I’m often surprised at how effective the average person can be at picking the “better” of two designs, or saying which colors or fonts look “right” and “wrong”. As others have written before, the typical individual probably has no idea why they like a specific design approach. However, this doesn’t stop them from providing valuable [...]

Say you’re designing a list of features that people will access from a menu on the left side of the screen. When you only have a few items to include, ordering them by popularity or frequency of use probably makes the most sense. But as this scales beyond ten or so items, it becomes cumbersome [...]

While making some configuration changes in Salesforce.com, I ran into a truly puzzling set of buttons. At the bottom of the page I was editing, I saw the usual buttons for “Save” and “Cancel” — plus another button for “Quick Save”. I don’t have a clue how you can save something faster than normal, and [...]

From what I’ve read, modern elevator design generally focuses on how to make elevators more efficient. In other words, engineers try to group passengers by their destination floor, reducing average wait times. With that said, I came across a design blunder in Chicago’s John Hancock Center that makes me wonder if elevator designers have really [...]

When designing software, it’s common practice to relegate some of the more obscure settings into an “advanced” tab. Personally, I don’t understand the attraction. Adding another tab to your settings window creates yet another thing for the user to worry about, and doesn’t really provide any benefit. Sure, you might be able to shorten the [...]

A recent bout with PowerPoint reminded me why I dislike Microsoft’s ubiquitous presentation software: the files it creates are absurdly large. For every image that you import, the file size seems to increase by two or three times the size of the original image. I’m guessing PowerPoint converts the images to an uncompressed format like [...]

When adding a new feature to an existing software product, many programmers and designers just sit down and create the look-and-feel from scratch. This is a mistake, since it leads to user interfaces that have little in common with the rest of the product. A much better approach is to study the existing features in [...]

Last weekend, I tried to buy some vitamins. My selection method was pretty simple: for a given price level and ingredients, I prefer a small gelcap to a large capsule. But the design of many bottles prevents you from telling how big the actual pills are. For instance, the bottles are often opaque, and some [...]

For whatever reason, some people feel compelled to include a bunch of extra text in their documents, rather than simply referencing or linking to the original source. Worse, this information is frequently retyped from memory or copied from an older version of the data. This behavior frustrates customers, since they have to re-process the extra [...]

If you want to communicate effectively, it’s generally a good idea to use the same words that your customers do. This rule applies whether you’re creating a website, writing a user’s guide, or designing navigational signage. I’ve seen this recommendation many times before, yet companies still get it wrong all the time.
Here’s my most recent [...]