Tag: USABILITY

For Web developers, designers and managers, each design change involves a ton of small and large decisions. What color scheme should we go with? Should this element be larger or smaller? What will people remember once they glance at my page? More often then not, we sort of wing this part of the job. We may ask a couple of people we know, but most small-time developers and internal product ...

Aza Raskin of Firefox fame has just announced one of the most amazing concepts I have seen for Web browsing in a long time: Tab Candy. Lee covered a slightly out-of date version on Monday, but now it's out for everyone to play with. It's a completely new concept of tab management: today, it's very easy to have too many tabs. I mean, 12-13 tabs is already "too many". Just try doing three or ...

Firefox is doing a lot of usability-related work recently. And really, it now sports a fairly usable UI. It's kind of sluggish at times, but it is my browser of choice, mainly for political reasons. But one thing never fails to piss me off ... why does the Find function have to be so bad? Many people use large monitors these days (and often, more than one). This means that we often have a large ...

Wikipedia just underwent a pretty significant refresh in the looks department. Here are some of the new features: The navigation menu now uses JavaScript and neatly folds and slides on click. The tabs on top of each page look different, and are actually easier to use. The editing toolbar is still quite busy, but it's been reorganized to make it simpler to use. I don't think there's any ...

Firefox's AwesomeBar is great, but there is no easy way to make the text (and the bar itself) larger from within Firefox. So this little trick might come in handy to those of you who use large monitors which are located somewhat far away. 1) Go to your chrome folder (not the browser Chrome, but Firefox's chrome configuration folder): ...

IOGraph is a Java application that traces your mouse movements while you work. The screenshot above shows about 1:20hrs of my work, during which I took a break (it shows up as the large blob near the middle). The reason there's a large blank area on the right side is that I have a dual-monitor setup. I usually use the right-side (secondary) monitor for displaying information, while keeping ...

Here's a problem all of us face, but few of us acknowledge: the mouse. It's long been known that the humble mouse is a necessary, and sometimes much-loved evil. It's not actually the mouse itself, or the manipulation of it that's bad for us, but the moving of your hands to the mouse -- now that's bad. I won't get into the details, but a big part of avoiding RSI (repetitive strain injury) from ...

Have you ever received an iWork file created in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on a Mac, and not had any way to deal with it? Next time, try changing the file's extension to .zip, then unzip it with your favorite zip utility. Inside you should find a PDF preview document containing a nicely formatted version of the document in question. It seems strange that Apple doesn't promote this fact more, as ...

My primary phone is a BlackBerry, but I also own an iPhone with no service contract. Several weeks ago I had the lucky gig of compiling a few fart apps for TUAW, and I was less than impressed with the overall situation. In other words: most fart apps stink. But let's face it, fart apps made a lot of noise for the iPhone, in no small part because Apple initially refused to "pull the finger," ...

Mozilla has decided to bring in some extra hands on a UI upgrade for FIrefox 2.0, still slated for an October release. Toronto software company Radiant Core beat out two others for the project which will focus on updating four specific areas of the browser: the search bar, icons, the tab strip and dialog buttons. The present FIrefox 2.0 beta does not include any work from Radiant Core - you'll ...