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 July 22, 2017
The reasons why confirmation dialogues are inferior to “undo” (perhaps better termed “delayed triggering”) are pretty clear, well understood, and accepted by anyone who has taken the time to read something about HCI. Undo has also featured in usability heuristics since time immemorial. No serious designer should therefore be specifying confirmation dialogues for significant CrUD […]
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 October 12, 2015
I’ve been using Gmail for years, yet I still sometimes have to think quite hard about which menu to use for lesser-used things. While I can see the logic in having a “More” menu where such things can go, I can’t understand why they can’t just all go in there. Why is an additional menu needed, and with […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 4, 2015
I feel the need for some cathartic adjustment of one of the more annoying interfaces I have to look at most days: the Outlook Meeting Invitation. Outlook’s current offering is full of annoyingly confusing clutter. So here – more for my benefit than yours – is my re-take. The current UI is mostly irrelevant noise:
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 15, 2012
I was having a look today at this question posted on Quora: “What are the most unexpected things people have learned from A/B tests?“. The writer clearly expects answers on specific tests, but a couple of people have referred to the surprising behaviour of people who run or react to the tests themselves. I think […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 17, 2011
(I posted this to Google+ a couple of weeks ago, but I may as well post it here too) Each time I engage in any activity that involves the legislature, I come away feeling soiled. Despite numerous independent and well-respected studies that said term extension in sound recordings would not achieve anything most people would […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 27, 2011
To what extent should a designer specialise? Can somebody perform UX/IA design as well as graphic design as well as the craft of markup and styling? And does that increase their effectiveness? Is it in fact only possibly to span two of these areas? And what does “effectiveness” mean in this context? That last question […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 5, 2011
I see that Stephen Few has now encountered the work of David McCandless and, as I expected, has rather a lot to say about how bad it is. He’s not alone in thinking that McCandless’s work as minimally informative, often unclear, and sometimes downright misleading. Like Few, I have yet to see McCandless create an […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 20, 2011
Agile development is a process (nay, a “culture”) that amongst other things has a number of revolutionist slogans attached to it. One of these is “fail fast” – sometimes boosted by the rejoinder “fail often”. My relationship with Agile has been a bumpy one, but I think I’m qualified to at least understand the basics […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 4, 2010
I think I’ve been a user experience designer for about 10 years now. I say “I think”, because I regularly read descriptions of methods of working and relationships between people in multi-disciplined web and software development teams that I don’t recognise. It is of course with great interest that I like to find out about […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 23, 2010
Lately I’ve been rather depressed about the state of user experience design. Both my own (management overheads, inability to sweat the details, lack of self-belief…) and that of the wider community. So it didn’t help that one Cameron Chapman delivered a further kick in the teeth the other day with 10 Usability Tips Based on […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 5, 2010
Ryan Carson is funny :-)
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 9, 2010
Every time I decide to pen a rant about some user experience issue or other, I feel a bit guilty. Guilty because I know it’s hard to be positive, easy to be cynical, and makes me look nasty. But I’m going to justify this one on the grounds that if countless hoards of designers are […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on April 1, 2010
Everyone as boring as me on the subject of copyright, community and contemporary culture (OMG it alliterates!) has something to say about the Great Paywall of Murdoch. It’s coming to an interface near you in June, we are told. So naturally, I have been ruminating on this too. My thoughts were crystallised when I read […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on January 24, 2010
(Apologies to Mike Elgan for the headline on this one) Those in the UK who want to use Google Power Meter can do so using a wireless doobrie from AlertMe Energy. Nothing wrong with that, but words fail me at the staggeringly bad information visualisation on their site. I hardly know where to begin with […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 11, 2009
Angela Epstein is unbelievably pleased to have been able to “bag poll [sic] position” in getting a national identity card. While she is apparently aware that the cards are “hotly disputed”, she says “everyone is entitled to their view”. Epstein (the Jewish surname not without some grim irony here) may think that ID cards are […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on September 24, 2009
I’ve had an unusually frustrating day with Microsoft office, so I’m venting. Coincidentally, here’s a little titbit trawled from the oceans of Slashdot this evening – some anecdotal evidence of the way Microsoft do usability “research”: I’ve participated in usability testing at MSFT (Score:5, Interesting) … as a developer. They basically have labs with one-way […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on August 7, 2009
Today’s news from Tinsel Town is that the heirs of J R R Tolkien and the charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, are seeking more than $220 million in “compensation” from New Line Cinema as a cut from the huge profits from the Lord of the Rings films. The family say have a right to […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on July 1, 2009
Earlier last week, the mighty Joshua Kaufman brought my attention to Jakob Nielsen’s latest alertbox about removing masks from password fields. This sparked some interesting debate, and it got me thinking again about passwords and security in general. It has often seemed to me that the first mistake people tend to make in applying security […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 8, 2009
Just so wrong – and you have to dismiss it with a mouse click as well. Possibly an even worse violation of the principle of avoiding user distraction than Windows networking trumpeting its wireless connections. Why should I care? It’s so hard living through the dawn of interaction design. All I can hope for is […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on May 5, 2009
The campaign starts here. The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not write about “the internet” for the same reason. I’ve […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on December 3, 2008
If you land on a web site you know nothing about and it asks you for your authentication details to another system, you should (if you have any sense) immediately hit the back button. Yet with all the hand-wringing about phishing, identity theft and net crime in general, a site called Power.com apparently sees a […]
by Jonathan Baker-Bates on October 2, 2008
Apple have threatened iTunes-listening Britons with the closure of their iTunes store. I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn’t understand what’s happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around […]