Sliders are often the UI control of choice for letting users select a value or range from a fixed set of options. However, in practice, sliders are difficult to manipulate . Especially on touch interfaces, the level of control needed to meticulously operate a slider to an exact value is simply not realistic.
Definition: A slider is a control element that uses a knob or lever moved horizontally to control a variable, such as volume on a radio or brightness on a screen.
Imprecise Interactions
When designing a usable UI we must consider the context in which the interface will be used. For mobile design in particular, users often hold...
We get countless questions about small details in UI design that don't matter much to the overall user experience. One classic is the order of buttons in dialog boxes: OK / Cancel Cancel / OK Both are reasonable choices, and people can argue for hours about their preferences: Listing OK
Because WeChat’s primary function is chatting, the home screen is dedicated to recent conversations. To see mini programs, users need to swipe down from the top; this action reveals a list of recently used mini programs. Although swiping was easy and convenient for regular min-program users, new
Because I used Liste Rouge Paris as a bad example under Mistake #1a, I thought I'd play nice and use them as a good example here. The tailor offers 15 different collar styles (among many other options) for people ordering custom-designed shirts. Luckily, they also provide good defaults for each of
Cross-Platform Scaling: The Way Forward for Businesses on Blockchain
Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed a significant shift in the state of the financial markets. Cryptocurrencies, once a niche fascination, have exploded in value. At the start of 2017, digital currencies held collective market cap of less than a $20 billion. They entered 2018 with a
Is Bitcoin Accelerating Our Global Warming?
Other cryptocurrencies and blockchain platforms have also experimented with alternative protocols which consume way less energy. Such algorithms could potentially eliminate the energy consuming process of mining while at the same time recording transactions. The fact that a number of brilliant
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Though interaction has always been important for forming customer impressions in service industries — customers would quit going to McDonalds if they were consistently treated rudely by staff no matter how highly they rate the fries — what’s new is that interaction and user experience have
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Empathy Mapping: The First Step in Design Thinking
In this step, the team moves through the stickies on the board collaboratively and clusters similar notes that belong to the same quadrant. Name your clusters with themes that represent each group (for example, “validation from others” or “research”). Repeat themes in each quadrant if
UX Research Cheat Sheet
When deciding where to start or what to focus on first, use some of these top UX methods. Some methods may be more appropriate than others, depending on time constraints, system maturity, type of product or service, and the current top concerns. It’s a good idea to use different or alternating
Users' Pagination Preferences and "View All"
Pagination is a necessary evil when you have too many items to easily show them all on one screen. Linear content flows — such as articles like this — should almost never be broken up into multiple screens. It’s better to show the full article on one long screen than to inflict the pain of
Celebrating Holidays and Special Occasions on Websites
Holidays and special events provide opportunities for websites to brighten up their design and connect with users on a more human level than that typical of daily business and transactions. There are a few pitfalls to avoid, and, even during the holidays, it's important to focus on supporting
The User Experience of Public Bathrooms
When a sensor doesn’t respond quickly, the lack of feedback indicates to users that they should try something different. If a person holds her hand under a paper-towel dispenser and nothing happens, she might try touching it, pushing anything that looks like a button, hovering or waiving hands in
How to Recover Abandoned Shopping Carts for WooCommerce Stores
Imagine this: You’ve spent months getting your new eCommerce shop up and running. You set up WooCommerce, installed a bunch of plugins, found a perfect theme, dotted all your i’s and crossed all your t’s on tax compliance, logistics, and customer service. You roll out your beautiful new shop
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StudioPress Theme Spotlight: Generate Pro
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to get readers to take action, investigate a product, or change a behavior. The success of your email marketing, however, comes from your email list. If you need to generate more and better email leads, you need web design that specifically
WP Engine Named the #4 Best Place to Work in Texas
Texas’ economy is the second largest in the United States, a measure of success that’s only expected to continue; Texas ranks first for its growth prospects due to impressive growth forecasts and competitive employment rates across the state. To tap into this statewide success, however
The Two UX Gulfs: Evaluation and Execution
The gulf of evaluation and the gulf of execution describe two major challenges that users must overcome to successfully interact with any device. As indicated by the figure, users are stuck in an (almost) endless cycle, alternating these two issues: after you execute, you must evaluate the outcome
Expandable Menus: Pull-Down, Square, or Pie?
Pie and marking menus have encountered their moment of glory in the era of touchscreen devices. We see more and more versions of these menus in touch apps. Finally, these menus are in a good position to overcome the unfamiliarity obstacle and translate their theoretical advantages to the real
Modes in User Interfaces: When They Help and When They Hurt Users
An alternative to modes are spring-loaded modes (also known as quasimodes); such modes are active only while a modifier is engaged. For example, holding down the Shift key on a keyboard is the spring-loaded equivalent of the Caps Lock key — the quasimode is only active while the Shift key is
Hackers are Ready to Exploit Zero-Day Flaws; Companies are Slow to Act
Interestingly, 4.23 percent of desktops still run on Windows XP. Microsoft officially abandoned the defunct operating system in 2014. This continued use forced the company to release an emergency patch during the WannaCry ransomware outbreak of 2017. It was the same outbreak that crippled the
6 technologies you need to know to secure your IoT network
Unlike traditional networks, it is much more challenging to secure an IoT network. The reason is that there is wide range of communication protocols, standards and devices involved, which makes things more complex. Hackers will try to attack the network because it gives them the control of all the
Remote Access Solutions: Overcoming the Challenges
Your remote access system must ensure that access to the data users need is fully secure. If, however, your system presents a direct connection to the internet, you’ve increased your risk. Direct exposure to the internet will dramatically increase your network’s attack surface. Among the 50% of
Building a Startup Culture that Encourages Wellness
For a startup to begin to create a culture of wellness, it must first deal with an issue that’s common to all fledgling businesses: a lack of overlapping skillsets. In general, most startups don’t prioritize the cross-training of employees, which makes every team member indispensable
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Open Plan Offices Kill Productivity. Here’s What to Do Instead.
For years, the business world lived under the false pretense that open plan offices were a killer idea. I myself even bought into the hype. At Netconcepts, the digital agency I founded (and sold in 2010), only the executives had offices with doors that closed. Open plan offices were a win-win for
For Startups, a SaaS Solution is an HR Killer App
Startups, more than any other stage of the company, rely on talented workers to build out new products and establish their markets. That makes building out a human resources (HR) department as close to a must-have as you will find for an average startup. At the same time, research reveals that as
Slider Design: Rules of Thumb | Pop-ups and Adaptive Help Get A Refresh
Pop-ups and Adaptive Help Get A Refresh
If the system suggests topics that users aren’t interested in, they will quickly learn to disregard those suggestions. (The other reason that Clippy failed was because it was bad at predicting users’ problems). Even systems that manage to be highly accurate in their predictions face a tough
Best Practices for Homepage Links on websites
In most cases, using different labels for the home links to the various homepages (subsites vs. official site) will help. As with all links, provide as much information scent as needed to help users disambiguate the meaning of the link. In some situations, an abbreviated URL (e.g
Centered Logos Hurt Website Navigation
Based on these observations, it’s clear that left-aligned logos are better than centered logos for supporting user navigation to the homepage. Note that the left-logo sites in this study still caused some homepage-navigation errors (although far fewer than the centered-logo sites). This is
