by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 3, 2022
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been helping out with our corporate blog, a Medium publication. Medium is utterly awful for the purpose of corporate blogging. Disclaimer: Some of the things described here are so molar-crushingly bad that I suspect they are in fact not true. Perhaps it’s the lack of any detailed documentation […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 31, 2020
The use of “toggle” switch UI in place of check boxes has been growing in popularity over recent years, and is approaching a convention in some contexts (particularly mobile). But there is a problem with them that designers should bear in mind: If somebody sees a toggle as a button, then the UI will take […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on February 9, 2019
Ever since Amazon removed their navigation from their checkout screen, it has been said that transactions (or other critical tasks the business would prefer the customer to complete) should not have “distracting” navigational elements on the screen. This is because those elements could take people away from the task at hand and erode conversion. Not […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 4, 2016
At the trainspotting end of the UX spectrum of activity lie articles like this, from Information Architects Inc., which for some reason I find myself reading. While IA’s article is far too long and badly needs editing, the following occurs to me: Icons take up minimal space and look better than plain text, so they tend to […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 31, 2015
In a further instalment of Google-bashing, here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while about Google Contacts on Android:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 17, 2009
I’ve blogged before about how I think calendars are to dates what pie charts are to numbers, but recently I’ve been thinking a bit more about this issue. The background to this was a discussion I had several months ago around the pros and cons of using calendars for date range selection, for example in […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on August 1, 2008
Here’s a fun, and quite interesting, post-launch “movie” of the changes made in the new delicious UI. You have to be fairly familiar with the old one to appreciate the differences, of course. Oddest thing I’ve noticed with the new design so far: in common with the old design, they seemed obsessed with limiting the […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on June 13, 2008
One thing that bothers me about “design patterns” is that they don’t always seem to be the best method of solving a design problem. In many cases, patterns are patterns simply because they are popular. This of course is a phenomenon not limited to design (music, for example, is another case in point). However, it […]