Today Google released its web browser, called Chrome. Go and get it. Really.

It’s fantastic with the great user experience, wicked fast JavaScript (3x faster than Firefox and 75% faster than Safari based on Bubblemark test) and supports both ActiveX and Firefox plugins! Even Silverlight works although there is a minor issue with canvas updates.

Google Blog Search offers an easy way to subscribe to search notifications in Google Reader. Very simple and nice.

However, there is a problem. Here is how the feed looks in Reader’s list:

The actual search term is represented by the first letter only. Interestingly Google’s Russian rival Yandex makes the very same mistake (the line above Google’s).

Search term alerts feed name should start from the term itself:

Fixing that is easier than writing this post.

Jakob Nielsen writes about some frequent mistakes in application design.

Here is his list (with my comments)

1. Non-Standard GUI Controls (sometimes you have to use non-standard controls, if they can do the job better; otherwise we would stop the GUI design evolution in 60-ties)
2. Inconsistency (inconsistency is bad, but in the context vs consistency battle context wins)
3. No Perceived Affordance (agreed)
4. No Feedback (agreed)
5. Bad Error Messages (I would generalize this to include bad copy in general)
6. Asking for the Same Info Twice (who does that after all?)
7. No Default Values (agreed)
8. Dumping Users into the App (I didn’t understand this one)
9. Not Indicating How Info Will Be Used (hmm… I don’t suppose explaining everything is a good idea; it’s better to let user correct the mistake easily, when necessary)
10. System-Centric Features (I would call them useless features — pretty obvious)

The complete article, while being a bit on a linkbait side, worth checking out too.

“Are you sure you want to delete this item?”

Sounds familiar, does it? Just a couple of years ago every application had dozens of message boxes and confirmation dialogs popping up here and there. Now it’s changing. In Loudtalks we decided we won’t use any.

So how do you handle the above mentioned situation without throwing a message box?

Implement Undo for any action the user may regret a moment later. Sometimes it could be tricky but most applications don’t have to do anything irreversible.

There are several caveats of course:

1) Sometimes you really have to do something, which can’t be reversed (like format the hdd).
2) Blind users accessibility should be taken into account.

Even if the action does require re-confirmation, you could do it in more elegant way. For example, use in-place confirmation button. Probably the best way to address accessibility issue is to implement a handler, which will announce the undo keyboard shortcut along with the fact that the action is completed, when screen reader software is detected.

Do you still use MessageBox in your software?

It’s been a month since we have launched Loudtalks and we are approaching 2,000 registered users mark. It’s still a very little number and practically it means that almost all user names are available.

For example, as I write this, such names as bruce, jason, jennifer, jesus, michael are all available.

Still we are getting a lot of registrations with fancy names like jones331 or _ktr1954 (these are not real but you got the idea). The reason is simple. Once you picked the name — it’s yours. Most people will stick with it even though it was a random choice.

It’s an interesting effect and I’m wondering what would happen in 20 years. If the trend will go on we will have people naming their children AlexG_2047_12 or JulieF_A23045 (and check them in Google Names before they do to assure uniqueness).

A splash page with an edit box for an email address — this is how most of yet to be launched websites look. I suggest to use “disposable” RSS-feeds instead. Disposable means it only delivers a single message — launch announcement and keeps silent before that. Such feed could be marked by a special icon (I tried to make the one by laying a rocket icon from KDE Crystal theme over standard RSS icon). You can see a live example here or embedded below.

Launch feed has few important advantages over email box:

1. RSS is pull technology so there is no spam concerns. User identity is not disclosed.
2. It’s easy to track for the user, what she has subscribed for.
3. RSS is perfect for aggregation so it would be possible to build the website (your next start up?), where users can subscribe to a single feed and get notified about product launches (all or belonging to a specific category) even before TechCrunch writes about them.

Meanwhile you may subscribe to the one below to get notified about availability of Loudtalks — a secret project of Metalink, which we’re launching this month.

Loudtalks Launch Feed

Mac user interface looks fantastic.

Even if you’re not Mac addict, you’d agree, that it has something beyond the look — it feels good too. How did Apple do it? Can you do the same with your application?

These concepts will help you to accomplish that.

1. Continuity

Mac OS X plays the continuity game nicely in its windows manager and it makes a huge difference to user experience. In the real world, things don’t appear from nowhere. They don’t vanish suddenly either. Alice felt uncomfortable, when Cheshire Cat was suddenly appearing and disappearing, so do the users.

Continuity could be very hard to implement but it worth the effort. Ideally the screen should transform between different states seamlessly yet fast. iPhone user interface is a great example of how much you can do despite the lack of computational power. You have the power of a desktop, WPF, Silverlight, Flex and JavaFX — sure you can do better!
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I tried Safari for Windows, which was one of the news at WWDC yesterday. I must say I was deeply disappointed. It’s not that the browser is bad. It’s ok for the first public alpha. The problem is mismanaged expectations.

Download page says not less than “The world’s best browser. Now on Windows, too“. The press-release screams “the world’s fastest and easiest-to-use web browser“. That promises for something. I would suggest Apple PR people to try the product first.
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We have been working on it for a while and I’m glad to announce that we released the first public beta of human translation plug-in for WordPress. The plug-in allows blog visitors contributing translations to their language of content they like. AJAX interface is used to display translation without reloading the page or making visitor leaving the site. I installed the plug-in on this blog so you can try it now. If you want to try it on your WordPress blog, post a comment here and I’ll send you instructions.

Thanks Brian for such an interesting project and Alexander for the hard work.

We have lots of features lined up to make it really useful tool for community-driven content translations. If you are interested in this topic the best way to keep track of the latest updates is to grab the RSS of Worldwide Lexicon blog.

Today I used “cool” as del.icio.us tag for the first time.

I never thought I would use it at all but when I saw this personal website of Bret Victor it came up organically and indisputable. Other del.icio.us users seems to agree. If you haven’t seen it yet — sit down and take a look.

I got to the site to check who is the author of Magic Ink — an amazing paper on UI-design, focused on reducing interactivity rather than building on it. I haven’t read it yet (I don’t think anyone did as seen from this discussion at Digg, where I found the link) but even brief scanning proves that the concepts Bret presents deserve very careful attention. I downloaded the PDF and will be reading it slowly as time permits.

That’s right and classy black on white is way behind according to readability study performed by Alyson L. Hill from Department of Psychology of Stephen F. Austin [State University]. You can actually get this conclusion by simply looking at paper’s webpage — it uses exactly the colors combination, which it found to be the most favorable. Nice touch indeed. While the study itself is quite dated (1997) I don’t suppose people has changed a lot since then so most if not all of results must still be valid. Here are some interesting ones:

- Green on yellow is the best color scheme in the most conditions except for italicized Arial, for which it’s the worst
- Times New Roman on average is much better than Arial
- The combination, which gives the fastest response time is (surprise) italicized green Times New Roman on yellow background

- Black on gray is much faster than black on white

Here are response times results from the paper:

Good to see that plain black Arial on white (as used in this blog) is doing well too. Do you agree?

Few more useful Web Page Readability / Usability Research works from the same lab can be found here.

Microsoft’s User Experience team did an excellent job putting together Vista User Experience Guidelines. It’s very good, detailed and actually has broader application than just Vista. I wish every software developer / designer read it and at least tried as hard as possible to adhere to rules and suggestions presented there.

Here are some of my favorite’s rules from the guidelines:

“Don’t spend time rebuilding standard UI components; use that time instead to innovate in meaningful ways based on your core competencies and understanding of your customer needs.”

It makes sense although the reality is that over the next five years Windows XP and older systems will still represent significant market share so most developers won’t be comfortable abandoning skins just because on Vista standard controls look good enough.
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Skype is without doubt one of the best modern examples of consumer market application done right. Anyone who develops for the same market segment can definitely learn some good practices from it.

Let’s start from the beginning (and often the most critical part of conversion funnel) – software download process. There are numerous approaches to this problem from plain download link to auto-installing activex downloaders. You can take a look at Skype’s implementation here. Wow, it’s that simple. The process is structured in steps with pre-requisites first, then download button with release details below, then download process illustrations, then setup wizard instructions, then “how to start it and see that it’s running”.
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… without good software. This is the tagline we used in our new printed ads. Take a look and tell us what you think!

There is lighter version:

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