You are probably wondering how anyone could muster enough words for an entire article about the humble, ubiquitous radio button—and specifically, whether the designers should choose one of the options to be selected by default or not. Before you hit the Back button, think of the old adage «the devil is in the details,» and that so many radio buttons today are downright devious. So read on to avoid creating a diabolical design.
First and foremost, a quick reminder of what radio buttons do: They display a set of mutually exclusive options from which a person may select exactly one . People sometimes confuse radio buttons and checkboxes, but...
Users will most likely fail if you deviate from expectations on something as basic as the controls to operate a UI. And, even if they don't fail, they'll expend substantial brainpower trying to operate something that shouldn't require a second thought. Users' cognitive resources are better spent
Password-creation designs usually ask people to enter their passwords twice, mainly to ensure that there are no typos. But there is a positive byproduct to that second entry: It is a small form of rehearsal. Since the interaction cost of entering the new password a second time on a phone is quite
Whether you're designing web pages, web-based applications (e.g., SaaS), or native mobile apps, one of the basic building blocks is the humble text-input field: a box where the user can enter some text. Uses of this widget are plenty and not the topic of this article. We should point out that there
Why Mobile Games and App Stores Should Opt for Blockchain
Hence, Apple and Google will no longer have full power over what will be allowed — or not — and no more of their (whoops) security breaches. [Frankly, as gamers, we don’t want Apple, Google and Amazon having all our data, using their bots to record and watch every eye movement
Blockchain in Retail: Changing the Shopping Experience
Beyond the marketplace relationships that can develop and thrive because of the blockchain, it’s the entire supply chain that often inhibits a retailer from providing the best possible shopping experience for its customers. While all segments of retail can benefit, it can make a world of
Can Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Alone Save $2 Trillion in Preventing Cybercrime?
It’s through smart contracts that transactions can be made whilst their details can be kept both transparent and secure. Writing about their new smart contracts-based Ethereum trading platform, Confideal stated: “To put it simply, code is not law, but smart contracts created on a platform
UX Research Cheat Sheet
User-experience research methods are great at producing data and insights, while ongoing activities help get the right things done. Alongside R&D, ongoing UX activities can make everyone’s efforts more effective and valuable. At every stage in the design process, different UX methods can keep
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Browser and GUI Chrome
What do we mean when talking about the "chrome" in a user interface design? An attendee asked this question during a recent course on Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet. Whenever someone asks us a basic question, I assume that many more people want the answer as well — and thus, this article on
UX Responsibilities in Scrum Ceremonies
Regardless of the ticket structure used, UX work needs to be visible to the rest of the development team to ensure that research and design tasks are not skipped. Participating in sprint planning helps to keep the team aligned and informed about what UX will do during the sprint. This approach can
Why Personas Fail
A failed persona effort is often the largest barrier to future success. Those who have seen them fall by the wayside without having any meaningful impact on a project often write them off as a silly waste of time for the rest of eternity. You will have to work hard to convince these skeptics that
Typography Terms Cheat Sheet
The typeface is the group to which a specific font belongs. Arial, Calibri, and Helvetica are examples of typefaces. The word “typeface” refers to the face of physical letter blocks which printers used to set into printing presses to create publications. A printer would have a vast range of
Journey Mapping: 9 Frequently Asked Questions
The list of tools that professionals use to create journey maps is always growing. Classic tools like Microsoft PowerPoint or Visio ensure that most team members will have access to them; however, they lack live collaboration and risk that team members will not have the latest version of the
Mobile's New Power Couple: PWA and AMP
That’s where PWA (Progressive Web Apps) come in. What AMP does for landing pages, PWAs do for the rest of the website. AMP brings users in, ensuring consumers reach your landing page quickly without bouncing, while PWAs allow for immersive and complex shopping experiences that keep users on your
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StudioPress Theme Spotlight: Altitude Pro .
What is a child theme? A child theme works in combination with the parent theme. With regards to Genesis, child themes serve as a sort of skin that can change the way a theme looks, while relying on the functionality of its parent theme (in this case, Genesis). Child themes offer users the added
A First Look at WordCamp US .
In less than two weeks, members from the WordPress community around the world will head to Nashville, Tennessee for WordCamp US. This is the second consecutive year that the event has been held in Music City and WordPress community has evolved significantly since 2017. The most anticipated topic of
Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid | Nielsen Norman Group
It’s important to measure global navigation clicks on destination pages for those users who enter the site on these pages (that is, they deep-link into your site). Users who deep-link into your site do not have the benefit of context presented via your homepage, so these users need assistance to
Facilitating an Effective Design Studio Workshop
Edward de Bono developed the Six Thinking Hats method in 1985. It is a discussion framework that defines six metaphorical hats which represent different modes of thinking, therefore enabling participants in a group to think and discuss ideas together effectively. A set time interval is used for
Facilitating an Effective Design Studio Workshop
With a variety of ideas on the table, the facilitator needs to lead the group through some sort of convergent activity that solidifies the design direction resulting from the workshop. Otherwise, individual teams might walk out with the incorrect assumption that the concept they created is the
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
How to Create an Effective Cybersecurity Routine
If you want to keep your business safe for years to come, then you’re going to need to stay one step ahead at all times. Work with a team that actively searches out and predicts the latest threats before they manifest themselves, and you’ll notice your number of attempted breaches falls off
How Can Big Data Benefit Marketers?
Big data can be structured as well as unstructured. By studying this data, human behavior can be comprehended. The world has, now, become a virtual structure of communication. Everything from transactions to trends is being recorded digitally. Thus, the information recorded is of massive importance
How Do You Determine Which Partners Will Fuel Your Success?
Besides values, one thing that will sustain a long-term partnership is motivation. Partners who not only share values, but also goals beyond them — such as becoming the go-to provider, building a $100 million company, or establishing a household name — will thrive. But virtual strangers who
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Why Your Business Needs Copyrights
While people usually think of copyright law only extending to movies, books, songs, lyrics, paintings, photographs, and other similar works it is much broader than that. In the business context, copyright includes items as diverse as emails, letters, legal documents, articles, computer programs
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
Back-to-top links lead the user to the top of the page from another part of the page. While these links duplicate the functionality of the scroll bar, they can be useful on long pages where a single click will save time over multiple scrolls. Such links tend not to harm users who do not use them
The Fold Manifesto: Why the Page Fold Still Matters
An aggregate heatmap shows 57,453 eyetracking fixations across a wide range of pages, excluding search and search-results pages. Red indicates where users looked the most; yellow where they looked less. White areas got virtually no looks. The top black stripe indicates the page fold in the study
Beyond Blue Links: Making Clickable Elements Recognizable
With that said, the flat-design trend (a style of interface design that emphasizes 2-D flat illustrations and is well exemplified by iOS 7 and Windows 8) has some website designers taking the minimalist approach to the extreme. The idea behind flat design is to simplify the interface. However
