Monthly Archives: March 2008

Opt-in / Opt-out upsell practices: the fine line between salesmanship and sneakiness

The debate about the ethics of opt in / opt out defaults in web forms never seems to go away. If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s Wired Article “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“, then you might know where … Continue reading

Bill Scott on refining search

Providing a good UI for sorting and filtering search results key fundamental to making your long tail work. Bill Scott (Director of UI Engineering at Netflix) wrote a post on this yesterday with lots of video clips and screen grabs. … Continue reading

The Story of the Microsoft Office Ribbon by Jensen Harris

This is a great presentation by Jensen Harris, talking through the history of the MS Office UI and the design approach that brought about the ribbon. Contains nice shots of the early prototypes from slide 60 onwards. | View | … Continue reading

Google’s New Advanced Search: tidier, but how much better?

You may have noticed that Google changed their Advanced Search page eariler this month. The new version certainly is a lot tidier than the old one, which was a complete dogs dinner – take a look at a screen grab … Continue reading

You know you’re a usability nerd when…

… When you chuckle to yourself about drop-down menu items. I laughed to myself about this one eariler when buying tickets for Mavis Staples at the Brighton Dome. I ended up going for “Group Captain”.

Hey, can I borrow you multimedia computer to make a quick call?

According to this Article by Darren Waters, Nokia have started calling their devices “multimedia computers”. This makes me laugh – can you actually imagine any normal person ever using that term? “Hey, can I borrow you multimedia computer to make … Continue reading