Update July 14th 2011, Additional commentary on my old design and changes to other UI’s since I first wrote this post. A brain storming session on the Moz usability list was sparked off by Firefox’s need for a better generic movie player UI . After doing some best of breed analysis of current solutions and [...]
As outlined in Part 1, the traditional style of documentation is antithetical to actual usage. Style is a major problem, but the delivery mechanisms are just as bad. At best, a manual can be oriented to predefined tasks and known problems, at worst it is a dense technical read with a broad overview intertwined with [...]
It has been over a month since my last post -testing has taken a backseat to reading research in social learning theory and technical communications. But now I have some more solid ideas I want to share in this 3-part series. Today I am going to talk about a typical users, how they learn, and [...]
There is a lot of talk about community building for the Ub command developers. My main concern is UI engineering; how can we help command developers create Humane commands? Earlier I blogged about the translate command, offering some suggestions, hoping it would help future command developers. Sadly, we can’t expect trained Usability professionals to review [...]
I have been running into two types of usability problems in my testing of Firefox Ubiquity. One set of problems is with Ubiquity itself, it’s discover-ability, the display of suggestions, help, etc. The other set of problems is with the commands. The Translator command caused a lot of confusion. It would change the contents of [...]
