It seems that Synaptics are about to release new touchpad, one that it able to register 10 fingers at the same time. Tech itself seems mighty compact and quite ready for some serious manufacturing. Also, with the new touchpad, they’ve developed a demonstrator which has an OLED screen underneath and the new multitouch touchpad above. It’s also demoed in the video, check it from the full post.
Engadget also has pictures of the device: Engadget
Continue reading “Synaptics 10 finger capacitive touchpad, devkit now out there”
It’s interesting how the web interfaces, now that the web is actually becoming a platform for real applications, are doing some of the same exact mistakes that desktop interfaces have done in the past years (well, in all fairness, some are still doing). I’m guessing one of the reasons for this is that the visual designers (who usually do the designs for web sites) usually don’t have user interface background, thus making the same mistakes. Another factor could be the introduction of AJAX, which brought the possibility of cool interfaces, which as an idea is good but often is quite hard to pull off without proper knowledge of the interface design.
Why Modal Windows are bad?
Modal windows (Modal Window – Wikipedia) by themselves aren’t bad inherently but they have only a specific use in the user interfaces, and it is this specific use that it’s usually neglected in these new breed of web interfaces: Modal windows are designed to stop workflow and to force the user to pay attention to specific information and/or task. Good example of this would be an alert of some sort, that is so crucial that the user simply has to pay attention to it, before doing anything else, thus restricting access to the rest of the interface.
An example of modal window would be Digg.com’s login window (even though it’s not actually a true modal window, see below):
In this case, there are another problems: The login window doesn’t fade the background away (with darker overlay, for example) and the background of the window is practically even the same color as the page underneath, thus making it harder to perceive than necessary. What’s more is that the window in question acts like a normal page element, moving with the page when scrolling, thus not coping with the rules of window behavior.
Continue reading “Modal windows are bad, ok?”
Lately I’ve been experimenting with several different themes, trying to find the perfect theme for the blog. No luck on that issue. At the moment I’ve settled to TLight with some quick customizations. The other themes that I’ve tested suffered problems with rendering with different browsers. The TLight seems to render correctly and quickly at least on major browsers, even though it lacks the option that the finer themes have. Oh, and it’s wide enough for the layout pictures, like on the Chrome Page Titles -post, so it’s going to serve the Mint Usability to the audiences for a while now.
I’ve also been building my own theme for the blog but that’s still in the pipeline, and prolly going to be still for a while since I also have other things to attend to. Like the concept that I’m working as my thesis: It’s going to be a concept design, instead of user interface design, that I originally planned to do.
Oh, and got the Lightbox issue resolved finally. Yey! Now it works like it should. Happy picture clicking!
Welcome to another installment of the Small Things series. This time the tale is about news aggregation giant, Digg.com, who for some reason seems to be shooting itself to the leg by introducing CAPTCHA to the login process.
The sole reason of existence for CATPCHA is to shoot down non-human users, since the computer supposedly can’t figure out the actual letters/words in CAPTCHA field, thus it’s usually used in user registration forms. Though, I’m not sure how long this feature has been in the login form since I really haven’t logged in to Digg for a while.
Now, while I’m sure there is some sort of reason to this kind of use (one being bot(s) using “fake” accounts to login and digg up certain stories) I’m not so sure if the end result is right on this occasion. The immediate effect on myself was that after several attempts to trying to remember my password I eventually gave up and moved on without ever logging in. Why? One of the reasons was clearly the habit of logging in generally includes entering your username and password and pressing enter, first I didn’t even see the whole field completely. When I noticed the CATPCHA test I practically gave up after trying two times. Why? Because even though the process of trying couple of different mutations of the password is not that complicated and tedious, the CATPCHA instantly morphed the whole task into something that really demands my immediate attention to get through the simplest of tasks in online world.
Could this be avoided? Why not just use the massive statistics that is the backend of Digg and just start forming patterns? At some scale this is already done, confirmed by Kevin Rose at Diggnation (in some random episode), then apply that data and try to force diggers who always end up digging the same stories to do the CATPCHA before digging. If they fail repeatedly that would identify them as bot accounts, which could lead to suspension. It’s hardly a perfect solution but it’s something that wouldn’t punish the regular users.
Rule of Mint: If you have to start complicating the user experience because of a small group of users, and thus penalizing the larger part of the audience, there’s inherent problems within the system itself.
Welcome to the small things, covering the small things in the area of user interfaces that without no apparent reason (at least usually), one way or another hinder the user experience.
Todays receipe: Google Chrome + lots of open tabs + missing title bar
I’m a power user of tabs (like everyone who has seen any of my browser windows open knows), which means that many times in a day, all of my tabs are so small that only the first letter of the page title is shown, like so:
Now, you would get the same kind problem with any browser, but that is not the problem I’m referring to. The problem becomes evident when you are say, reading a longer article and you want to check what was the title of the article, or have lots of pages open from the same site and have to distinguish the difference between them. Normally (Firefox, IE and whatnot) you would just glance the title bar of the window and be done with it, this method however doesn’t work with Google Chrome since it’s lacking the title bar. What you have to do in Chrome is you either look around the page, to find a clue about the title of the page or hover the mouse pointer over the tab for few seconds, until the title appears as a tooltip.
Continue reading “Small things: Google Chrome page titles”
I started a new photography project and since the result of that project would be flooding the front page with just photos I removed them from front page.
You can see them by going to the Photography category: http://www.mintusability.com/category/photography/
Also check out the post detailing 365 Photos
For some time now people (analysts?) have been predicting the death of a computer mouse, by touchscreen and lately by multi-touch. I’m, however, going to claim that both of those technologies are absolutely outgunned by a simple Logitech. And as a cherry on the top, I’m going to give my take on the computer mouse killer.
Why touch-technology has lost already
The statement that simple touch technology is going to be replacing the mouse is just simply dimwitted. Why? Simply because they are used in two completely different context: Whereas touch-screen rock the handheld world, computer mouse reigns as the sole emperor of the desktop computing. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love touchscreens and even multi-touch, however, neither of them have the power or the ergonomics of even the simplest 5€ mouse, when it comes to desktop computing. Just think of the time you use your computer daily; 2 hours? 4 hours? For me it would be something like 8-10 hours. Now, keep your hand pointed to the screen, as you would be clicking a button on it, and see how long you can go. Now, do the same test with the mouse. See the difference? On continuous use, mouse wins hands down. Sure, touchscreens are intuitive but when it comes to desktop use, they just suck. Unless. And this is big if, unless the whole paradigm of desktop computing changes to something drastically different.
Then what?
Continue reading “Killing the mouse. And no, it’s not touchscreens.”
