Usability
Google Reader Suggestion
I put a bit of feedback on the Google reader group’s feedback and suggestions section which I thought it might be worth sharing. It illustrates a nice little point on usability
This is something that I constantly need to do which is made a bit more difficult than it needs to be.
The search box defaults to all items. Followed by read, starred, shared, friends’ shared etc.
However one of the most common searches I do is to search an individual blog that i’m currently “in”. Why isn’t this right at the top of the drop down list (yes you would need to use some clever bit of AJAXey whizz to make it so) instead of making me search down through what, in my case, is a fairly long list of blogs.
The lesson I’m sure you smart readers are aware, is that you make the most frequent actions easy to do. It’s a simple but incredibly powerful idea. The hard part in designing new apps is knowing what those most frequent actions are going to be (which feeds into the performance measurement and optimisation sermon).
Overlay Off
I asked a question on twitter earlier today.
I received some interesting replies which I thought I might collate and share.
I found it interesting to see how much people disliked the overlay effect which is becoming increasingly popular due to sites like facebook popularising lightboxes. This is essentially websites, and RIAs in particular going back to the bad ol’ days of desktop application design. In such archaeic times dialog boxes which prevented the user from doing any other action until the dialog has been dismissed were common. Alas they’re still relatively common for some types of applications in some operating systems (not naming names of course).
I had believed that in certain process or stepped tasks the overlay or the lightbox was a useful tool which focuses the attention and restricts the user to more limited courses of action which is useful for keeping a process in line. But I would think again having seen some of these reactions. Has anybody experience of doing user testing with these sorts of interfaces.