Attending Matt Gemmell’s workshop last week was a great exercise for thinking from the user’s perspective – something which we, as software developers, often do not usually spend enough time doing because of being wrapped up in other things.
As developers, it is hard for us to detach ourselves from what we do and cater to the user. We live on …

We’ve all seen it before: dialogs which ask you whether you are absolutely, completely, invariably sure that you want to close without saving changes. And you click “Yes” in your haste, and then realise that you actually kind of needed that unsaved presentation that you’d been working on all evening.

A flawed design
It’s a pretty common design in applications even today, …

People like clicking; after all, wasn’t the mouse the main piece of hardware that lead to the GUI and made computers more accessible?

But people don’t like repetitive, boring tasks. And one of the areas where this is done especially poorly is when performing batch operations on large sets of data, where the user has to go through several stages to …

The other day I was using Cyberduck more heavily than I would usually, when I was doing a whole load of uploading. When I came to close the application, I was presented with this dialog:

It’s a fair enough dialog, I have been using free software which someone put their own time into and I’m appreciative, and might think of donating …

After downloading the new Chrome beta for Mac OS X the first thing that struck me was how well it blended into the native Mac UI. The window takes on the standard OS X window appearance whilst working into it with the tabs which are built into the title bar. This wasn’t simply a port of the Windows version, it’s …

Users don’t like change. Perhaps one of the most apt demonstrations of this is with Facebook. Only today, changes were made to Facebook, basically consisting of a new setting on the front page:

Which can be changed to:

(Dependent on your level of stalkiness).
Being a moody teenager myself, I am, naturally in contact with.. A lot of moody teenagers. And there has …

Are you familiar with the Apple Human Interface Guidelines? It is a document which outlines how good OS X applications should look and behave in order to maintain the consistent look and feel of applications across the Mac platform (and the iPhone for the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines).
Personally, for any document of considerable length which I will undoubtedly spend a …

When firing up Apache the other day, XAMPP presented me with the ever helpful error message:

Taking a step back, Wikipedia describes error messages as:
a message displayed when an unexpected condition occurs, usually on a computer or other device. Error messages are often displayed using dialog boxes. Error messages are used when user intervention is required, indicate that a desired operation …

“Aha!”, they say, “We can handle mouse events and return false!” This is completely wrong. To me, one of the most important features of software development is usability. You can have the most sleek design, the most killer algorithm, but with a poor user interface and workflow, these become irrelevant.