Category: Usability
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Spotify to music subscribers: drop dead
Since at least 2010, subscribers to Spotify’s paid music service have asked the company to include the ability to sort playlists alphabetically in the desktop player. It’s the sort of drop-dead obvious feature that should…
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Ten Years Ago on the Web
2006 DOESN’T seem forever ago until I remember that we were tracking IE7 bugs, worrying about the RSS feed validator, and viewing Drupal as an accessibility-and-web-standards-positive platform, at the time. Pundits were claiming bad design was good for the web…
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90 Minutes With Amtrak.com
I’m traveling by train next week. This morning, Amtrak .com wouldn’t let me log into my account with my password, which I have never changed, and which Amtrak.com now says is “incorrect.” When I eventually…
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Pinterest giveth, and Pinterest taketh away
AS MY design career has taken on more and more strategic and managerial freight, I’ve done less and less hands-on design. This year, I decided to change that. As part of my reimmersion, I found…
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The Year in Design
Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first. Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content. 90 percent of design…
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Ad Blocking Phase II
The world has finally caught up with Been, Inc. Three years ago, this tiny start-up company shared my studio space in New York. Their product idea was remarkably original: instead of passively accepting the data…
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Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson
Longtime web developer, lecturer, and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson and host Jeffrey Zeldman discuss the newly published update to Aaron’s best-selling industry classic “love letter to the web,” Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences…
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Web Performance Today
Front-end design/development then and now. As web design becomes more complicated, so do performance solutions. Enjoy a nostalgic look back at yesterday’s best practices, and dive into great resources for optimizing today’s complex websites and…
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You’re welcome: cutting the mustard then and now.
EVERY TIME I hear a brilliant young web developer cite the BBC’s forward-thinking practice of “cutting the mustard,” by which they mean testing a receiving web device for certain capabilities before serving content, I remember…
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This Week In The Death of Publishing & The Web
FAST COMPANY writes: Apple, like Facebook, has entered into a standoff with the publishing industry and the open, if for-profit, web. And it’s being done under the aegis of design: choose a better reading experience…
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Usability Testing
Usability testing doesn’t reveal problems in your product so much as it uncovers arrogance in your thinking.
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No Good Can Come of Bad Code: Ask Dr Web in A List Apart
Remember: the future will come whether you design for it or not. If your company charges $300,000 for a website that won’t work on next week’s most popular device, your company won’t be able to…
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Material Design: Why the Floating Action Button is bad UX design
I HIGHLIGHTED so many passages in this brief, well-focused design argument, it’s almost embarrassing. Read it (it takes about three minutes), and you’ll wear out your virtual highlighter, too: Material Design is a design language introduced…
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Designer Blindness
If your design works for 80% of the people, give me a shout. I’ll depress you posthaste.
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Broken All the Way Down: Seeking Basic Information from Southwest Airlines
I was taking my daughter to Laguardia Airport to meet her mom, who would then take the girl on to Chicago for a few days’ holiday-time visit. Laguardia is a large airport, with many terminals,…