A great example of bad dialog box design
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!
Bad Design
Designing route planner services that play well with paper
These days when you see someone wondering down the street looking lost, chances are they don’t have a shop-bought map in their hands – it’s much more likely they have a scrappy looking print-out from a web-based route planner service. … Continue reading
Blockbuster just don’t know what they’ve got.
I was in Blockbuster yesterday, and started chatting to the staff. I asked them why Pan’s Labyrinth (good film) only has 2 copies shown, while Shadowboxer (worst film of all time) has 2 entire shelves worth of boxes on display. … Continue reading
Home Printers. Why are they usually rubbish?
Think back to your first ever home inkjet printer. Mine was an Apple stylewriter in 1993. Look at home printers today. They still look pretty much the same – they haven’t moved on much. Why not? We’ve been having the … Continue reading
Arrogant hardware design – Claim back your surfaces!
We’ve all had hardware like this in our home: designed to be an ornament yet attractive to nobody, and a waster of good surface space. You can imagine how the designers pictured it – the user placing the device on … Continue reading
Virgin Media show how to create a word-of-mouth campaign *against* your brand.
Word of mouth happens when customers become really passionate about your product or brand. The thing about passion is that is has two ends: very happy, and very angry. Here’s the story of my last two points of contact with … Continue reading
Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor: the relentless salesman
I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my aging laptop the other day and after scanning my machine for a few minutes it gave me this wonderful feedback screen: [Blue speech bubbles added for emphasis] Great stuff. Even though it … Continue reading
Mystery Meat in Vista Media Center
After all the beta testing – how did this one slip through the net? When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you … Continue reading
Samsung E900 usability take-down
If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not – check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing … Continue reading
Nielsen calls the OLPC design approach “reckless” (and so do I)
In this BusinessWeek article, Jakob Nielsen calls the OLPC UI design approach “reckless” because they have done no user testing so far. Meanwhile, John Maeda bizzarely praises process as “…the Steve Jobs method. […] You don’t use focus groups. You … Continue reading