In Part I, I wrote about the effect of information overload, poor communication, and misplaced convenience on user experience.  I’m going to discuss information overload in more detail and speak in a more meta sense about tools. Once again, I’m going to pick on Antonio’s (although I could choose any number other pizza places) pizza box: ...

I’m going to discuss the user experience at a local pizza restaurant as a model for what not to do in user interface design. In Easthampton, there used to be a pizza place called Pizza Wings and Things – it closed and was purchased by a place call Antonio’s, which has a reputation for carrying erudite (and delicious) pizza.  The new location ...

In this post, Lou refers to a Seth Godin’s talk about the way things can be broken.  I watched Godin’s talk, and entertaining as it is, it is missing an aspect which I think should be part of every “this is broken” statement: “…and here’s how to fix it.” This is one of the aspects that I like about the Naval Safety Center’s Photo of the ...

When developing two of my applications for 31 Apps in 31 Days (here and here), I discovered an issue with using YUI with our WebImageViewer. The script tag that references the YUI js files must be inside the main form element. If it is not, the DOM of the WebImageViewer gets distroyed and multiple painful errors ...

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and waddles like a duck, then it's probably a duck. But if it just looks like one, it might be my next WinForms application. Ah, and yes it is. This blog will put a useless spin on creating non-standard shaped WinForm applications. There are real uses for this practice like adding rounded corners or ...

We all want our Windows applications to stand out, and I think most people would like to believe that there are a few distinct approaches to achieving this. You can either have an app that does great things, one that does things great, or one that does things while looking great. The ideal approach is to combine all three and make great ...

Usually, I like to complain about bad UI.  That's easy.  There is so much bad UI in the world, it's hard not to.  I try to take an extra step and describe how to fix the bad UI to make it better. For a change, I'd like to point out one small piece of good UI:    Do you see it?  It's the little pieces of plastic ...