Posts tagged “user experience”

Twitter's new UI is a mess of small but infuriating design failures: a useless right-column layout, duplicate tweet composition interfaces, broken conversation controls, and a chaotic interactions tab. None alone warrants outrage, but together they prove nobody's minding the store. A billion dollars buys better than this.

iTunes started as a simple, elegant music player. Now it's a bloated monstrosity handling everything from phone activation to app stores. These features have nothing to do with each other, and Apple is even using iTunes as a Trojan horse for unrelated software like Safari. Time to break it up.

My iPhone wishlist: landscape keyboard everywhere, cut-and-paste, better SMS options (send to many, resend, character count), a Windows-compatible calendar app, and a live weather icon. Also finally sorted my wi-fi issue -- turns out HEX and ASCII passwords aren't interchangeable, apparently.

I just used Flickr to batch-resize photos for a friend's website gallery, not because I needed cloud storage or any web-specific feature, but simply because it was the easiest option available. That moment crystallized something: web apps are winning not on principle, but on pure user experience.

Design serves multiple masters: first impressions, usability, functionality, and efficiency for power users. No site or OS has balanced all four; they pick a niche. Know your users, lean toward the right extreme, and measure accordingly. RSS hints at a solution: separate interfaces for separate needs.

One emacs config setting transforms it from an arcane key-binding nightmare to something that works like every other editor. A good reminder that good design is often invisible until you've experienced bad design first.