I can operate almost any user interface. After all, I have 33 years’ experience using computers and 25 years’ professional experience analyzing bad designs: I know most of the ways interaction designers can confuse or annoy users. I’ve seen it all before. Or so I thought.
Despite my prowess at defeating complicated user interfaces, I was recently stumped by a simple dialog box. I simply couldn’t figure out how to proceed, so I had to close the application and use another program to achieve my goal.
The offending software shall remain nameless; it’s a nice piece of shareware that I enjoy enough to have paid the fee. Also, a single...
In some instances, there may well be good reason to use personalization to remove access to certain information. Examples include restricting a minor’s access to particular content or limiting employee access to a site section intended for employees in other areas of the world. An employee in
In some instances, there may well be good reason to use personalization to remove access to certain information. Examples include restricting a minor’s access to particular content or limiting employee access to a site section intended for employees in other areas of the world. An employee in
Wireframes are a great way of showing layout, but they don't describe interaction well, and they are especially poor at documenting the layout of digital products that have a lot of dynamic content, such as mobile apps or webapps. Wireframes are most useful when documenting websites (or other
A marketplace solution for IoT development through decentralized smart contract ledger
Otherwise, the person cannot have the desired item. Smart contracts are based on blockchain technology and hence, it works in a decentralized manner ensuring security and immutability of the contract. Ethereum is one such private blockchain platform that enables the creation of smart contracts. As
Developers Set to Use Bear Market as an Opportunity to Accelerate Ethereum Upgrades
The second most famous cryptocurrency in existence has had challenges of its own this year, particularly from the direction of Ripple, which overtook it in terms of market cap back in September. This was followed by a dramatic fall in the Ethereum price in recent weeks, but the developers seem to
Blockchain Metrics Will Add Transparency to Investing and Better Inform Investors
Eventually, the impact of blockchain-based aggregated data platforms will be more profound in the cryptocurrency market where it is common for various entities to churn out fabricated figures. Replacing misleading crypto performance metrics with blockchain-based aggregated data would give investors
UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
All UX mappings have two-fold benefits. First, the process of creating a map forces conversation and an aligned mental model. Second, the shared artifact resulting from the mapping can be used amongst your team, organization, or partners to communicate an understanding of your user or service. This
defeated by a dialog box
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Take Uber for example. While the experience is hugely popular and generally pain free, there is room for enhancement — especially for large groups travelling together. Currently, a group must problem-solve in order to figure out how many “ubers” to call and and how many passengers can fit in
Eartracking: A New UX-Research Method
Why do men’s ears react more strongly than women’s ears to webpages with pictures of wooly mammoths? We can only speculate, but it’s likely that during the era of the cave people, it was mainly the men of the tribe who were assigned to hunt the wooly mammoth, and since such a kill would be a
The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying
Dr. Alan Rimm-Kaufman from the Rimm-Kaufman Group recently tracked one million clicks on search ads on Google and Yahoo. These advertising clicks eventually translated into 41,377 conversions on the target websites. Although the clients in question must remain anonymous, they presumably have
Decision Making in the Ecommerce Shopping Cart: 4 Tips For Supporting Users
Having a full shopping cart would hardly have been necessary as a usability guideline in the old days where everybody did so, but today we need to tell designers to do so. Some sites only allow users to view the shopping cart in a minicart view that appears as an overlay or as part of the checkout
Web Research: Believe the Data
Do not ignore research: it can improve your site by several hundred percent. Even when a specific project does not have data from its exact customers using its exact site, it should use general data about the average behavior of Web users with common sites. Well, maybe your site is so unique and
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: EMEA
Last week, WP Engine employees from our Limerick and London offices came together for the bi-annual All Hands event in Limerick. All Hands is a 2-day event where employees come to engage with, collaborate, and strategize with employees from other offices. This year’s theme was “Boldly
defeated by a dialog box
A Look Back at the 2018 WP Engine Summit
To conclude the Summit, we heard from WP Engine leaders who offered a look into the WP Engine roadmap. This included a look at newly released products, like our Global Edge Security offering in partnership with Cloudflare, as well as a deep-dive into our recent acquisition of StudioPress. To wrap
Join WP Engine at SXSW 2019
In this panel, Brunner will be joined by popular Austin figures as they discuss who and what has been the major change agent in Austin. Brunner will represent technology while other panelists will represent food and film. Joe Nick Patoski, author of Austin to ATX: The Hippies, Pickers, Slackers
Customization vs. Personalization in the User Experience
Designers often have many good ideas for things that can be provided to users, from ideation, feature requests, and other sources. It’s tempting to throw all these options into the system and rely on customization or personalization for pruning the screens into a manageable level of complexity
Service Design 101
The term “service design” was coined by Lynn Shostack in 1982. Shostack proposed that organizations develop an understanding of how behind-the-scenes processes interact with each other because “leaving services to individual talent and managing the pieces rather than the whole make a company
Journey Mapping in Real Life: A Survey of UX Practitioners
The answers to this question show that most practitioners include elements from Zone A: The Lens , and Zone B: The Experience in their journey maps. Personas and scenarios are used in almost 80% of journey maps created by the participants. Furthermore, respondents reported that user actions
Is Data the Next Front in the Trade Wars?
While tariffs may be the focal point of the ongoing trade war, a brand-new front focused on data is opening amid growing concerns about the reach of the Chinese state and its accompanying private sector companions. Whether for security, espionage, or social credit, the Chinese state has shown
How To Secure Your IoT Devices And Why Should You Do It
Since 2015, when the IoT devices started to become more and more popular, the technology has been a controversial subject. Recently, the FBI released a statement through which they warned people in the entire world that these devices can be as dangerous as they are useful. Of course, we had the CIA
The Key IoT Security Questions You Need To Ask
These questions only scratch the broad surface of IoT security. To learn more about securing your IoT solution, register for this free, one-day event. You’ll hear from the researchers behind The seven properties of highly secured devices and see an IoT solution come to life before your eyes
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
defeated by a dialog box
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
Dancing in the Co-Economy: Are you Square Dancing or Foxtrotting?
The customer must be active contributors along each step of the way (not just a beta tester or someone who signs on the dotted line upon the project’s completion). This step ensures that the solutions you deliver address their very specific business problem. It also helps validate the scalability
Defeated By a Dialog Box | Scrolling and Scrollbars
Scrolling and Scrollbars
If you must make your own scrollbars, stay as close to user expectations as possible. Unless your scrollbars look like scrollbars, users might not notice them. Unless your scrollbars behave like scrollbars, users might not be able to bring the desired content into view. In either case, your
Website Logo Placement for Maximum Brand Recall
In a word, no. There were no statistically significant differences (according to a two-sample t-test) in how people rated the hotels with traditional left-aligned logos, compared to the ‘unconventional’ right-aligned logos. In fact, in most cases, the left-aligned logos were rated slightly more
Maximize Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen
Eliminating the search box and replacing it with a magnifying-glass icon has become almost standard on mobile. It doesn’t work as well on the desktop: the space is simply too large and users don’t have the patience to hunt for a small search icon. If you consider using it on the desktop, keep
