all quiet on the xmas front
It’s Xmas eve, so 99% of my company took the day off. The resulting peace and quiet allowed me to think a little bit…
You know how tag clouds indicate the importance/usage of a term by making it larger? I personally think that’s a pretty good visual indicator, so I started thinking where else it could come in handy.
Browser bookmark folders tend to disintegrate into heaps of useless information (we actually picked that up during our last intracompany ethnographic study). The whole tagcloud-ish idea could be used here, even with the existing linear format – bookmarks that you use more often can grow subtly, so that they attract more attention when the folder is opened. Of course, I’m not convinced that a directory tree is the best way to store bookmarks either, but that’s what we have, given the lack of competitiveness in the browser market.
On a completely different tangent: within my company, we do an absolutely terrible job with action buttons. Positioning, order, and appearance are never the same from application to application. Here, too, we should indicate the preferred or expected action with a button that calls more attention to itself, possibly by using a larger font. I’m actually guilty of letting this one app go live with OK/Cancel buttons – “Cancel” was about twice as large as “OK”, just because the text string inside was longer. Of course, color is another decent (but not infallible) designator – but with that, you have to stay consistent. PayPal comes to mind as a habitual offender of the “consistency of action buttons” law; it’s actually amusing to see them struggle over the years, getting closer and closer to uniformity but never quite reaching it. But yeah, peaking behind the scenes, I understand how difficult it is to implement consistent interfaces, where one development team is so separate from another that they might not even be aware of each others’ existence. And it’s always the job of the UX guy to crawl across the no-man land and ask, “Hey guys, can you change your buttons?”
You know how tag clouds indicate the importance/usage of a term by making it larger? I personally think that’s a pretty good visual indicator, so I started thinking where else it could come in handy.
Browser bookmark folders tend to disintegrate into heaps of useless information (we actually picked that up during our last intracompany ethnographic study). The whole tagcloud-ish idea could be used here, even with the existing linear format – bookmarks that you use more often can grow subtly, so that they attract more attention when the folder is opened. Of course, I’m not convinced that a directory tree is the best way to store bookmarks either, but that’s what we have, given the lack of competitiveness in the browser market.
On a completely different tangent: within my company, we do an absolutely terrible job with action buttons. Positioning, order, and appearance are never the same from application to application. Here, too, we should indicate the preferred or expected action with a button that calls more attention to itself, possibly by using a larger font. I’m actually guilty of letting this one app go live with OK/Cancel buttons – “Cancel” was about twice as large as “OK”, just because the text string inside was longer. Of course, color is another decent (but not infallible) designator – but with that, you have to stay consistent. PayPal comes to mind as a habitual offender of the “consistency of action buttons” law; it’s actually amusing to see them struggle over the years, getting closer and closer to uniformity but never quite reaching it. But yeah, peaking behind the scenes, I understand how difficult it is to implement consistent interfaces, where one development team is so separate from another that they might not even be aware of each others’ existence. And it’s always the job of the UX guy to crawl across the no-man land and ask, “Hey guys, can you change your buttons?”
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