Gregory's Server48. Things that work different should look different.
in linguistics, false cognates are words that look and sound similar, with similar meaning, but different origin. false friends are words with similar sound but different meaning. software has false cognates and false friends too. In 2018 they nearly ended the world:
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51. Humans make mistakes. It’s no use pretending they don’t. You’re just going to have to deal with it. So just make them easy as possible to fix. Include infinite undo, back button, home button, version control. Autocorrect, I am not so sure about. I for one don’t like the computer to insist it knows better than me and then provide no way to easily insist i am right. Let me make mistakes! just make it easy to fix them. 55. All manufactured things should be designed to be used by one hand. either hand. there are safety features of some industrial equipment that require both hands so that both hands are no where near the dangerous hand mangler part- use best judgement via @space_cadet 56. on Unskippable Cut Scenes. 57. Negativity Bias 58. more on episodic memory ever stand up to do something, walk into another toom and forget what you were doing? it turns out there’s a reason for this. since human memory is organised around episodes, experiments have found that walking through a door is a trigger for ending an episode- the result? short term memory is cleared and primed for new input. what triggers exist in software? how often have you picked up your phone to do something, saw a notification and lost your flow? 59. Please don't use confirmation dialogues, but if for some reason you absolutely must, don't sleepwalk through writing the the messages and the button labels. Don't just label them "okay" and "cancel" Without thinking about whether that wording harmonises with the message text. If possible, label the buttons as what they actually do, specifically.   @zensaiyuki This is exactly why I advise against using JavaScript's alert(), confirm(), or prompt() functions: They don't allow you to label your buttons anything other than "Okay" & "Cancel". I generally prefer native UIs, but in this case: PLEASE implement your own! Preferably something non-blocking like GTK's InfoBars.  @zensaiyuki I really like how NMS both does this and - crucially - says "your game was last saved X minutes ago". So I can go "saved 1 minute ago? yeah okay we're all caught up." or "oh, 6 minutes? we were just sitting in our ship the whole time, 's'fine." 60. Plan for failure software breaks. hardware fails. services go down. users make mistakes. Anticipate as many failure modes as you can, and design recovery plans and craft reasonable, well written communications for the user. Technical writing is its own topic, but for error messages the important things to accomplish are 62. Stop making your updates so intrusive. I open an app to use it. if you force me to stop and update it first i forget what I opened it to do. this is user hostile behavior. Ideally, users should not be bothered about updates at all- but unfortunately they a necessary. a less intrusive pattern is asking for permission to download and install an update on app EXIT. just don’t ask using a blocking modal dialog, for the love of durga. the least intrusive pattern of all is web apps that are just automatically always the latest version, and at worst, occasionally ask you to reload your browser so the front end matches the back end. this is a tradeoff of course because those updates happen without consent.  @zensaiyuki @zens yep. As any D&D player will attest: 1% is a lot higher chance than you think 68. don’t assume your users’ devices resemble yours or your close circle of friends when deciding minimum requirements- especially if you intend to reach a wider audience with a range of socioeconomic conditions and internet connection speeds. brought to you by the Australian government locking welfare payments behind a mininum iOS version. Le dernier message avant le mien, "the Australian government locking welfare payments behind a mininum iOS version." 70. your ui should not passively animate for anything less important than a carbon monoxide leak. it's effective at getting attention, often way too effective. via @binarycat  @zensaiyuki@mastodon.social It's a fairly straightforward argument to make that this is illegal per GDPR too, data minimisation is a binding legal requirement and demanding people register when there's no actual necessity seems to contradict that @zensaiyuki Wow, they're like shop security asking you to buy something or leave. Except they also want you to open a loyalty account.  @zensaiyuki i couldn't figure out what was wrong with Adele until i put her upside down… i hate it. |
49. Figure-Ground and sillouettes.
The fastest and most well developed stage of visual recognition is of the sillouette of an object. In character design, getting the sillouette of a character to be disctinct is most important. in portraiture if you get the shape of the head right, you’re 90% there. it takes far longer to notice the interior features. time how long it takes you to spot what is wrong with adele. This is important in icon design too- don’t mask all your avatars in circles please