90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

I’ve just finished setting up uxurls.com – a user experience aggregator. It’s a really simple popurls clone, intended for people who are too busy to set themselves up with their own RSS reader, or just fancy a quick glance at the sites I’m reading.

There’s about 130 sites on there right now and I’ll be adding progressively more in the next few weeks.

If you want your site added, feel free to drop me a line @uxurls, but I’m not making any promises. This site is really just intended as a way for me to share the sites I’m reading at the moment, and it’s definitely not intended as an exhaustive catalog of all things UX.

I hope you find it useful!

Here’s a nice antipattern from the Odeon (UK), who show us how to annoy 99.9% of users in an effort to help the 0.1% who enter their email addresses incorrectly.

So, here I am registering on odeon.co.uk…

Oh look, I need to enter my email address twice. Never mind, I’ll simply copy and paste it…







Job done. No, wait, WTF? They’ve disabled paste!





I’ve been a bad user, I must to stand at the blackboard during lunch break and write out my email address over and over again until I promise never to use shortcuts ever again!

Seriously though, typos in email addresses when registering is a real problem (more than typos in passwords, as Jeremy Keith points out – since if your email address is correct you can always reset your password, but not the other way round). However, this problem hasn’t really been solved properly yet – we don’t have a standard design pattern that we can just copy as needed.

UserGlue’s proposal looks promising, but it’s more of a prototype than a finished solution. Have you’ve seen any other attempts to solve this problem in the wild? Have UserGlue hit the nail on the head? I’d love to hear your comments…