Tag: interfaces

  • The Three Important Response Time Limits

    There are three important response time limits in user interface design, and this has remained constant since 1968, says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Those three time limits? Chess, anyone? It’s worth also looking at Nielsen’s Powers of 10, detailing further time scales of user interaction. My summary:

  • The Role of Good Progress Bars

    For the increasingly complex applications that we deal with on a daily basis, progress bars are an important feature in order to provide users with a constant experience of progression, efficiency and engagement. After explaining the benefits of progress bars (see above!), Gavin Davies then delves deeper into the topic, looking specifically at the role of…

  • Unintuitive Interfaces

    Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almostĀ embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…