I travel a lot on business, and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. While many airports still humiliate travelers who forgot to bring a plastic bag for their liquids and gels, others have taken a better approach: they provide plastic bags right by the security checkpoint. At Chicago’s Midway airport, they’ve even taken this a step [...]

I’m a huge fan of Bloglines for both desktop and mobile usage, and I generally find that it works really well.  But I came across one really annoying issue on the mobile interface.  If you’re scrolling through a feed and click “Unsubscribe” by accident, it removes that feed instantly.  No warning message, and no option [...]

I find myself using the “Find a Store” feature on retail sites more often than I realized, usually to figure out the store hours. While most sites make this easy to find, others do some really puzzling things when designing this feature. After spending a few minutes comparing the store locators on 10 popular [...]

You could write volumes about password and security issues on the web. Some issues are highly complex, while others are common sense like “don’t write your password on a sticky note on your monitor”. In fact, if you’re trying to create a good password policy for your application, Thomas Baekdal just wrote an excellent [...]

When I encounter a product that’s hard to use, the same thought always crosses my mind: nobody in the company actually uses it on a regular basis. To be more specific, even if some employees do use their company’s product, these people don’t have any significant influence over product design or subsequent revisions. Obviously, customer [...]

Although the selection of photos can get a little random, the This is Broken photo pool on Flickr has some great examples of what to avoid in your own designs.  Mark Hurst used to have a whole site dedicated to these pictures, but these days he posts the best ones on his Good Experience blog.

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about some products he had reviewed. These ranged from websites to PC software to non-computer stuff, and he had been asked to look at them in terms of the user experience they provided. Although he had been using these products for years, he came [...]