Flea Market of Functionality

The "tools" menu is a UI's junk drawer...

"Last Monday, I set out a simple brain teaser for the Word gurus out there. I listed a number of seemingly unrelated features in Word 2003 and asked the question "what do these have in common?"

John Topley got the answer I was looking for in the very first comment to Monday's post: all of the features I listed are on the Tools menu. Many of you also sent me the correct answer via e-mail.

The point I was trying to make is simply this: don't over-romanticize how ideal the current menu structure of Office is. Although any organization of disparate features is going to have strengths and weaknesses, there's nothing "magical" about File Edit View Insert Format Tools Table Help. I don't want to belabor the subject any further—if you want to read more about the relationship between familiarity and the classic menus, read last Monday's post.

Instead, I wanted to get to an interesting comment Ben R. made last Monday: is it inevitable that there's always going to need to be a "junk drawer" of leftover commands in an application and how is that handled in Office 12?

It caught my eye because "junk drawer" is a term we use as well. I think of a junk drawer as being features piled together primarily for the convenience of the UI designer. The Tools menu is a great example of a formalized junk drawer—an entire menu envisioned as a kind of flea market of functionality."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Does your UI have a junk drawer?

Success by Indirection

The more tools you provide your users, the more they will use them...

"Last century, when designers at Amazon.com decided to include negative reviews alongside positive ones on their product pages, you could almost hear the book publishers, music distributors, and device manufacturers whose products were being sold by the online store pound their collective fists on the table. How the heck does Amazon expect to sell more products if they allow people who may not even be actual, paying customers to publicly trash them?

At first blush the Amazon decision is counter-intuitive. It would seem that allowing anybody to say anything about an item would cause it to sell poorly because someone, somewhere, would write one rotten apple review of it and spoil the bunch.

That didn’t happen, though, and the decision Amazon made is very similar to decisions other successful online companies have made recently that are starting to bear fruit. These decisions all have one thing in common: the more tools you provide customers to help them solve their own problems, the more they use them, and the better your site does as a result. Even if you allow for things like negative opinions."   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Home Page Goals

Design goals of homepages...

"When I set out to design a website, I do it backwards. I start with the design of the smallest, deepest element: the story page or search results. Then I work backwards to design their containers: section pages, indexes. Then, lastly, I work on the home page.

I do this because each container needs to adequately set expectations for what it contains. If the home page says one thing, but the internal pages say another, that’s going to lead to a user-experience failure.

This also means that, by the time work begins on the home page, there’s a lot of momentum going already. And any lingering anxiety is going to come to a head—on the home page.

Home pages are anxiety-inducing for companies. The home page is your first impression. And like the old saying goes, you only get one chance. So home pages themselves have a unique set of design goals."   continued ...   (Via A List Apart)

Design goals for creating a first impression.

Mashups for the Masses: When Mom Meets Gadget

Discussion on the conflicts of simplicity and convenience...

"Everywhere I look recently, I see possibilities for personalizing or customizing products and services. I’m not talking about choosing a nice skin for your media player or downloading ringtones for your Razr. I’m talking about a quantum leap that’s occurring as consumers morph into creators. But as our creative will to shape the world around us grows stronger with each new device we use, will the technology encourage or hinder our efforts?

We’re no longer content to passively use products and systems as they were designed for us; there’s now an inherent belief that we can and should have exactly what we want, when we want it, our way. We don’t watch live TV anymore, we TiVo our shows and watch them at our leisure, minus the annoying commercials. We don’t listen to the radio, we create our own stations on Pandora that only play music perfectly attuned to our specific tastes. We read ReadyMade magazine to learn how to MacGyver a solar tower in our backyard. And there’s a lifehack for just about every activity you can think of, from using your cell phone as a check register to getting down to one remote control."   continued ...   (Via Gizmodo)

Do we have too much control over information tailoring?

Rules for labelling Buttons

On button labels...

"It was one of those really conscientious discussions that seemed to have no end.

First UI designer: 'Right. Now here we have a tabbed dialogue box. When you press 'Cancel', it should remove all the changes the user has done since the box opened.'

Second UI designer: 'Hmm. Are you sure that's right? Doesn't 'Cancel' just remove changes on the current panel?'

Third UI designer: 'Hang on, we're supposed to aim for consistency. What does the style guide say?'

And then off they went... looking for evidence, trying to find out what best practice is, getting other opinions. Even planning some specific tests for their next round of usability testing.

Which is all very well but I thought; 'Are they trying to answer the right question?'

They had become fixated on the question of what the 'Cancel' button should do."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

A Separate Piece

On visual seperation of menu items...

"I'm not sure when menu separators were invented. They could well have been dreamed up at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, although I can't find any definitive evidence of it. Apple included them in the design of the Lisa user interface; below you can see an example of menu separators looking pretty much as they do today in the Edit menu of LisaDraw, circa 1982.

In common practice, a menu separator is used to break a menu into discrete chunks of related functionality. Usually drawn as a simple etched line, separators are thought to make menus easier to browse.

In Office 12, the Ribbon hosts controls which drop down menus. And many times we do still use plain old lines to separate sections in menus, just as designers did in 1982."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Visual break-up of menu items

Logo Claims about Website Accessibility bely Reality

The presence of an accessibility statement or logo on a website does not necessarily give an accurate picture of that website’s accessibility, according to research conducted by Helen Petrie, Director of Research at London-based user experience consultancy Designed for All.

The research found that out of 500 websites, 40 (8%) had an accessibility statement or logo. However, when 20 of these 40 'accessible' sites were inspected only 6 passed basic accessibility tests. Indeed, 6 other sites were found to be making claims about accessibility conformance beyond what they actually achieved. Only 30% of the 'accessible' sites examined in the research were making accurate claims about accessibility.

'A company’s accessibility statement is a reflection of its values towards disabled people. People’s trust will be affected if a company makes a public statement that is not reflected in how it actually behaves,' suggested Petrie."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

What Matters Most?

The most annoying usability problems ...

"Recently, I had to use an application that reminded me of a very basic usability question: What matters most? Based on my experiences, I found the answer quite revealing, especially with respect to the role of usability efforts in the development process. For this article, let me put the initial question slightly differently: Which usability problems annoy me most?

Number One: Waiting Times
Number Two: Crashes
Number Three: Missing Functionality
Number Four: The Rest"   continued ...   (Via SAP Design Guild)

Crash.

The Digital Revolution is about usability

The need for better UI's in the digital world ...

"Very regularily I find myself talking on the phone to friends and family trying to explain how to successfully complete a task using any of our favorite toys: PCs, VCRs, DVRs, mobile phones, PDAs, WLAN routers, DSL modems, etc. Just recently while attending DLD06 in Munich I was dining with friends when I got a call from my mother who needed to burn a CD. Or today my sister called because she needed to format a Word document in a certain way. It's not that I mind helping. But I am still waiting for my first phone support incident involving a fridge, or a microwave, a washing machine, or a cordless phone. Somehow those things just work. Plug and play. No questions asked.

So why then is burning files onto a CD-ROM so much more complicated than cooking vegetables in a microwave ofen? All I need to know when driving a car from A to B is what type of gasoline it needs. (Well, at least that's true as long as the car doesn't come with iDrive.) Why do I need to learn about ports, port forwarding, NAT, DMZ, UPnP and DHCP when all I want is using Wi-Fi at home? I want my parents to be able to simply "burn this file or directory onto a CD-ROM", no questions asked. (Because they really don't care about burn speeds, multisession, or ISO images. And, no, they don't need little animated helper icons either.)"   continued ...   (Via Hebig.com)

$250,000 award for human-centred computing

Do you know a worthy candidate? ...

The 2007 Bower Award and Prize will be presented to a distinguished scientist in the field of Human-Centered Computing.

The Bower Award for Achievements in Science is presented annually by The Franklin Institute to a researcher of any nationality for outstanding work in the applied or basic sciences, or engineering. A predetermined field of study is chosen each year as a theme. A gold medal and a cash prize of $250,000 are awarded to the individual selected to receive the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science.

The theme for the 2007 Bower Award for Achievement in Science is Human-Centered Computing. The organisers are soliciting nominations of individuals who have significantly advanced Human-Centered Computing; who have clarified the relationship between human cognition and computing; or who have successfully translated some important aspect of basic research into significant, practical results. Areas of contribution can include issues of design, collaborative work, and assistive technology."   continued ...   (Via Putting people first)

2007 Bower Award.

Measuring Results

Selecting UI features based on results ...

"A couple of us on the UI team were having a conversation about the comments to yesterday's post. Someone pointed out that it appears we've discovered a community on the internet of people just as obsessed about UI as we are around here. :)

I wanted to build on yesterday's conversation by helping you to understand more about how we measure results.

When you boil it down, we have a pretty straightforward set of high-level goals for the Office 12 UI redesign. Help people use more of the functionality in Office. Help people create better-looking, richer documents. Save people time in doing the tasks they frequently do. Make sure people can be productive right away using the new version. Help normal people get results that only power users could get before. Give power users the a richer set of powerful tools to go beyond what was possible before. Stuff like that.

So, how do you know when a feature is right? There are so many tools at our disposal."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

The joy of interacting with your computer.

Windows Vista GUI Designer: Expression Interactive Designer as Beta available

Looks like a good tool for creating UI / UX screens ...

"Microsoft releasd the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Expression Interactive Designer. (Only a .NET password is required for downloading the preview.) Expression Interactive Designer is used for creating the user interface and layout of Web or Windows applications

Design the applications of your dreams.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer helps you create streamlined, innovative and just plain beautiful applications. Users experience increased satisfaction, while you develop in a flexible, productive environment."   continued ...   (Via User Interface Blog)

Auto-completion in search interfaces

A nice addition to usability functionality by Google ...

"According to Jesper Rønn-Jensen from justaddwater.dk, live search will gradually replace traditional search on the web. In live search interfaces results are fetched whenever the user stops typing for a brief moment. An example of this is Google Suggest where the most popular results are presented as-you-type.

Jesper sees the following benefits:
- The search user interface is identical to traditional search
- Misspellings can be corrected immediately
- Relevant alternatives are presented as you type
- It's easy to refine your search: Just continue typing
- If the search is too narrow it's easy to press backspace and remove characters"   continued ...   (Via GUUUI)

Website Design Considerations for Older People

Usability study results and tips for older users...

"According to the 2001 UK census, the UK now has more people aged over 60 than under 16. It also revealed that there are now 1.1M people aged over 85.

Webcredible recently analysed and compared the results of 16 usability testing sessions – eight of these sessions conducted with older users (i.e. over the age of 65), and eight with younger users (i.e. under the age of 40).

The 40-minute ‘talk-aloud’ sessions involved asking participants to find information on a range of government websites. All participants reporting using the internet 'at least once a week' for 'over 1 year'.

Assigning blame
The main finding of our study was that older users were more likely to assign blame when using the internet. Of the eight older participants, three appeared to blame themselves for any difficulties which they encountered (sample quotes: 'I don‘t really know what I’m doing'; 'It’s probably my fault'; 'This always happens to me').

Four of the older users, however, seemed to blame the site(s) for any difficulties which they encountered (sample quotes: 'I hate it when websites do this'; 'Well, that’s stupid'; 'That doesn’t make any sense')."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Mindless clicks at the iMac G5 Troubleshooting Assistant

Users don't mind clicking a lot if it gets them closer to their goal...

"Making people click a lot is a bad thing, right? Not always. As Steve Krug talks about in “Don’t Make Me Think,” it’s the quality of the clicks, not the quantity. If they’re easy and mindless and the scent gets stronger with each click, then people don’t mind clicking a lot.

I was reminded of this during my recent experience with the iMac G5 Troubleshooting Assistant"   continued ...   (Via Signal vs. Noise)

Goal oriented clicking

Icons, Usability and Computers

On conveying information to users by using icons...

"A classmate of mine tonight made an excellent point about the symbology that is inherent in computing. Think about it from an outsider's perspective, from someone who's never used a computer seriously, only rarely, casually. The representations that we use to represent things are really quite silly.

In the olden days of the Mac, I remember a specific icon that drove me crazy: the paint bucket. It didn't look like a paint bucket to me at all, rather some bizarre odd shape that didn't made any sense at all. Icons that are clear to some folks are far from intuitive to others.

Think about it. If you click on Firefox or Internet Explorer, what are you clicking on? A stylized E? A fox on a planet? What do those mean, really? Look at the icon for Safari. It's a compass. But how does that represent the web to a new user? I'm not sure it does."   continued ...   (Via O'Reilly)

AJAX Design Pattern: Login Panel

An interesting approach to handling new user registration and existing user login...

"I've noticed another new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places that I though I'd share. It solves a real problem in an elegant fashion: how to handle registration of new users.

Every site that requires a login needs to provide a way for new users to register. The tradeoff between supporting new users and existing users is always tricky: for example, most brokerage sites are oriented towards marketing to new users, and have a little link in the corner where existing clients can log in. Other sites orient towards existing users, and new users are shunted off to a registration page.

Ideally, we’d keep the user on the same page. With a little bit of Javascript trickery, this is possible. The best example of this I've seen so far is in ZohoCRM.

The login widget starts out oriented towards existing users."   continued ...   (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

New Registration is abstracted, but easily accessed

Obsession to Detail

On the importance of getting the details right...

"The success of a user interface depends on getting the details right. That's not to say that a little bit of fit-and-finish work can save a horrible design, but a good idea won't thrive either unless enough of the little details are right.
I know that I am sometimes frustrating to work for because I can be a bit of a perfectionist around the UI. Especially during the last part of the product cycle, I'm constantly prodding and poking (and asking those around me to prod and poke) to make sure that every decision we make is as good as it can be. (I mean, you only get one chance to do something like this, right?)

Our development team has gone out of their way to provide us the opportunities to get the details right. Unfortunately, sometimes getting the small stuff right costs way more time and energy than doing something "most of the way." Yet, the whole team has remained committed to going beyond the "good enough" mentality so that the user experience is seamless in ways you wouldn't even notice unless we got them wrong.

One of my favorite examples of this was a design change we made a number of months ago called "Eat Dismiss Clicks."

Here's the setup. Let's say that you drop down a menu in Windows. Now, instead of clicking a menu item, you click somewhere else on the screen. This has always dismissed the menu and sent a mouse click to wherever you clicked. Nothing surprising so far; this is just how the Windows focus model works."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Introduction to Great Design (First Draft)

Confession: I'm afraid to turn off my cell phone.

Not because I'm afraid of being out of touch, mind you. Heck, I could care less if people can reach me. If you have something to tell me that's so important it would be worth interrupting Will and Grace, well, I think I'd rather have another 45 minutes of ignorant bliss before I find out about it. That's my motto: Will and Grace First, Earthquakes and Floods Later.

Here's why I'm afraid to turn off my cell phone: because I can't always seem to muster the brain cells necessary to turn it back on.

It has two buttons on it, a happy green button and a scary red button. They have funny icons on them that don't mean very much to me.

You might think that the green button turns it on. Green means go, right?

Wrong."   continued ...   (Via Joel On Software)

Which button is the power on?

Windows Vista setting new standards for Find-as-You-Type searching

Easy access to search field in Windows Vista...

"Very interesting read from a user interface point-of-view. I stumbled upon a walkthrough of Windows Vista. An interesting perspective here is that the search field has gotten a prominent position on the Start menu itself.

The start menu has evolved in Vista. At any time one can type search words, resulting in Search-As-You-Type functionality. This search leverages the broader search functions built into Vista. It functions in a very similar fashion to the MSN Desktop Search deskbar - but is integrated directly into the Start Menu. It is actually quite useful, and newly created documents appear to get indexed almost immediately. For example, after copying some Word documents into the Documents folder, they were available for search immediately. Since the start menu can be activated with the start button, one can actually perform a search and select a search result, all without touching the mouse or opening any new windows. Quite slick. Pressing enter opens a full search results window."   continued ...   (Via justaddwater.dk)

Prominent position of search field

The Elements of a Design Pattern

Design teams are discovering that a well-built design pattern library makes the user interface development process substantially easier. A quality library means team members have the information they need at their fingertips. Choosing usable components that work smoothly for users becomes the developer's path of least resistance. Innovation, while not prohibited, is reserved for those times when it's really necessary, allowing the team to leverage the work already done by others.

Our research suggests one difficulty in building out the design pattern library is starting to catalog the current set of elements. It takes a push from the library creators, but once it's completed, the value seems to be immediate: teams can start to discuss what works and what doesn't in current designs, laying out a vision for future development.

What do teams put into their design pattern descriptions? Here's what our research has turned up:"   continued ...   (Via UIE)

Microsoft Releases Pilot of GUI Design Tool For Windows Vista Apps

Microsoft released previews of interface-design tools for developing on Vista...

"Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday launched a test version of its upcoming graphical user interface-design tool for applications built for the upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer is available as a download. The Community Technology Preview is not a production tool, but is meant to give GUI designers the chance to try some of the new tool's "innovative features," such as 2D and 3D graphics, animation, dynamic layout, data binding, style and template editing and resource management, the Redmond, Wash., company said.

In addition, Microsoft released an update of Expression Graphic Designer, which is used to create graphics and export them to Interactive Designer for deployment within a user interface.

Both tools are meant for developing Windows applications that run on WinFX, which is the Vista presentation platform for displaying the user interfaces of Windows software. Vista is scheduled to ship later this year, but no timetable has been released for the production versions of the design tools.

The WinFX runtime components are also available for download to Windows XP computers, or they can be packaged with third-party software for XP. The components equal 40 megabytes."   continued ...   (Via InformationWeek)

10 Reasons Clients Don't Care About Accessibility

Thoughts about client views on web accessibility...

"Working as an accessibility consultant in an IT company is a very frustrating job right now. Highly publicized lawsuits and deep-rooted accessibility myths leave us with a lot to explain when the final product does not really help visitors. Our clients simply don’t care about accessibility as much as we’d like them to, and there are several reasons for that.

Reason 1: It’s the Law But There’s None to Follow
Since February 2002, it has been a legal requirement for organizations to make reasonable adjustments to ensure their sites are accessible. The Disability Rights Commission of Great Britain (DRC) issued a revised code of practice for Part 3 of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995, which covers goods, facilities and services. The code of practice explicitly included Web sites under Part 3 of the DDA and includes both those that provide services and goods for free and for payment."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web)

The Feature Bob Invented

How scrolling tabs in the Office 12 Ribbon came about...

"It was a cold winter afternoon early in 2004, and we were in the midst of doing some of the first usability tests with a working, clickable prototype of the Ribbon. (Prior to that, most of our prototypes had been paper-based.)

This particular prototype was put together in PowerPoint as a fairly inexpensive way to mock up a basic Ribbon and to see whether people got the concept. Basically, we put a picture of each tab of the Ribbon in a separate slide in the PowerPoint deck. We turned off the "click to advance" functionality for each slide, and then drew a nearly transparent square around each tab of the Ribbon. Each of these squares was hooked up to an action so that clicking on them advanced to the slide that revealed the picture of the tab you were clicking on.

In this way, we were able to simulate a tabbed user interface just by drawing 8 or 10 pictures. None of the commands within the Ribbon really worked in these early prototypes; we just would watch and listen to see where they clicked within the tab."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Using the scroll button to switch tabs

10 Best Intranets of 2006

Jakob Nielson discusses the trends in intranet best practices...

"This is the first year in which a majority of the winners hail from outside the United States, underlining the continued growth of good intranet design around the world. In fact, the globalization of good intranet design is actually greater than what this simple list implies; many of the winning companies are highly multinational, with team members operating in multiple countries. At Vodafone, for example, intranet technology is managed from Germany, with development efforts occurring in California, Spain, Italy, and Egypt.

This year's winners are all large companies, with an average size of 80,000 employees. In previous years, we've always had winners with only a few hundred employees, but this year the smallest company has 3,000 employees. It might be that large companies are finally making intranet quality a high priority, and thus their more substantial resources make it harder for smaller companies to compete. One year's results, however, are insufficient to confirm such a trend."   continued ...   (Via useit.com)

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance.

I am intrigued by how a designer’s background affects problem definition and, thus, the resulting design approach and its implications for the design and development of these new forms of user experience. Developers of desktop applications and Web sites have very different orientations to user experience. As application developers move into Web development and Web developers begin to take on the peculiarities of application design, each needs to recognize the wildly variant aesthetics of the other."   continued ...   (Via UXMatters)

Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach

A look at eye tracking applied to search forms...

"In this article, I’ll present findings from eyetracking tests we did to evaluate the best solutions for label placement in Web forms. Today, forms are the primary—often the only—way users have of sending data to Web sites. Web 2.0 makes extensive use of forms. For example, on Flickr™, Del.icio.us, and Writeboard™—which, by the way, I used when writing this article—users provide all of their tags, comments, and other information using forms. Users submit queries to search engines using forms. E-commerce sites also rely heavily on forms that let visitors find and purchase products. (I’ve never browsed for books on Amazon®. I always search for them.)

So, the usability of forms is often massively important to the overall usability of a Web site. That’s why we decided to subject some of these forms to a quick round of eyetracking tests and have analyzed the resulting data to better understand what makes Web forms usable—or unusable."   continued ...   (Via UXMatters)

Eye tracking on search forms

Child Computer Interaction - Taking bigger steps!

On children and technology interaction...

"Child Computer Interaction (CCI) is that branch of HCI that considers interactions between children and technologies. Not surprisingly, CCI borrows many thories and methods from HCI but also has close ties to education and gaming.

As a genre, CCI has been steadily developing over the last few years; much of the momentum has come from the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference Series and from the establishment of research groups across the globe including specialised groups in the USA, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Following a successful workshop at INTERACT 2005, a special edition of the journal "Computers Technology and Work" is planned for 2006. The editors are looking for contributions that address methodological issues in Child Computer Interaction Research. The deadline for contributions is the 24th February 2006 and further details can be found at www.chici.org.""   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Child Computer Interaction

Above the Fold is obsolete

Interesting thoughts on front page design the keeping users on the right track...

"We’ve been working on a major overhaul of our new website for about a year now. One of the big issues with this redesign has been trying to figure out our audience. As a branch of government, we finally came to the conclusion that we simply have a gigantic audience to deal with. As such, attempting to come up with specific personas wasn’t necessarily going to help us as much as it does in other projects. The issue was simply that we had dozens of personas to address and, short of designing separate sites for these folks, we had to deal with the fact that a lot of content had to be presented to a lot of different users.

In addition, our first stab at doing this last year led us to at least attempt to define some personas and we found that it just didn’t work. Too many folks fell outside of our common personas and people were simply getting frustrated with having to define who they were before they could get to the content.

Long story short, with the new site, we decided that more links was better than not enough and decided to go with a rather long, but organized, navigation bar for the site. Of course, this created some backlash mainly from internal people. And, even to me, it seemed a bit counter intuitive. We’ve always been taught the truism that we should never give people more than 7 options at once and it’s better to funnel them through smaller sets of options rather than give them too many at once."   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Design pages to keep users on the track to completing their task.

The End of Personalized Menus

Office 12 has officially migrated away from personalized menus on by default...

"As faithful readers of this blog, you no doubt know that not every program shipping with the Office 12 "wave" of products has the new user interface.

This means that, at least for the time being, menus and toolbars are still alive as a part of many important programs, such as Publisher, Project, Visio, and several others.

The good news for fans of usability worldwide is that an historical moment is upon us. As of Tuesday, we have officially flipped the switch to turn off Personalized Menus by default for all apps in all future builds of Office 12. (New UI programs based on the Ribbon, of course, were designed without Personalized Menus from the beginning.)

Don't know what Personalized Menus are? You can read all about them in Part 3 of the "Why The UI?" series, including my take about why they weren't a good idea.

The option isn't going away, so if you do love this feature for some reason, you can still manually turn it on in Office 12. But the default setting for "Always show full menus" will be set to on, reversing the default first introduced in Office 2000.

A small but significant victory for humankind."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Personal menus will be off by default

One of four web users are disabled users

A new look at what makes up accessibility...

"Did you know that up to 25% of all visitors on your website have some kind of accessibility problem. Some of your users may be blind, deaf, dyslectic, has learning disabilities or motoric disabilities such as schlerosis, parkinson’s disease, etc. A so-called functional disability.

But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.

25% of all web users have some kind of accessibility problem. That is a claim from the Danish Center for Accesibility. Here is my translation:"   continued ...   (Via justaddwater)

Consider technology accessibility problems

Google Asked to Make Its Visual Word Verification Accessible

Word verification limits accesibility...

"An online petition is being circulated to all Internet users for the purpose of collecting signatures showing support for Google to make its word verification scheme accessible to the blind and visually impaired.
Tempe, AZ (PRWEB) January 17, 2006 -- We at the Blind Access Journal call upon all Internet users to sign the Google Word Verification Accessibility Petition found at http://www.petitiononline.com/captcha asking Google to provide an accessible alternative to the visual verification scheme that currently locks the blind and visually impaired out of participation in all the company's services. Google's implementation of word verification currently denies us access to such important features as the ability to create accounts and blogs, change our passwords, and post comments to most blogs that use the Blogger service. Accessible solutions to visual verification have already been put in place by such companies as America Online, Microsoft, PayPal and SpamArrest. We ask Google to follow this lead with an audio playback implementation now, followed by the creation of new innovative approaches that meet the needs of all users, including the deaf-blind population.

After allowing sufficient time to collect a significant number of signatures, the signed petition will be sent, via certified mail, to Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO. Visual verification without accessibility represents a growing, immediate clear and present danger to the continued ability of the blind and visually impaired to participate in all the Internet has to offer on terms of equality with our sighted peers. Let's all sign this petition and do all we can to urge Google to make the situation right by following the company's own mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" by allowing participation for everyone."   continued ...   (Via PRWeb)

Word verification hinders accessibility

Five Experience Fundamentals

Key ways to invest in your user experience...

"Let's face it - we're all sweating a little: Product and service commoditization are forcing strong price competition - squeezing margins and motivating us to tighten our belts. In the midst of "the squeeze", it's harder than ever before to deliver increased value to customers and build differentiating customer experiences. We often have fewer resources to draw upon, and we want to be wise about how we invest them.

Even so, in times like this, most successful business leaders understand the importance of investing back into the business. The most successful customer experience leaders follow this principle, as well: investing in ways to iteratively innovate and improve customer experience across online and offline channels.

It's easy to forget, in a world of incredible possibility and infinite creativity, the power of simplicity and the importance of a solid customer experience foundation. This is especially true related to online user experience, where the dust around Web 2.0 hasn't quite settled. As we look forward in anticipation of what's to come, it's important not to lose sight of managing the founding elements of customer experience.

To do this, user experience practitioners should follow the lead of the successful leaders in customer experience. These leaders never favor "flash over substance" approaches to experience innovation. Instead, Experience Leaders understand the critical need to deliver innovation from a foundation of "experience fundamentals," which can be applied in a channel-agnostic fashion to any experience."   continued ...   (Via gotomedia)

Customer Experience.

Improving Customer Experience: Usability Testing Is Not Enough

The need for good data to design good websites ...

"Many Web businesses do not provide a compelling customer experience; some sites are simply unusable, while others fail to provide content, goods and services that match their customers' needs and expectations. To make matters worse, most e-tailers do a poor job of effectively assessing their customers' experiences. They fail to learn why their customers behave as they do, a step vital to mapping any strategy for improvement.

To truly understand customers and gather the information necessary to make strategic business decisions, Web companies need to employ methods that yield richer customer insights.

User Interface designers are often buried in technical departments and have backgrounds in software development and graphic design. Unlike their marketing counterparts, they are not trained in product, pricing, placement and promotion. They often report directly to a product manager and are left out of strategic discussions altogether."   continued ...   (Via E-Commerce News)

Customer Behavior.

A Better Box Of Crayons

Adding some (more) color to Office 12...

"Perhaps because I was never the kid who had the super sized 128-pack of crayons, I never developed much of an artistic eye, especially for colors. Having only the 16-pack, with nary even the free crayon sharpener is something I obviously rue to this day. (Made worse by the fact that, only a few years later, my younger brother got a 64-pack of crayons complete with built-in crayon sharpener. Sigh.)

Anyway, the point is, if anyone needs help with colors, it's me. That's why I love that Office 12 helps me make better looking documents by improving the selection of colors throughout the product.

Now, it is true that many of the core Office 12 products (including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) support a new model for document themes, which let you change the color scheme, font scheme, and special effects scheme on a per-document basis. Much can and should be written about how all of this works in the future.

But putting that aside for the time being, every document comes with a "default" theme which contains a color scheme full of well-matched colors. The result is that, even if you don't mess with the new theme or color scheme features at all, your documents look modern and well-matched. (Of course, it doesn't hurt that all of the default object styles in the contextual tab galleries will be based on these colors as well--so when you put a chart or table in, all of the styles you can choose between will match by default.)"   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Increased color options in Office 12

Graphical Passwords Enhance Computer Security

A new approach on system passwords and security...

"How safe is your online information? Not nearly enough, due largely to the secrecy of personal passwords being easily compromised by hackers and “shoulder surfers.”

A research team at Rutgers University—Camden has developed a unique solution to this growing problem: forget about words and numbers when crafting passwords for your computer and online accounts, and use images instead.

This next wave of computer password security could very well result in greatly enhanced security for online retailers and sensitive information stored on computer hard drives.

According to Jean-Camille Birget, a professor of computer science at Rutgers University-Camden, violations of personal information and access to both networks and individual computers is due largely to the relative ease for a criminal to co-opt a private password. “In order to make your password secure enough, you have to make it harder to remember, which means that you’re more apt to forget it” says Birget, who also notes that people rarely pick random passwords and instead choose something familiar that might not be hard for someone else to guess."   continued ...   (Via Rutgers)

Using graphics for passwords

INTERACT2005 Special: Keep Designs open for Human Ingenuity

The importance of human intervention to prevent over automation...

"Trust and Incidental Interaction: Would you let a Talking Paper Clip run YOUR Home?" at the INTERACT 2005 conference, held in Rome towards the end of last year, featured - among others - Albrecht Schmidt of the University of Munich's Embedded Interaction Research Group explaining his answer to the panel question. It may be helpful to refer back to the first article in this series When Interactions happen without You for background.

Yes, said Schmidt, presenting "I think I let the paper clip run my home... but first I need to know how to cheat on it". His argument was it is fine for software to go on in the background as long as people know what it is capable of and how to override it.

He pointed out that the system acquires implicit inputs from the user and may then present implicit output to the user. Implicit input are actions and behaviour of humans, done to achieve a goal and are not primarily regarded as interaction with a computer, but are captured, recognized and interpret by a computer system as input. Implicit output is that which is not directly related to an explicit input and which is seamlessly integrated with the environment and the task of the user."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

How much automation would you allow him?

The 50ms Myth

More on visual appeal, and the balance of function and form...

"A study by Gitte Lindgaard in Behavior and Information Technology found that a mere 50msec glimpse of a web page is sufficient for readers to form a judgment of whether the page is visually appealing. Writing in the pop section of Nature, Michael Hopkin asserts that this means that you'd better make a favorable impression right away if you want Web surfers to buy from you.

"Of course, says Caudron, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. 'That can be the difference between big business and no business,' he says."

Well, no. The study described here does not demonstrate the claimed effect, and there's excellent reason to doubt the claimed effect exists."   continued ...   (Via Mark Bernstein)

In the blink of an eye

Visual Strategy

Research on the differences in how users track elements visually...

"Have you ever wondered whether the way we move our eyes and head when looking at our environment is the same for everybody or everyone has his/her own way to see, his/her own visual strategy?

This was the question that the R&D dept. of the lens division of Industrias de Optica S.A. (INDO), a Spanish company devoted to ophthalmic optics that actively does research on Progressive Addition Lenses* (PALs), when they began to perform eye and head tracking tests trying to find mobility patterns in the coordination of eye and head of PAL users. The goal was to find clues that led to the personalisation of PALs.

The users performed visual tasks with targets placed at different distances, from infinity up to reading distance. A Polhemus Fastrak electromagnetic system registered the head and chest while an ASL 504 infrared camera followed the line of sight of their eyes. From the analysis of the data consisting of coordinates and rotation angles of head and eyes that the system produces you can derive a lot of information, such as velocities, accelerations fixation points and many others."   continued ...   (Via InfoVis)

Visual map

Outlook and the Ribbon

Some hints on where the next Outlook version is going and how it might integrate with Office 12...

"On Tuesday, I wrote about some of the new features in Outlook 12 and, in passing, I mentioned that Outlook was the single biggest consumer of the Ribbon.

Not surprisingly, since I didn't explain the remark any further and because it seems to contradict my post about what apps get the new Office UI, I got a lot of feedback questioning my remark. "Surely you're mistaken... or crazy?" one reader wrote in.

While it is true that I have been quite sick this week and woke up with a > 100 degree fever again yesterday morning, I assure you that I am not, in fact, any crazier than usual.

(That's 37.8 C for you non-United Statesians...)

Anyway, while it is true that part of Outlook has the new UI and part of it does not, the half which does required the design of more Ribbon tabs than the rest of Office combined.

Start with the fact that in Office 12, the Outlook editing and reading canvas is based on Word. This means that the feature set of an e-mail message starts with "everything you can do in Word", subtracts "things that don't make sense in an e-mail, such as page orientation" and adds "all of the features Outlook supports."

And now, you've successfully designed the Ribbon for one scenario: sending an e-mail message."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Outlook 12 gets ribbon too?

iTunes, Netflix, and the Paradox of Recommendations

The Catch-22 of suggesting new music while trying to maintain customer privacy...

"The developers of Apple’s iTunes music system caused an uproar recently when it was discovered that one of the music player’s new features, the MiniStore, sends personal information back to the Music Store itself.

If you use iTunes and have upgraded since January 10th, you may have noticed the new feature yourself located at the bottom of your application. The MiniStore feature provides a small version of the Music Store that shows up when you’re browsing music from your own library. If you click on a Van Morrison ditty, the MiniStore feature (below: in light blue) will show links to the latest Van Morrison albums as well as recommendations from the iTunes Music Store."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Paradox of recommendations

Contextual buttons

Confusion with context buttons ...

"I have noticed a trend in virtual interfaces that exploits their ephemeral nature, where a single button is used today where two buttons used to be used in the past. The button label is used to both clear a state of the system and the action the button can do. Who else finds they pause slightly in these contexts even after becoming “experts” in these systems?

Of course I’m going to use the covetted champ of design, the iPod, and critique it. I mean it is so easy to nitpick “perfection” b/c it gives us clear lines, with the distractions of too many interrelated mistakes.

So here is the mini view of iTunes while playing a song:"   continued ...   (Via Synaptic Burn)

iTunes Pause.

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

The importance of a strong first impression to lead into your user experience...

"Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.

Quickly now: like what you see?
Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing."   continued ...   (Via Nature.com)

First impression in 50 milliseconds.

Quality is Usability

The importance of early usabilty/beta testing in Office 12 ...

"We have a number of ongoing, long-term projects designed to help us test the overall usability and learning curve of the new Office 12 user interface.

One of the most important tasks has been a full deployment of Office 12 Beta 1 within a local company. We chose a dozen people with all different job types (but none of them computer or software related) and replaced their Office 2003 with Office 12 Beta 1.

On the surface, this doesn't sound that novel. Obviously, if you want to find out how well a product works, you need to get it in front of people. What is unusual is how early we started this study."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris )

Office 12 Interface.

Managing User Experience Performance

A good first post on a new blog by a strategy director at Frog Design ...

"Part One: Understanding the Experience/Expectation Gap
Why smart near term choices on improving user experience can be liabilities later.

Developing complex products today - cellphones, digital music, cars - is challenging because there are many ingredients that must go into providing a satisfying user experience for customers. Everyone one wants to make a compelling, coherent experience, as customers are becoming more sophisticated about expecting them, but few companies have the resources, expertise, budget or time to develop every element themselves - interfaces, controls, web applications, operating systems, retail integration, etc. So you have to make decisions about what you're going to do custom, and what you're going to get off-the-shelf.

These decisions have major impacts on not just how customers will perceive you, but also your future flexibility and growth path as a company. They also have a dramatic effect on profit margins."   continued ...   (Via Adam Richardson)

Experience-expectatino gap.

Opportunities 2006 Usability

Focusing on usability from the start ...

"2006 is going to be a year where the creators of web technology have the opportunity to make their services better in terms of integration, usability, and usefulness.

Usability - Web products and services must be dead simple to use.

Have you ever tried to show a non-blogosphere, non-techy person how to subscribe to an RSS feed? It's quite a challenge, especially if they are still struggling with their e-mail inbox. And of course, it requires a preliminary conversation about what RSS is and why they should use it. Despite its name, RSS is not simple."   continued ...   (Via WebProNews)

New RSS Subsciber.

Image Links vs. Text Links

No difference in clickstreams between text vs. image links ...

"Years back, we compared successful clickstreams (clickstreams that resulted in users accomplishing their goals, as observed in tons of usability tests) with unsuccessful clickstreams (clickstreams where users abandoned their goals before completing), looking for any clues that would help us predict behaviors in one that we didn’t see in the other.

One factor we looked for was whether the clickstreams contained image links versus text links — does one type of link show up more often in successful clickstreams than the other.

Our finding was when users clicked in image links they were just as likely to succeed or fail as when the clicked on text links. There was no statistically-meaningful difference."   continued ...   (Via UIE Brain Sparks)

Sun Clickstream.

AJAX performance stats, ROI, and business value

A review of Ajax articles to demonstrate the cost / benefit ratio ...

"Is Ajax a smart move? (Source: JustAddWater.dk, Author: Jesper Rønn-Jensen) — “The benefits listed here are very similar to benefits when we’re arguing for web-standards: Reduced bandwith, training costs, cost of ownership, and increased return on investment. But for the time being I still believe that AJAX has increased learning costs for developers."   continued ...   (Via WebWord)

Ajax Bandwith Cost Benefit.

New Theoretical Approaches for HCI

New theories of HCI ...

"Author: Yvonne Rogers — “A core lesson that was learned, however, is that you cannot simply lift theories out of an established field (i.e. cognitive psychology), that have been developed to explain specific phenomena about cognition, and then reapply them to explain other kinds of seemingly related phenomena in a different domain (i.e. interacting with computers). This is because the kinds of cognitive processes that are studied in basic research are quite different from what happens in the ‘real’ world of human-computer interactions (Landauer, 1991).”

The quote above is wonderful. In effect, it states that you can’t necesarily use lab research to answer practical questions. Sure, you might be able to gain some insight but you won’t get great answers without getting your hands dirty.

Great article full of important insights."   continued ...   (Via WebWord)

Applying the principle of cognitive tracing.

When Interactions happen without You

"Trust and Incidental Interaction: Would you let a Talking Paper Clip run YOUR Home?" was the name of the most challenging panel at the INTERACT 2005 conference, held in Rome towards the end of last year. All four speakers' presentations had interesting aspects and made a unique contribution to discussions about the future of user-centred design. To do justice to the ideas, each is being given its own story. Today, UN features Alan Dix of Lancaster University's Computing Department explaining his answer to the panel question.

Dix began by asking how many computers we thought we had at home. More than five? Most of us put up our hand and laughed. Then he knew he was talking to the initiated. This panel was not about desktops or laptops; it was all about the little computers inside things and what they are increasingly going to be able to do for us, with us and in spite of us.

Dix introduced the 'intentional spectrum':
* intentional is when you press the light switch to make the light come on;
* expected is when automatic doors open, or an automatic light switch functions because it has sensed your presence;
* incidental is when, unbeknownst to you, the air conditioning increases because you have come into a room."   continued ...   (Via Usability News)

Incidental.

Visual Interfaces for Databases

New approaches to designing a Pivot Table interface ...

"Although visual interfaces and databases are two of the success stories of the computer revolution, their synergy to date has been modest, probably because visual interfaces have focused on human capabilities while databases have focused on efficient query processing. The success of visual interfaces started with the GUI (Graphical User Interface), which supplanted the command line interface by exploiting the power of the human visual motor system. Given advances in graphics hardware in the mid 1980s, research started on Visualization, the use of interactive, visual representations of data to amplify cognition. We will briefly describe Mackinlay’s dissertation, which formalized Jacques Bertin’s design theory, adding psychophysical data, resulting in a system that could automatically design graphical presentations.

In This talk we describe an interface for exploring large multi-dimensional databases that extends the well-known Pivot Table interface. The novel features include an interface for constructing visual specifications of table-based graphical displays and the ability to generate a precise set of relational queries from the visual specifications. The visual specifications can be rapidly and incrementally developed, giving the analyst visual feedback as they construct complex queries and visualizations."   continued ...   (Via Stanford HCI)

Pivot Table.

Designing for the Web

Website design within the constraints of HCI ...

"Now it is time to turn our attention to the Web. Within any given medium there are unique constraints that can affect the way designers make use of the principles and elements of design. These constraints can be based on a variety of different things including materials, technology, processes and standards in the industry. The Web is no different. Designing for a Web-based environment enacts a set of unique issues that need to be considered before implementation can be successful.

In my opinion, the vast majority of constraints in a Web-based environment are brought about because of the limits of human interaction with technology. The Web, by its very nature, is a virtual medium accessible only via peripheral devices (computers, monitors, mice, etc.). We are constrained by what technology allows us to do, and are confined by the rules of these systems. One of the most interesting (and frustrating) aspects of the Web is that it is such a new environment that the rules are constantly changing. Designers need to adapt as necessary."   continued ...   (Via Digital Web Magazine)

Dominant Screen Resolutions.

Bringing Desktop Interactions Online

Clarifying actions when bringing applications to the web ...

"As the gap between desktop and Web applications continues to close, interaction designs previously reserved for the OS are making their way online. Unfortunately, the transition is not always a smooth one.

Interactions that reveal themselves in context are likely to have the easiest time making the move from desktop to Web. For example, auto completion of user input doesn’t require different upfront behavior on the part of users. Simply start typing in a text field as you always do and suggestions reveal themselves below. Based on the presentation of these suggestions (within a vertical list of options), you are likely to assume you can select one with your mouse or arrow keys and (when the component is designed right) you can.

Other forms of desktop interaction don’t have the luxury of being visible when they are needed. In fact, actions like double-click, right-click, and drag & drop are not visible at all. You need to know that these options exist in order to make use of them. This problem is magnified in the single-click world of the Web browser where few people imagine that single-click selection, double-click launching, right-click menu access, or drag and drop are possible. To address this issue, designers often opt for direct communication by including messages that describe drag and drop behaviors and making actions explicit through links or images."   continued ...   (Via Functioning Form)

Web Application Actions.

Change It Up!

Methods of designing for an existing UI ...

Organizations now recognize the value of spending time and money on user experience design. Many have spent considerable time and money to develop just the right user interface (UI). So when it comes to adding or changing functionality, they may not want or have the option to do a full re-design because of budget, time, or technological constraints. That leaves designers working under less than ideal conditions.

Specific practices and concepts can assist you when designing for an existing UI. The following projects demonstrate these approaches."   continued ...   (Via Boxes and Arrows)

Existing UI Sketch.

We all want to take the easy option

Increasing sales with usability ...

"After suffering user fatigue from early experience of mobile applications, it is great to see companies realising that usability is the best way to create a mass market

Webcams have come a long way since 1991 when Cambridge University geeks linked their computers to a camera near the coffee machine. This enabled people in far parts of the building - and the rest of the world once it was linked to the internet- to check out the coffee. Webcams have since slowly become better and cheaper, and may now be poised for liftoff.

Last week, I tested a service that would have seemed implausible 10 years ago: video phone calls to anywhere in the world for nothing - yes for nothing, assuming only a broadband link. Skype 2.0 (beta) has good quality video - as webcams go (ie moody). Used with a Creative webcam (£27.99), it can shrink the video image or make it full screen and can mail you automatically if it detects movement where the camera is monitoring. You can also take photos or videos."   continued ...   (Via The Guardian)

Skype

Apple is getting sloppy.

Apple's OSX interface dropping the ball? ...

"Graphic designers and web developers have always had a place in their heart for Apple computers. In general, they’ve always been prettier to use. But since OSX has come along, something at Apple seems to be amiss. Somewhere in the bowels of the corporate beast, they’ve become quite sloppy with their presentation layer. Apple, once known as the epitome of human interface standards adherence has slowly become a random mis-mash of interface ideas and implementations.

For starters, it’s next to impossible to identify Apple’s standard interface anymore. This is perhaps the most common gripe expressed on Daring Fireball. To be fair, OSX has been very much a work in progress, and a lot of interesting desktop UI things have come out of it, but we’re getting a tad tired of them redecorating in a seemingly randomly fashion from application to application.

Then there’s the ease of use (or namely, increasingly lack thereof) of their applications. I love iTunes, but there are so many illogical UI issues with it. I can’t browse more than one page at a time. I have to jump through hoops to add podcasts one at a time. I tried playing with Garage Band the other night and it appears that the days of being able to open a Mac app and intuitively get the hang of it in 5 minutes are slowly fading away."   continued ...   (Via MNteractive)

Apple OSX.

Managing Editor Wanted

Usability In The News is looking for a volunteer managing editor to serve the usability community.

If you are working in UI or a related area, and want to contribute to the UI community, this might be a perfect activity for you. Also, if you are a UI student, this might be a good learning opportunity for you to get imersed in the latest UI and UX information available.

This activity will take an hour or two each day and can be done in your own time and from your location.

If you are interested, please contact editor@usernomics.com.

Selecting With the Magic Box

Adding some functionality to the interface ...

"Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend.

You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. They're not in a table.

Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in any of the other ones. Think you have to manually select and format every word in the column manually? Not so!

Simply hold down the Alt key and drag a box around the text you want to format. Let go of the Alt key and all of the text within the box is selected! Apply formatting until your heart is content. Or, perhaps click Copy to put the selected text on the clipboard."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Magic Box.

Best 2005: Navigation

Providing more than one method of navigation ...

"Don't tell your neighborhood librarian, but sometimes there just isn't a single perfect way to organize things.

Something we've noticed over the years on Sun.com is that our customers often have different strategies for finding the same information: Some people start browsing the site right away, others use the search box. Some people look for support on our general support areas, others go first to the support areas of product pages, and still others first look in communities like BigAdmin.

And, when looking for products, some people search, some look by name, while others are more interested in looking by categories or by the function a product solves."   continued ...   (Via Sun.com Design)

Sun Storage Gateway.

Clear For Whom?

How clear can it be?

Via OK/Cancel)

Tools for the Transition

Transitioning to a new interface ...

"A lot of people are involved with helping to produce documentation and tools to help ensure a smooth transition to Office 12 and the new user experience. Although the data indicate that people will be able to be productive even as they first sit down in front of the new product, we want to make sure that every "T" is crossed and every "i" dotted.

With that in mind, we're trying out a number of different ways of presenting migration information to see what people find useful. One thing we wanted to try was to generate a tool that would help people interactively map commands between the menus-based UI of Office 2003 and the Ribbon-based UI in Office 12.

The idea wouldn't be that this was a primary reference, because we really believe people will be able to find the features they're looking for very quickly in the Ribbon. It's more like a security blanket--so that you absolutely know that if you somehow get stuck, you have a friendly way out."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Office 12 Security Blanket.

AJAX Design Pattern: Read/Write Div

Keeping the display clean until more is needed ...

"A new AJAX convention cropping up in a few places, one that is easy to implement and has real benefit to end users. I haven’t found a description of it anywhere, so I thought I’d write it up here.

The basic idea is that user controls (typically for editing the displayed data) should be hidden from the user until needed. At "rest", an area of the screen displays information in read-only fashion. On clicking an "edit" button, the div expands to display the widgets for changing the data."   continued ...   (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

Display Closed.

Display Open.

The Swivel Socket power strip

A new way to handle power bricks ...

"Many have tried to create power strip that performs allows you to use more than the inevitable two of the plugs at once, and many have failed. One notable exception is the PowerSquid, but this Swivel Socket concept seems like it might give that thing a run for its money. Each socket rotates 180 degrees, and each has a swiveling label so you can remember what you plugged into what. Sounds like a plan, no?"   continued ...   (Via Engadget)

PowerSquid Power Strip.

Symbolism (Office 12 Coolness, Part 5)

Word 12 access to symbols ...

"In every phase of my life in which I've been required to create documents, a different set of symbols has been important to me.

For instance, in high school, I studied Spanish, which meant figuring out how to type ñ and ¿. In college, as I repeatedly flirted with flunking German, I inserted a lot more of ä, ß, and ö. And now that I work at Microsoft, my symbols of choice are © and ®.

That's one of the reasons I appreciate the Symbol gallery on the Insert tab of Word 12. When I want a symbol, I just pop open the gallery and choose the one I want."   continued ...   (Via Jensen Harris)

Word 12 Symbol Gallery.