User Centered

A dialog/form that could have been designed better:

• Yes/No buttons should ideally only refer to one question
  
• "Continue" is ambiguous in this case- continue to remove the item from my cart? Or continue with the purchase as is?
  
• The "dominate" question is the "Are you sure you want..." but the HR tags are grouping the "Do you want to continue.." with the Yes/No buttons. Clearly some interaction design work could be done here.
  

AT&T Form Full of FAIL

Big screenshots ahoy! (hence the preview)

Here's a few screenshots of my experience with the most pointless use of tables that I have ever seen in a website. It's as if the web designers AT&T wanted to see how much screen real estate they could take up while providing the least amount of actual information.

Read more...

Movie theater concessions exist in a closed system, (...unless you've snuck something in to avoid the high costs) meaning you know what all the variables are as far as what will be purchased, and exactly where it will be consumed. It would then seem it's fairly simple to design a system that works well for the user given these constraints.

How is it then, that the movie theater operators would introduce into "the system" something that, literally, just doesn't fit? In this case, it's a cup that is too large for the cup holders. You can see here the bottom of the cup barely squeezing into the cup holder ring. I think it's worse that the cup almost fits in there- it gave me just enough hope that I might have enough time to "perch" it there long enough to sit down and get situated. Of course, it fell.

When the first shipment of cups arrived at the theatre, how hard would it have been for someone to take the largest cup and try it out in the cup holder? Why would you possibly frustrate the user like this when it's perfectly avoidable? I think it's clear what size drink I wouldn't have chosen if I would have known about this.

The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from...

Here's a context insensitive message when I load this page from the Rochester Post-Bulletin.


I didn't even know I was supposed to have a working example. Example of what, exactly?

I appreciate the notice, but I have no idea what this page is trying to communicate to me... other than: "we don't like Opera." But as bad as it is, at least it tells me that there is something that doesn't work with Opera- it's better than pages like this one, from Turbo Tax:


They list: AOL 8.0, Firefox 1.07, Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 8.0, and Safari as supported browsers, but what drives me up the wall is that I can't tell from these messages whether Opera is *broken* or doesn't meet some guideline for TurboTax, or if they just don't have any idea if it'll work because they've never tested with it. Those are two very different situations and I hate being left in the dark on this issue.

I understand the real world quirks and hacks that require each browser to be supported, but it's nice to dream.... dream of when the whole notion of "supported browsers" becomes ridiculous. Open the web already and start having a "supported standards." A test that a browser can undergo that certify its ability to meet a common, security standard. No company is going to take the time to support every browser out there, time is money. But it would save more time to only have to code your page to a security standard than to support only the browsers you have time to test with...

Saves you (the company) time, and lets me continue to use the best damn browser that you (the company) can't be bothered to test with.

*no offense to any step-children out there with red hair

Edit- updated the URL, sorry if it caused problems...I got tricked again

A screen capture from an online training course of some sort...

First the text on the screen (the item being taught):


Now, the visual representation to go along with the words...


???

Maybe I'm dense, but I just can't relate. Every slide had images like this that looks like someone just threw some clip art randomly on the screen because they *had* to have an image. The icons weren't consistently used or defined in any previous screens, etc etc... my favorite part of the training was trying to think up what the picture *really* meant.

For example- I'd say this picture is trying to tell me that using Windows 3.11 to play media files will take WAY too long which will result in Jeff Goldblum looking out of an airplane window in all directions....but whatever happens, do *not* play Trivial Pursuit.