I was looking at the packaging of my Arm & Hammer toothpaste this morning. It has metallic inks, embossed card, and plastic lamination. The box probably cost more than the contents. It’s kind of pointless given that everyone chucks the
The OLPC (aka the ‘hundred dollar laptop’) has a ‘View Source’ button on the keyboard. See if you can guess which one it is in this image here. The motivation for this is to let kids ‘under the bonnet’ and
Lifted. A funny short film from Pixar, with bad UI design featuring heavily in the plot. Thanks to Andrew Harder for sending this one round…
If you don’t know much about Personas, or have your doubts about them, read this article and the comments thread over at Signal vs. Noise (the 37signals blog). Here’s an excerpt: We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe
Interesting piece of copy in this Windows Vista dialog box. Basically it’s saying: Type your product key in now. But you don’t have to. But if you don’t, you could loose everything. And you might have to buy another copy
“Oh shucks Sandy, you’re such a card! I wasn’t going to, but since you said it was going to be delightful, I think I diddly-will sign up to your newsletter.” … For the record, when you want to entice newsletter
I’ve just discovered pagegangster – a very flashy Flash viewer for PDFs. You upload your PDF, in return pagegangster gives you a magazine-style UI where you can flip through pages, zoom, and do searches. it’s all very nifty looking. While
I’ve just switched from mac Office 2004 to iWork ’08. I mainly liking it, though I spent about 30 minutes yesterday thinking I was going mad over this mail attachment issue – you can’t attach Keynote and Pages files to
How many people are being sent .docx files every minute of every day only to find themselves unable to open them?
I was flipping through Allan Cooper’s classic “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” just the other day, and I noticed how in one section he has a little rant about how calendaring software is broken. “Many calendar programs are available
In Office 2007, you sometimes get shown this funny little dialog box when saving a large document. Have you ever noticed it? So what happens if you click cancel – does it cancel saving the document? Or does it just
Before I start I’d like to say I’m not a Microsoft Hater. I’m actually very, very impressed with Office 2007 – the UI design is great. And when I saw today’s splurge of blog posts about the new Zune, I
This isn’t really hot news, but it was news to me when George Oates mentioned it in passing during her piece at Dconstruct 07. In an age of curious-sounding Web-site names, “Flickr” came largely by accident. The domain owner of
A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing: “Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.” – Paraphrased from Lindsay Camp (2007)
This should be the mantra for user experience designers everywhere. Image stolen unashamedly from Jonny Baker’s Photostream. The concept came up in a chat with Simon Johnson today over lunch.
I’m looking for a flight at the moment. I know the following: Where I’m going from (well I’d actually like to see results for all London airports listed in an order of my choosing) When I want to go (give
I was in Finland a few weeks ago, and this was the control panel of the lift in my hotel. Imagine this scenario: you get in the hotel on the ground floor, you press a button, nothing happens. You try
Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is? Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them
Douglas Karr pointed out that I should put my money where my mouth is and explain how it should be redesigned. Having given it some thought, I’ve realised this is a particularly tricky dialog box – the problem does not
A great example of bad dialog box design from Jungledisk: Long convoluted question – check! Frightening subheading – check! Options that don’t map onto the question – check!