Every time I sit down to design an application, the first question I ask myself is how simple should the interface be. For that, it pays to know what the target audience is, their level of expertise etc. But the most important aspect is ‘how simple can I make it?’

«Continue Reading»

When you design an application to be cross-platform, or if you have decided to take an existing application to other platforms, your first step should be to translate that application to the new platform. In moving from a desktop application to a mobile one, the changes are quite radical and somewhat obvious. Moving from the desktop to the web, while tricky, is still understood as a big change so people tackle the problem accordingly, (generally) paying attention to details. Moving from one desktop platform to another is, unfortunately, a place where many mistakes are made, because sometimes software-makers forget that platforms are different.

«Continue Reading»

A few things I came across today, during the daily grind:

• Trying to sign up for meetup.com is not as easy as I would like, especially since they do not allow valid e-mail addresses.

  

• Trying to save the previous screenshot, using an invalid filename on Windows (due to the ‘?’ character) gives an error.

  

  Well, in my case it simply refused to save, with absolutely no indication as to why.

I hope none of these things are done on purpose (although the e-mail address bit happens in many places) but please, if the work you do is in anyway tangent to similar system, make sure the people in charge of testing the logic and the usability understand what the problems are. Someone said that “usability is predictability”, that if the user knows what’s going to happen after they click a button, your system is usable¹.

P.S. Yes, in Gmail you are free to use user+tag@gmail.com where user@gmail.com would be your normal e-mail address. The +tag is useful to filter easily on incoming mail, and potentially a giveaway in case some service decides to sell your e-mail address to spammers (although I suppose spammers are at least sophisticated enough to remove whatever is between + and @, but who knows?)

1. Caveat: this is about application design, where action should equal reaction and the interface should always provide some feedback. Games thrive on unpredictability, as do other systems [↩]

As more and more applications go cross-platform, users are sometimes presented with software that they can tell was simply “dressed-up” on/for their platform of choice, not actually thought out with it in mind all the way. Does your application follow the platform or does it follow itself?
«Continue Reading»