Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves a human-powered appendage at rest (whether it’s physical like your finger or virtual like a mouse cursor) and a target area that’s located somewhere else.
Visualizing Fitts’s Law
For people who need tables in everyday work they are hated element that makes them scream. And it shouldn’t be this way. Here are some of the patterns that can help in creating less evil tables.
Ultimate guide to table UI patterns
Three more table UI patterns
Bad Designs is a scrapbook of illustrated examples of things that are hard to use because they do not follow human factors principles.
Bad Designs
It turns out you do need to know some math to work in user experience. Being in UX means that sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with data on user performance or satisfaction, typically from a usability test. Even if you restrict yourself to design and leave the user research to others, [...]
When you see a heatmap for the first time, you are probably so busy saying “wow!” that you forget to critically evaluate what you are seeing. It’s easy to feel intimidated. The technology involved is phenomenal. But this doesn’t mean all research done on an eye tracker is infallible– far from it. This talk is [...]
This 93 page report based on usability studies reports how users actually use a broad variety of iPad applications as well as websites accessed on the iPad.
Usability of iPad Apps and Websites: First Research Findings
Partial Abstract
The web provides an unprecedented opportunity to evaluate ideas quickly using controlled experiments, also called randomized experiments (single-factor or factorial designs), A/B tests (and their generalizations), split tests, Control/Treatment tests, and parallel flights.
Controlled experiments embody the best scientific design for establishing a causal relationship between changes and their influence on user-observable behavior. We provide [...]
Google Drawings is the latest addition to Google Docs. You can use it for wireframing with this stencil kit.
A Wireframe kit for Google Drawings
While Information Architecture took its name from architecture, it took very little else. This is not surprising, as the early days of the web were about making sites that supported the interaction between people and data. The obvious model back then was a library; a library is a space for humans to receive knowledge. But [...]
The pilot thought he had keyed in 7600 to warn air traffic control his radios had packed up. But he actually punched in 7500, the code for “I’ve been hijacked”.
The pilot’s problem is comic, but not unique. Why, asks Michaela Bushell, are so many products still designed to suit the way companies would ideally like [...]