Interesting side note, at work a few days ago a co-worker went to log
into their bank. When they went to the log in page of the fresh and
new bank site, it saw the cookie from the old site and logged him in.
As someone else.
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Important thing to remember: Forcing items into a heading they don't
fit under is worse then having no headings at all. Also, items can be
in more than one heading, really. If you have too many items to do
that, well, perhaps you have too many items? Maybe your app should be
broken into a suite of
Pay EXTRA close attention to what you are paginating. Sometimes a
big-ol-list of items page after page is the wrong fit. In the app I
am working on, for example, there is a big old list of all the
articles released in the last forever. The obvious thing to do was to
paginate them into 10 or 20
Just don't forget that your user's are part of the security of your
system. Requiring a password system they have no choice but to write
down, for example, is LESS secure than a password of their choice
that has the option to be changed each month but can be set back to
the same thing and is
So you are the one of the ones responsible for turning adobe's
god-awful site into something at least usable?
There is a long way yet to go. I don't think a search-based paradigm
is the way to go. Let google get people to your pages by search.
I see adobe site users as falling into 3 groups.
Rather than trying to discover if a user is human, focus on the
opposite. Look for inhuman actions. The honeypot option is a good
initial barrier. But monitor that user's actions from that point on.
Are they doing something at super-human speed? Are then repeating
themselves a lot? Repeating ones
I assume you mean automated systems, not paying someone to answer
emails versus answering the phone.
It comes down to implementation. But don't expect more than a 10%
drop overall. And that is if you've done really well.
There are a lot of reasons for this, but the primary one is that if
you
FYI md5 is totally cracked. It can be broken in a matter of seconds
these days. Try other forms of 1 way encryption. Salt heavily. If you
are really paranoid, encrypt twice in two different ways.
But a good strong atypical one way encryption should be good enough.
Even md5 should be enough if you
The good news is: Even a terrible design standard will likely be
better than 6 completely different designs which all get some things
right and everything else wrong.
The core of your job does itself by being a job. So don't worry too
much. Provided you aren't a moron and you know -something-
clearer before.
- Original Message -
From: live human.factor@gmail.com
To: William Brall dam...@earthlink.net
Cc: disc...@ixda.org
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 9:20 PM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Interaction flow as subterfuge.
Ethical except for, you know, this kind of one act play
will
be what replaces the PC. Mark my words.
- Original Message -
From: Jarod Tang
To: William Brall
Cc: disc...@ixda.org
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Palm Pre
On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 3:32 AM, William Brall dam...@earthlink.net wrote
We are currently in the process of bringing an iPhone app to market
for army.mil. If anyone is interested, I can do a postmortem.
Will
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=43042
Stick to your guns. Be ethical. Be personally responsible. Advertise
that you do these things and give examples of where you have left
jobs due to ethics. Ethical people will hire you and the others will
not. Which is where you want to be anyway.
At least that is my opinion.
Then again. I work
I'm all for some competition for Apple. I think the future of all
personal computing are in something iPhone like. I've already seen
some people stop using their PC in favor of the iPhone.
I haven't used the Pre yet. But from what I hear it can give the
iPhone a run for its money. This will be
I'd say it is time for the metaphor to die. That is, the global
metaphor.
People accept their computer as a platform. The 'desktop' metaphor
is vestigial.
There is still great need for functional metaphor. Buttons that look
like buttons. But most of the metaphorical aspects of our OSs have
People assume I'm joking when I say this. But I REALLY love The
Most Unwanted Song
http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/
22 minutes of music genius.
I enjoy coding to it. And other interesting music like Balinese
Gamelan and Traditional Indian. Why? Like all creative
Might help if we could see a screenshot or an example.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42873
Welcome to the Interaction Design
...@gmail.com
To: William Brall dam...@earthlink.net
Cc: disc...@ixda.org
Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2009 7:42 AM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Any good examples of mixed IA structures?
Thank you for the response. I probably did make the cases too narrow.
Currently the existing interface is an Access
Maybe I'm just not following. I don't see two use cases here. I see
two pre-existing interfaces that don't support the use cases that do
exist.
I realize it isn't always an option to go in a completely new
direction. Ok. I realize it is almost never an option. But perhaps
what you really need is
You'll do fine so long as you remember that things can logically fit
in many categories. My new video game belongs in BOTH electronics and
toys. If you try to pidgin hole everything into one group, when the
case can be made for it to be in more than one. Some people won't
find it.
This is,
Gregor. You are in the vast minority.
ONLY using IP is dangerous. A splash page is a bad idea because you
route 99% of your users to a useless page. Make it easy to switch to
a new language, auto-detect, and you will be fine.
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Always ALWAYS do for the user what you can do for them. Auto-detect
and provide -some- way to second guess the machine. But don't expect
a lot of people to second guess.
The best language picker is the one the user never sees.
If you can't auto-detect, and you almost always can, a decent picker
I'm working on a heavily tabbed system myself right now. Most of them
make sense. I'm trying to keep reducing the number and merging them
into the areas that they make sense to be in.
The first thing we did was break them up into several major groups,
like meta-apps, and styled them differently
To counter Jared's argument. At army.mil, we consider the other
branches of the military our (all-be-it friendly) competitors. Much
of the information we have, on the broadest scope, is the same
information these other groups have, but the primary reason we view
it this way is to have something to
Initial page is garbage. They should have used the same page as all
the other pages. Also, that building under the top left made me miss
the links across the top for a little while.
The pagination is standard and poor. Somehow google has managed to
convince everyone that bouncy-bottom-only
pagination.
Obvious. Thoughtless.
- Original Message -
From: Andy Edmonds
To: William Brall
Cc: disc...@ixda.org
Sent: Sunday, June 07, 2009 11:50 AM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Microsoft bing.com reactions
Wow! I don't even have time to go beyond the first two points
Who arrives on time anyway? Why not just have general choices like
Nitesh Bhatia said, then skip the more exact time. Most people will
arrive around those times away. Are you really gaining anything by
being so specific?
This is of course meaningless if exact times are important. IE. If
this
Do like the video games do. In app walk-through!
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42524
Welcome to the Interaction Design
I agree with Live. And he requires a warning.
I outlined a 'score based' way to sort posts. If you like it and
want more details. Ask away.
I'm a big fan of finding the underlying problem with math and then
not bothering the users about stuff the computer can do.
That is what the score method
Feel free to 'steal' any good ideas you find at www.prettybutbad.com
about just such an application. Then tell me, so I can buy one if I
like what you did.
I outline almost an entire OS on said blog. I'd never have the
chance to do it. So I wouldn't feel a loss if you took the whole
idea and ran
http://www.prettybutbad.com/?id=8
That would be the post you'd most be interested in.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42270
Being able to get at the link, to link to it, is more important. They
URL can be gibberish, like YouTube links. Having a friendly URL will
help the user find his own page more often than someone else finding
it. At least that's what I've seen.
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The first link has a (,) at the end. That is why it 404s.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42234
Welcome to the Interaction Design
It is a broken link on the website. That's the issue here I think. In
your e-mail app it might be ok. On ixda.org it is busted.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42234
Anywhere that has swallowed IxD as a concept at this time has likely
been initially exposed to IxD through a variety of books. Almost all
of these books suggest that 99% of people CAN'T straddle these two
disciplines.
Why?
Because 99% of people can't.
It is rather like being a great web
I agree with what Dave is saying.
But I also believe that the vast majority of people aren't as
competent as Dave. And the sublimely competent often imagine others
to be as competent as they are. Or at least a great deal more
competent than they really are.
It is very hard to be an expert at one
I agree with Harry. The last thing I think of when I hear 'Quick' is
a big 'thank you for buying my thing, and I hope you enjoy it'
speech on the front.
A Quick Start Guide should just be the guide. On as few pages as
possible. Everything should support the goal.
The only reason for a cover I
Just another note:
Manuals and Guides won't replace a better Interface. If the problem
is that people don't understand what goes where, but they understand
the thing they are doing. They will just hate you for giving them a
manual.
No one wants to learn software for software's sake.
Now, if you
http://search.ahp.us.army.mil/search/slideshows/
I'd like to say we did a decent job with army.mil's pagination. I
would have liked the tabs to be larger, along with the clickable
area. I would have liked to color the clickable items more obviously.
I would have liked to omit the last link on the
http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=41773
My experiences with voice-based interfaces has always been pretty
caustic. Often you have a voice command-line, where in the user can
speak commands that the computer understands (let's ignore
imperfections in recognition for now) and the computer
I'm not sure what all these links have to do with each other. Or what
they have to do with the topic. The last one sure. But Morse Code is
difficult to learn and doesn't really offer anything to a modern
voice-based interface... Unless I'm really missing something.
And I understand the
You can't make people be secure. You can only help mitigate the
damages when their insecurity causes them. Invest time in dealing
with what will happen if the user leaves their laptop open to their
bank account at starbucks and then goes to the bathroom.
It is going to happen. So offer a way to
I turn off HTML email entirely. As should anyone.
Focus on making HTML email more secure, rather than making it look
good when people turn it, or part of it, off.
Crack that egg, and no one will turn it off anymore.
It is to the point where I am very impressed with sites that send out
text-only
users don't use help means users don't use the crap-tastic help
that is normally provided. FAQs are about the best 'standard issue'
help out there. And they such.
Tool-tips are often panned and people forget that they are help.
So here is the deal. If the user has to stop what they are doing and
Don't forget 508. Easy to not think about it when dealing with
straight forward forms, but there are serious concerns. Good idea to
use the label tag and field sets.
Even if you style them to look different, readers like JAWS will add
functionality to the form for tabbing and helping the user to
I wonder what the numbers of people using WAP browsers for your
function really are. Are you building with the iPhone in mind? That
would seem to be the stronger, growing, market for mobile web. And it
doesn't have this concern.
I've been doing search pages with variable sets of results for year.
The first thing I clicked opened a new window. So I stopped clicking.
It was a string of what seemed like gibberish.
This will likely be the result for anyone else who doesn't care
about you. Which, unless you are making this for your friends, is
your target. People who don't care about you.
The
There are no such things as technical limitations. That is a cop-out
phrase that people use to avoid change.
That said. There is such a thing as financial limitations. It is
technically possible to build something JUST LIKE a google search
appliance but that returns a REAL total number of
You haven't used windows long enough then. :P
The only reason to confirm, is because you can't undo.
If you can undo the deletion easily, you don't need to confirm.
The only reason not to make something undo-able is that you don't
know how to. Not a very good reason. Go figure out how to make it
Do you mean a Google Search Appliance? It sits in your rack and looks
like swiss cheese. If that isn't what you mean then I have nothing
to offer. :)
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=41606
People still code this stuff by hand?
Ok, in the interest of full disclosure. Right now I am the one doing
this. But that makes sense, as I am a Web Developer by title.
I'm taking steps to remove the need for html/js/css hand-code in the
future. You heard it here first. Keep an eye out for it.
Undo FTW. Always. No exceptions. Infinite if possible.
If I put it in the trash, the trash should take itself out when space
is needed. Like Tivo, only not slow and otherwise clunky.
Undo is the new delete. Anything else is laze.
Peace!
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I rather like tables that auto-widen the column I am hovered over. But
only when they smoothly animate over around .5-1 second.
That way, it can widen to show the widest item without drastically
reducing legibility. Provided of course the other columns are still
mostly understandable while not
It isn't that the screen reader won't be able to see the newly added
content. It is that the screen reader will be busy helping the user
know what they are typing in the text box, not going out and reading
the new stuff that popped in under the box.
Imagine how confusing it would be if your
Build a relationship with your clients that sets you up as the
professional in this field. You are the one they brought in to fix
their problems with X, so they should listen to you about X.
This sets you up to either deflect, or redirect these topics.
Deflections is easier: The colors and logos
These don't seem so bad from a IxD stand point. I didn't fail to
find what I was pretending to look for. I understood what did what
and got what I expected when I picked things.
There wasn't anything overly annoying, like being forced to pick
where I live just to see the sites. Although, in the
Since what I was saying was, in fact, intended to be silly. I had
hoped that was obvious... I'll only defend The Science of Art
Think of that phrase to mean the science behind how art does what art
does. Art has always been something magical. I mean magical in the old
sense. There are practices
I think ALL of you are really arguing the same side.
Collecting Data is a big part of IxD, and like any field with a
science background, that data need not be collected a second time for
the same problem.
Do biologists retest basic chemistry in order to make a biological
experiment? Certainly
the floppy icon is a metaphor like the email inbox. I doubt many
people who use email know it is a metaphor. The 'in box' has all
but vanished.
To the point where I've considered not calling things that resemble
a REAL in box in my applications an in box. In Pile, or various other
names are
IxD is a kind of blanket term. It is really more of a philosophical /
psychological movement than it is a real design field.
IxD is the idea that interaction, between anything, can not only be
quantified in meaningful ways, but can be manipulated to produce
desired results in a controlled and
It is somewhat like naming contemporary artists. If you aren't an
artist, you likely can only name famous artists from 50-100 years
ago. Maybe the 70s... But artists working right now? Not so much.
Some of our fathers are pretty famous. And there have been a few
books on IxD that broke out of the
Bayesian Filtering
Implicit Choice
Intelligent Default
Best-to-market
And jokingly:
Toyetic
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38736
Don't confirm. Offer undo.
Or if you are Tivo, offer undo but confirm anyway to be pointless and
even slower.
But seriously. Assume the user knows what they are doing and give
them a way to reverse what they did without forcing them to confirm
what they did if they meant it.
iGoogle does this
Same as above only and instead of or. And an off-the-screen
hidden label for screen-readers also. If you intend to or need to be
508 compliant.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38342
Also, try to ask yourself how important your logo being memorable is
to your brand. Sure, it is always good to have a top-shelf logo and
great design. But not at the expense of other services and in the
case of a website, usability.
I have seen first hand companies spend a large amount on a great
What? Can't just put checkboxes on all the items and show the checked
ones in the details pane? This is analogous to any drag-and-drop
system, really. And easier to use, I bet.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
I have to agree with Beetlejuice on this one. In both points.
Especially the one about game design. GD is my own background and
everything we do in our games is about building a narative with the
user. Personal stories, scripted stories, even abstract games like
bejeweled are all about something
Why do the tabs go away? Is it a, You did it, so you can't undo
it thing? That's normally bad. But if it is 'right' in this
case, Why not just grey out the tabs they did and vividly highlight
the tab they are on?
Guessing a wizzardy step-by-step thing here...
A transition normally won't prevent
I second Angel,
Games are the best way to introduce students to interaction design.
Not always video games, however. Having them develop a board, card,
word, number, or other kind of game, perhaps is small teams or even
solo, would be a great project.
Let them chose. If they pick a video game,
Without really knowing what you are talking about, we can't offer a
real solution.
There is nothing that will work in all situations. It is going to
have to be tailored directly to your problem.
If you can't tell us what that problem is in enough detail to grok
it, we can't solve it. We can just
I disagree, Jared and Cindy.
The idea that you can't determine if your product is good or bad is
the very thing IxD was created to combat. The fact that we exist at
all is proof that you can boil these abstract things down to a
process you can follow that will provide consistently good results.
The free market is the final arbiter, yes. But that in NOT analogous
to a proof-is-in-the-pudding philosophy.
Sure, when you are designing on the bleeding edge, which many of us
are clearly mistaken to thinking we are or should be, you can't rely
on the past to in form your actions.
I could
Find our who is using the site the most now. Is it people outside the
company? Is it people looking for that login link?
In either case, the best place is the same place all the online store
places put it.
I shouldn't have to tell you where that is...
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Yes. Security is great, but good interaction is better.
And there is such a thing as self-defeating security, also.
Take AKO's (Army Knowledge Online) password requirements:
2 or more lowercase letters
2 or more uppercase letters
2 or more numbers
2 or more symbols (*^...@!,.; so on)
And at
I propose a new law. In IxD discussions if people bring up Yahoo
it should be as Godwin's Law.
Yahoo, while slightly better now then in the past, is still one of
the worst offenders when it comes to poor usability.
A close second is almost every Newspaper site.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
See, this is one of the issues with big conversation on IxDA.
EVENTUALLY, The people responsible for the actual examples are going
to pop up and destroy all hope of retaining the example as a
metaphor.
Paul, Jim, If either of you thought to include the optometrist
selection of TV settings. Kudos.
The problem with permissions is they are a part of administration,
which often means it is something required by the CMS to work, but
outside the scope of what the 'real' users are going to have to
deal with. In other words, it get's a raw deal.
Right-now, the general concept of permissions is
Just don't fall into the trap of building it out in the language it
will be built in. Clients see something 'working' and instantly
think 'almost done' rather than 'not yet started'.
Begin the precedent and un-training a client becomes more and more
impossible.
Better to draw on a napkin than to
I hate the design idiom. The instrument is underused, though.
Accordions are jazz. They are superfluous. They are a symptom of a
cancer that should be cut out.
The cause is senseless page bloat.
Focus on tracking, prediction, and reduction. And you'll see that
the need for accordions goes away.
If you really want to do good, you should make the chapter about how
to educate the people you work with in charge of business strategy
about IxD and why it is important for a product. And what parts of a
product should get focus.
Whomever is already doing business strategy would be best equipped
You got both the Wills on you now, raptr. One day, and soon, you'll
wake up with a triceratops' head in your bed.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36796
Ok. So put it in both places. ;)
- Original Message -
From: James Page
To: William Brall
Cc: disc...@ixda.org
Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Forms - selecting a country
Float the item you guessed to the top. Under than
put
In the end. I think many things that ajax sites do, are very very hard
to do right for screen readers. And in many cases, are pointless to do
for screen reader.
This is why I am a HUGE proponent of separate interfaces for screen
readers.
At the end of the day, you aren't doing interaction design
Have you ever wondered how the site authenticates you?
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36748
Welcome to the Interaction Design
I like how google does it for their site. In that they guess right 99%
of the time and give you a way to change it if they are wrong.
You can guess, based on things like IP and other factors. Where the
user is. And no matter the context, this is the best default.. Unless
you run a service that
Perhaps. But it is folly to talk about voice based interfaces without
diving into the future, where advanced AI will enable it to be
conversational rather than command based.
An example of this might be a system administrator's tool which
communicates with the sys admins by voice.
Repetitive but
It is good to have the kind of free conversation and transference of
ideas we've had in this thread.
I picked the remote control idea because it is easy to wrap your head
around. And so most of the conversation has been about physical
products.
But I've seen the same reluctance to embrace new
Still, we aren't talking about roomba or iPhone. Both of which are
substantial costs. We are talking about enhancements that could be
free, or in the case of remote technology, almost unnoticeable to the
consumer.
Since a company that developed such a remote, would add it to all
their TVs and no
It sounds, based on both testimonies in this thread, that Dragon
Naturally Speaking is the very opposite of a well designed interface
and is very much a dancing bear.
The people using it seem to require it, and they suffer through the
steep learning curves and training time because they have to.
silly, silly use of technology.
Why, pray tell, did they not just put buttons on the side of the
lamps? Pressing one will turn on the lamps for a section.
Also, wouldn't regular use of this system be the same as them all
always being on?
What they hell do they plan to save?
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All your purchases could be automated. If it can't figure out that
you like to keep certain things on hand. (There would be sensors
either at the front door or in your pantry as well) You'll still be
able to parse lists of what you have bought in the past. And more
importantly, What is to stop it
I'm in the beginning stages of a redesign on the Army's CMS called
CORE. I'd be glad to talk to you if you wanted to know my thoughts
on CMS.
However. I'm a bit confused as to who you intend CMS to help?
Most CMS out there are horrific in many ways. They often are built so
a single person can do
This phrase has become the mantra of amature interaction designers and of the
electronic product industry in general. It is the road block in the way of new
and better ways to control our systems. It even prevents logical enhancements
to our otherwise well-designed products.
Take the new
The general consensus amount IxDs is that voice command is a terrible
control idiom. It is incomplete, lacks detail and requires extensive
verbosity to outline a clear goal.
However, engineers and people who don't think hard about how voice
command will actually work, seem to think it is the next
My TV didn't come with it. Also, the blurb doesn't mention it being
a replacement for chan-up and chan-down.
But, doesn't really make my point moot. If they are just NOW coming
out with it. Why didn't it become the standard 10 or 20 years ago?
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When you talk about a calendar program, you are talking about keeping
track of events. A person looking to keep track of events is most
likely to be interested in what will happen that friday, rather than
what will happen 2 or 3 fridays from then.
That isn't to say people don't need to access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
While wikipedia does make mention of ajax and other richer web
offerings as being part of many web 2.0 sites. It says just that. It
is a part of many web 2.0 sites. Not the definition of web 2.0.
2.0 sites, from the perspective of wikipedia, are what I said.
We could always stop burdening our users with keeping our systems
secure for us. What is wrong with this combo:
*4 digit pin, same for ATM.
*First and Last name.
Isolate attacks intelligently. If the user attempts to log in more
than 5-10 times and fails, Allow the user 1 new attempt each hour
I'm an interaction designer
What's that?
I design how things should behave and then get ignored by everyone
else.
Oh, like what?
Like that your TV remote should have a dial, like a mouse wheel,
for volume and channel changing. Because you can skip ahead much
faster and count how many notches
Ajax != web 2.0
1.0 = content by web authors.
2.0 = content by website users.
3.0 = constructs by users and software as a service.
So, for web 2.0 there shouldn't be any extra concerns for
disabilities, but accessibility on the web has been a joke for much
longer than the X.0 concept has
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