12 Excellent Examples of “Lazy Registration” Signup forms have long irked the casual visitor. During the process of discovery, nobody wants to stop and fill out details before they can “unlock” the rest of the site’s potential. As web users become more and more fickle, signup forms are becoming an increasingly large barrier that repels many prospective visitors from great sites. Fortunately there’s a new signup system in town that is making it much easier for the visitor to interact with the site and it increases signups.
I give you: Lazy Registration. Lazy Registration Helping the web visitor only helps your site. One great trend that we’re starting to see in web development that helps visitors is “lazy” registration. The Old System So let’s contrast the lazy registration system with the crufty old signup forms most sites use today. Contrast the antiquated signup form method with lazy registration. Increasing Engagement and Trust Also, when a site has a registration wall that the user can’t see over, it creates a level of distrust. Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbo. Aurora (Part 1) Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 (Alertbox) Community Blog: The Product Tax. Your feature ideas are great, and your obvious passion is a tribute, I think, to what we've done so far.
So I'm going to have another one of those "out on a limb" conversations here about product design. (It's possibly too much for a blog like this, but...) there was something in a few of your postings that comes up often, and it includes the expression that the solution to a problem is "obvious. " This has triggered something in me. A number of new community features will roll out next week and it seemed like a good time to bring you deeper into my world. There is this idea in product design that can be called a "product tax. " It has a few components. The taxes are in addition to the more obvious cost of a new feature -- in terms of the work of designers and engineers. But once it was connected up to other pages, unexpected questions arose: if a movie is hidden, what happens if you review it?
The larger tax is the one frequently missed. This is the hidden tax. Sung Park on Blue Dot. Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » The 50 loudest webs. By Oliver Reichenstein Internet Marketing is a combination of Presence (how well is it pushed? How known is it?) And Self Dynamic (how well does it market itself as a product?). Interactive Content is a combination of Constructivity (is the content/service productively usable? Are the texts authentic? Do they incite to write?
Are they leading to positive action?) Usability is a combination of Structure/IA (Are the contents organized in an understandable way? Web Design is a combination of Typography (Is the text easy to read? Online Behavior is a combination of Interactive Ethics (do the authors/owners have a positive open-minded attitude? Top Services, Platforms, Tools Pres: PresenceDyn: DynamicsCons: ConstructivityId: UniquenessIA: Information ArchitectureUI: User InterfaceDetail: Attention to detailRead: ReadabilityEthics: Digital EthicsDem: Democracy We all know that the website of the year is youtube.
News To put old school New York Times in front of slashdot might seem offensive. Web Design Practices | Breadcrumb Navigation. Jon Udell: AJAX and automation. IT Conversations: Doug Engelbart. Dr. Douglas Engelbart invented or influenced the mouse, hypertext, multiple windows, bit-mapped screens, shared screen teleconferencing, and outline processing. But his ideas transcend technology and computer science and reach into the humanitarian. In this presentation, he tells how can we construct a collective vision as to where we are headed and where we should best be headed.
The history of computing has always been marked by individuals who have been years ahead of their time. The nature of computing, its impact on society, and the acceleration of change in turn recursively accelerates change. In 1962, Dr. IT Conversations' publication of this session is underwritten by your donations and: Douglas Engelbart, Ph.D., Director and Founder of the Bootstrap Institute, has been a pioneer in human-computer interaction throughout his entire career.
Resources: This presentation is one of a series from the Accelerating Change 2004 held at Stanford University, November 5-7, 2004. For Team ITC: Usability Week 2006 Conference: Nielsen No. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Tw. "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information"[1] is one of the most highly cited papers in psychology.[2][3][4] It was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University's Department of Psychology in Psychological Review. It is often interpreted to argue that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller's Law. Miller's article[edit] In his article, Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (e.g., 10 different tones varying only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before).
The "magical number 7" and working memory capacity[edit] Other cognitive numeric limits[edit] See also[edit] Useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and. Usability Views - 11,002 articles about u. Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Niel. Douglas Engelbart. Life With Alacrity: The Dunbar Number as a. Lately I've been noticing the spread of a meme regarding "Dunbar's Number" of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas. The Science of Dunbar's Number Dunbar is an anthropologist at the University College of London, who wrote a paper on Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans where he hypothesizes: ... there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained.
Dunbar supports this hypothesis through studies by a number of field anthropologists. Source: Boston Consulting Group Revisiting Dunbar's Number Dunbar's theory is that this 42% number would be true for humans if humans had not invented language, a "cheap" form of social grooming. LukeW Interface Designs | Web Application. Usability throu. « Follow-up bits | Main | More on blind spots » Usability through fun I've heard myself say that things can be both usable AND fun, but what if things might be more usable because they're fun?
What if we started including fun in our specs? And I'm not talking about games. Can a spreadsheet be fun? A word processor? A can opener? Before you start rolling your eyes, let me remind us all that FUN is not the same as FUNNY. People are often turned off by the idea of adding "fun" to an otherwise serious product simply because they think it means "humour" or "silly. " Jakob Nielson defines usability with five components: * Learnability * Efficiency * Memorability * Errors * Satisfaction "Fun" can directly improve three, and potentially the other two as well. Brains reward play. Brains like play, because play is important to survival.
If something is made more memorable, more easily learned, and more sastifying... we've improved usability. The more you do it, the better you'll get. Jay Socol writes: Sean. About the Book - Designing Interface. User Interface Design For Programmers - Jo. By Joel Spolsky Wednesday, October 24, 2001 Chapter 1: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy Most of the hard core C++ programmers I know hate user interface programming. This surprises me, because I find UI programming to be quintessentially easy, straightforward, and fun. It's easy because you usually don't need algorithms more sophisticated than how to center one rectangle in another.
I think most programmers' fear of UI programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. Actually, I’ve found UI design to be quite easy and quite rational. I'm not going to give you "Zen and the Art of UI Design". My first real job was in a big, industrial bakery. Well, this was the design. Alert readers will be wondering, "how did the dough get from Mixer B to production line 6? " There were other complications. The first few days, of course, I was terrible at this job. At first I just couldn't keep line 6 supplied with dough.
Other times, I would have tiny victories. Clunky? Right, Pete. Developer.gnome.org/documents/usability/us... Interaction Design: An Introduction. 5 ways to optimize your design. Color: An Investigation. The web professional's online magazine of choice. In: Columns > Design in Theory and Practice By Joshua David McClurg-Genevese Published on November 6, 2006 Introduction What is color?
The first true critical thinking about color occured during the Renaissance in Europe. In a previous article, I referred to color as an element of design, one of the basic tools that designers can use when building a composition. Over the course of my next few articles, we will explore the subject of color, including the historical underpinnings of contemporary color theory, key color theories, theorists who have been influential over the past few millennia, and the current state of color—including color in digital environments. We will, in the end, keep the focus on the discipline of design. What is color? What do you think of when you think about color? When you think about color, do you consider it primarily with a scientific mindset, or an artistic one? So I decided to start over. The origins of color M.
Color Theory Tutorial by Worqx. Why study color theory? If you are involved in the creation or design of visual documents, an understanding of color will help when incorporating it into your own designs. Choices regarding color often seem rather mystical, as many seem to base decisions on nothing other than "it looks right. " Although often told I had an eye for color, the reason why some colors worked together while others did not always intrigued me and I found the study of color theory fascinating.
While attending the University of Minnesota I enrolled in almost every course I could from different departments: graphic design, interior design, and fine arts. During my studies, I learned that there were 2 main reasons why scholars investigated color—the first involved the communication of colors; the other involved the application of color. Communicating Color What is red? HTML Red Pantone® Red Pantone® Warm Red TRUEMATCH® 6-a Color Application The next several pages of this site offer a tutorial regarding color theory.
Functioning Form - User Experience Software. The list of software tools available for user experience professionals continues to grow. From card-sorting applications for Information Architects to prototyping applications for Interface Designers, here are a few tools I’ve been exposed to recently. Update: I'm only including software specifically built for a particular user experience methodology like card sorting, user recruiting, requirements gathering, etc. General purpose software like Photoshop, Visio, Flash, and Omnigraffle are therefore omitted from this list. Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer Deliver exciting next generation user experiences that leverage the full capabilities of the Windows platform to provide greater overall performance, improved usability, and increased customer satisfaction. xSort xSort is a card sorting application for Mac OS X developed to streamline the workflow of user experience professionals and social scientists.
Axure Intuitect Aurora GenoPal A color picker and color matching software. Morae Ethnio.