5 July 2009
I saw this comic about usability (linked from this question at Stack Overflow) and couldn’t help but let out a distressed laugh. How often have you seen this happen at your workplace, or in an application you’ve had the “pleasure” of using? For every elegantly designed UI that exists, there seems to be a plethora of poorly designed ones that do their best to confuse users.
To me, a lot of this UI complexity stems directly from a lack of separation between the UI and business logic layers.
Continued
11 April 2009
Flickr photo by greensambaman
There’s an interesting article out that points to the fact that every day there are 10,000 canceled installations for Firefox; this meaning that each day 10,000 people download the Firefox installer, “fire up” the *.exe and then click “Cancel”. (A further 40,000 apparently downloaded the setup file, but didn’t even make it far enough to start and then subsequently cancel the installation)
Even more interesting were the reasons why the 10,000 canceled their install. A large part of the respondents were “confused” with some part of the install process (nearly half) while most of the other half identified that they did not have the proper permissions to complete the install.
Continued