UI

Microsoft Outlook “Read Receipt” Message Box is Criminal

Here’s an example of “user abuse“, which has remained throughout several versions of Microsoft Outlook . What do you think clicking the check box will do? If I’m never asked again, what would Outlook do automatically in the future? Would it always send a receipt? Would it never send a receipt? Would it always do [...]

Read the full article →

The User Experience has Changed

Your UI is not your father’s UI. Back in the late 80′s, during the days of Windows 2.0, the big push was to make your applications SAA/CUA compliant. SAA (Systems Application Architecture) was IBM’s strategy for enterprise computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which defined three layers of service, one of which was [...]

Read the full article →

Autosave – Is it Too Late to Standardize?

One of Alan Cooper’s arguments in user interface design has been that explicitly asking the user to save a file is a waste of time. I’ve always agreed with that, but I wonder if we’re too late in making autosave the standard. These days, many applications have an autosave feature in addition to an explicit [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t Click “Publish” Yet!

Do you realize that the default option for Microsoft Outlook is to automatically send an email immediately after composing? This has to rank as one of the most short-sighted decisions ever made by a software design team. I’m shocked that they still haven’t changed the default. I know they’re trying to make it easy for [...]

Read the full article →