The article The importance of having a design system by Reindeeraintreal (Reddit) shows the following UI elements from the gaming platform Steam.

The various UI elements of Steam

That looks pretty bad, right? There is no consistency at all.

However, the first comment is pretty astute: “Steam, being as successful as it is, makes me interpret this post as saying that having a design system is not important.”

Design’s not the only thing, that’s for sure. Market dominance definitely trumps design. But you could do your users a favor and lower the... [More]

For years, programmers have been searching for the one, true, perfect font for code. They keep making changes and coming up with dozens, if not hundreds of new fonts. Most of these are fixed-size, but some are proportional. Some have extra ligatures for common combinations, like ≠or ≥. Some look cursive, which I suppose is a matter of taste.

I saw one recently in a video presentation that seems like a big step backwards.

What is the point of making parentheses look so similar to square... [More]

I’m consulting on a private project with a couple of friends. They use Discord for communication. It’s quite a nice app, but there is no app in the MacOS app store. When I search for it, Apple shows me the following, wildly irrelevant hits.

Discord in App Store

You could also just say that you didn’t find any hits, Apple. This isn’t even close. The top hit is a 1/5-star reviewed product, with one review. What is the point of ever even showing this product to anyone who didn’t search for it?

So I installed the... [More]

I’m very open to the possibility that it’s just me, but this kind of stuff happens to me all the time. I approach an app that the entire rest of the country manages to use every day and fail to make it work for me, even for the simplest tasks.

In the screenshot below, you can see what happened when I tried to run a simple search for a route from “Kempten” to “Basel”.

SBB can't even make a simple form

I’m mystified as to which field the form thinks should be filled out.

Maybe I’m in some A/B test where I’m the only person... [More]

I wanted to watch a Swiss TV show that broadcast last Tuesday. I have a wealth of choices available to me.

UPC media box?

I have a “media box” from UPC, but it’s not connected because it draws too much power, even in standby mode. We (almost) never need its features, so we leave it off almost all the time. Maybe during the Olympics, we’ll hook it back up. We’ll see.

Anyway, I didn’t want to mess about with hooking up the media box—It’s not that difficult; I’d just have to connect the cable... [More]

Hoo-boy, no wonder this app has a two-out-of-five-star rating on the App Store. It’s absolutely terrible.

This is one of the first pages I saw:

Cut-off options

I had used my Swiss ID card as my proof of identity during the purchase. Now, I was supposed to actually send a photo of it to UPC so that they could verify it.[1] Unfortunately, I couldn’t see my option in this list. I was not encouraged that the second button was labeled “Passp”. I clicked that first, thinking that maybe the app just thought that all... [More]

The Strava “your year in review” is back in 2021.[1]

Strava Year In Review 2021

I just wanted to point out a couple of things:

1. This overview is only available on the mobile app. Desktop users are out of luck.
2. The overview and statistics is only available in animated form. You can’t stop the animation nor can you browse the pages in a normal fashion. The presentation is utterly and completely accessibility-unfriendly. You can only screenshot a page as it slides by.
3. Although the version from 2020 suffered from the same... [More]

I’m in the market for a mobile plan, so my wife forwarded me a link to this page at UPC:

Dein Persönliches Angebot

I’ve taken the liberty of adding some notes to the screenshot, but I’ll also list them here:

• They write that this offer is for me, personally, but there is no identifying information in the URL or cookies. This page looks the same in a private window. Stop lying to me, UPC. This offer is for literally anyone who stumbles across this page.[1]
• I was kind of shocked to see that WhatsApp is given preferential... [More]

I’ve used Google Meet twice in the last month. In both conversations, I exited the meeting room completely inadvertently and was forced to scramble back, profusely apologizing for my lack of technical proficiency.

It all starts with the Google Meet page losing focus, then “detaching” itself from the main window. This seems like a “feature” that prevents the user from switching tabs away from an open meeting. It’s bossy and intrusive.

The first time this happened, I ended up looking at a large... [More]

It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to start biking indoors. 👎

That means the TacX comes out of the basement and I am, once again[1], confronted with the awfulness that is TacX Desktop. I fired it up and was confronted with all of the same bugs and UX missteps that I’d noted a year ago. It’s like the app hadn’t been updated at all.

I got suspicious because I have a friend who uses his TacX regularly and he wouldn’t put up with this crap…so what is he using? I searched the App Store... [More]

Normally, in a UI, when you click or tap on a thing (e.g. a button), but complete the click or gesture away from that thing, the “tap” or “click” is not signaled. The gesture is ignored because the user did not complete the gesture, aborting the operation. That’s how we’ve been trained; if you press down on something by accident, just move off of it and release and you it won’t count as having been clicked or tapped.

DuoLingo Gems Purchase ScreenHowever, in the DuoLingo Settings screen—where they’re trying to get you to... [More]

…doesn’t mean you have to use light-green text on a white background.

Die Grüne Partei

The Fielmann eye-ware online store looks very nice. I’d bought glasses at the branch in Winterthur. They were great, with really good people with good advice. They have excellent prices. Their online prices are very good as well. They set me up with an account with my prescription, so I could order more contact lenses anytime.

Finding the online store

I returned to the site recently and found it to be very nice-looking, but considerably less friendly. It was subtly pushing me to use the app... [More]

These are just two examples of the inundation of UX frustration on any given day.

TacX

TacX asks every time I start the app whether it can use my personal data for a feature that I never use.

TacX Requests Data

The language is not only supremely awkward but inspired in its use and non-use of punctuation (why ellipses rather than etc.?)

“To use live opponents, we will need to share some of your personal data, such as but not limited to you name, profile, picture, speed, watt/kg, what workout you’re doing,…... [More]”

Both MacOS and iOS have system-wide notifications that use a red badge to indicate burning topics that need to be addressed.

On MacOS, the “Software Update” system-preferences panel has had a red badge on it since Apple released Big Sur was released six weeks ago. There is no way to turn off this badge without installing the upgrade. When they released a patch for my current version, the badge did not change, so I had no idea I had an update pending.

Similarly, iOS uses the red badge to... [More]

A friend sent me a link to a video on Instagram. I don’t have an Instagram account, but was able to watch the video anyway. I watched it on a desktop browser. It looked like this:

It looks like I’m previewing a device UI using the developer tools, but I’m not. Instagram on the desktop looks like two phones next to each other, centered in the ample horizontal space. The video takes up only a third of the “phone” in which it’s displayed. Each of the “more posts” at the bottom has more area... [More]

My old weather station finally died. I’d inherited it about 25 years ago from a good friend in New York. It came from my apartment in Kew Gardens to Switzerland, where it was first mounted in my kitchen and then office for many years.

The cord was covered with electrical tape from several incidents involving my first rabbit Oz. After a dozen more years, the plastic casing on the wire leading to the outside thermometer had become very brittle—especially after years of being shut into the... [More]

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall, but they now have a registration requirement. This is fine with me. I don’t browse their site regularly, but I do occasionally get links from bloggers I follow. I appreciate the job the Guardian does and am fine with being registered with them.

Guardian sign-in/sign-up formTheir signup form is somewhat odd and unpleasant-looking, but it’s the functionality that’s the most offputting.

I was unable to sign up with my preferred email address. I was notified of this by validation that... [More]

I almost never use Amazon. I almost never buy things. Recently, I had the pleasure of discovering that Amazon—a trillion-dollar company that delivers stuff all over the world—cannot properly validate phone numbers when you add an address.[1]

I entered a phone number[2] for an address to “help with delivery”. No matter how I entered the number, I got the error message,

I started with copy/pasting the phone number straight out of... [More]

I just can’t believe that this gruesome thing is still a thing.[1] In an age where we are supposed to have been sensitized to phishing sites, this thing is still an integral part of the online credit-card purchasing chain. It is generally called up with a completely different URL than the store where you started and it looks terrible and untrustworthy.

SecureCode Dialog

It’s probably a combination of:

1. not being able to change a running system because people are used to it now
2. not being able to change a running... [More]

After having listened to an excellent interview with the author on What we don’t talk about when we talk about rape, I’d recently added the book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal to my Amazon Wishlist.

Soon after, I received an e-mail from Amazon that they were giving me a one-week, five-dollar coupon toward the purchase of the book. That sounded good to me. I clicked through to the book’s page, where I saw that, indeed, a five-dollar credit would be applied were I to purchase the... [More]

It had been three years since I’d updated my resumé. To be clear, I’m not looking for a job[1]. I’m very happy at the company I (partly) own, Encodo Systems AG.

I see my resumé more as a description of my career than as a document with which I can get hired. As a partner in a company, it’s good to have an up-to-date profile handy, e.g. for including in RFPs.

One step was to write down the history of my more-recent projects and skills. In addition, though, I wanted to update the look and... [More]

When I snapped the screenshot shown below, I wanted the answer to one question:

I had actively used the phone for only about 2 minutes that day. Which application used the phone for the other 3 hr and 56 min?[1]

Apple’s design makes finding an answer frustrating, at best—and infuriating, at worst. Here’s what you see when you look at the battery settings.

Who's responsible for this?

The batter control panel tells me that “[b]attery information will be available after using iPhone for a few minutes.”

Some questions:

• ... [More]

This is an answer I wrote to What deliverables do I ask for from a UI/UX designer when starting a webapp project? by loki777coyg (Reddit).

Ideally, you’d have a VSG (Visual Style Guide) and an Interaction Design.

VSG

The VSG includes design details like colors, gradients, fonts and standard dimensions as well as details about components/controls, like for icons, properties like,

• margins
• padding
• separation between label and image
• alignment of image
• variants (image to side, image on top)

or for similar... [More]

I am in no way looking for a new job. I’m very happy at Encodo. However, I hadn’t updated my project list or resume format since 2002. I’d also seen a lot of resumes cross my desk when we were hiring last year, with some good ideas and some bad. I wanted to try out some ideas I had to improve formatting, legibility and information density/comprehensibility.

There were a few main areas that I thought I could improve in the “standard” resume format.

I’ve got a strong first draft, but I’ll be... [More]

I started using Netflix in Switzerland about 5 months ago. I initially made these notes about 2 months after I started using the Samsung TV App. In the last three months, while Netflix has made updates to their app from time to time, the core usability and browsability issues have not changed.

Browsing

Permanent billboard

The browser doesn’t make efficient use of screen space. The top half of the screen is always reserved for a billboard for the currently selected item. This choice makes... [More]

I harshed on the YouTube UX in a recent article about GrooveShark. I figured I would take a few screenshots and explain exactly what I am trying to do with YouTube and why it feels so awkward.

Use Case

The user wants to watch vides in a list that he has not yet watched.

'Mark as unwatched' would be nice

It is not immediately obvious how or even if the user can mark a video as “unwatched” so that the little sash is no longer shown across the video in a list. As it stands, the sash is pretty much useless because the video... [More]

Top of the pageNews linksA friend recently directed me to Steve Quayle where he’d found a link about Destroying your hard drive is the only way to stop this super-advanced malware (PC World). The article about viruses is a bit hyperbolic but mostly legit. The original web site, though, has some really interesting stuff on it.

It’s actually not too poorly laid-out—Cymax Media made it and their own homepage isn’t too terrible—but the emphasis is hard to parse.

What’s more important than the news links that the site ostensibly... [More]

Screen-shot of articleThe article Man sectioned over Manchester Airport plane bomb hoax (BBC) was forwarded to me purportedly for its content.

That content? They closed an entire airport for a bomb hoax.

But something else caught my eye: the sheer impenetrability of the presentation. I took a screenshot of the whole article, shown to the right. Can you tell where the article is hiding?

I’m going to ignore the British news-authoring penchant for crash blossoms.[1] Also, I’m going to assume that using “section” as a verb... [More]