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Practice

Why Your Form Checkboxes Should Always Use Label Tags

All check boxes have labels, but not all check boxes use label tags to dis play their labels. This can cre ate click ing prob lems for users. Check boxes are small and hard to tar get. With out the label tags, users can’t click the check box labels to tick the check box. Instead, they’re forced to tar get and click the small check box itself, which can cause user frus tra tion, espe cially for motor-impaired users.

via Why Your Form Checkboxes Should Always Use Label Tags – UX Movement.

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Practice

iPad Usability: Year One

Obviously, tablets might become truly personal devices in the future as competition drives down the prices. But for now, you should assume that youre designing for a multi-user device. For example, users might be reluctant to stay permanently signed in on an app, and theyll still forget their passwords. Its also important to design recognizable application icons so theyll stand out in the crowded listings of several users apps.

via iPad Usability: Year One Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.

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Practice

Utilize Available Screen Space

Mainly, though, let’s stop cramming information into tiny peepholes. Optimizing the UI for the available screen space is a key strategy for improving usability (and thus lifting your conversion rates).

via Utilize Available Screen Space (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Face it. The web has gone mobile (and small).

Nielsen’s words on Mega Drop-Down Navigation are informative as well.

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Forward Directions Integration Practice Tools

College students’ use of Kindle DX

A study of how University of Washington graduate students integrated an Amazon Kindle DX into their course reading provides the first long-term investigation of e-readers in higher education. While some of the study’s findings were expected – students want improved support for taking notes, checking references and viewing figures – the authors also found that allowing people to switch between reading styles, and providing the reader with physical cues, are two challenges that e-readers will need to address in cracking the college market.

via College students’ use of Kindle DX points to e-reader’s role in academia — University of Washington – washington.edu.

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Practice

A quicker drop table within MySQL

Whilst a truncate table operation is underway a lock mutex around the table is created to ensure data consistency; if using innodb file per table the physical .ibd file must be removed which is a painfully slow operation under ext3.

via A quicker drop table within MySQL:

Categories
Practice Technology

The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment

In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn’t Amazon’s fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon’s cloud computing model.

via The AWS Outage: The Cloud’s Shining Moment – O’Reilly Broadcast.

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Practice

The iPhone Tab Bar

Having worked with interaction and graphical design for iPhone applications during the last couple of years I’ve managed to pick up some lessons the hard way, and in this post I would like to share my thoughts on a couple of do’s and don’ts.

via The iPhone Tab Bar « SignificantPixels.

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Practice

Sorting algorithms as dances

Take one Central European folk dancing team, a small folk band and an added overlay showing array locations and get them to dance the algorithms in time to “appropriate” folk music. The result is slightly surreal and for a time at least slightly hypnotic.

via Sorting algorithms as dances.

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Practice

Incompetent Research Skills

Although some analysts questioned the finding of search dominance, its a user behavior that gets stronger every year. Today, many users are so reliant on search that its undermining their problem-solving abilities. Ironically, the better search gets, the more dangerous it gets as people increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer.

via Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users Problem Solving Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.

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Practice

7 Web UI mistakes to avoid for smartphones and tablets

Clients say the darnedest things. The other day, one scoffed, “Anyone who’s looking at our website on a stupid little phone screen probably isn’t our customer anyway.”

via 7 Web UI mistakes to avoid for smartphones and tablets.