When Facebook users were presented with a custom loading animation in the Facebook iOS app they blamed the app for the delay. But when users were shown the iOS system spinner, they were more likely to blame the system itself. The Psychology of Waiting, Loading Animations, and Facebook →
Tag Archives: ux
In Defence of the Floppy Disk Save Symbol
Those who believe that the floppy cannot represent saving a document because nobody uses real floppy disks anymore miss an important point: while symbols initially piggyback on the meaning we assigned to a material object in order to stand in for something more abstract, once a symbol is used often enough, the symbol itself is …
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Chardin.js
URLs are for People, not Computers
We are all familiar with URLs: the string uniquely identifying the requested document. However, we don’t always consider they are more than that: URLs are user facing and should be considered important UI elements. They should be clean, understandable, semantic, hierarchical and not excessively long. And that’s why I have a (tiny) chapter dedicated on …
Don’t Be Afraid To Teach Interactions
A couple of weeks ago, I was using the latest version of the Rdio app and realized that I had no idea how to put a song into a playlist. After hopelessly tapping around, I got a bit annoyed and posted a tweet asking if anyone had figured it out. But then I thought about …
Snappy & User Friendly Dropdown Menus
At every position of the cursor you can picture a triangle between the current mouse position and the upper and lower right corners of the dropdown menu. If the next mouse position is within that triangle, the user is probably moving their cursor into the currently displayed submenu. If the cursor goes outside of the …
Increasing the Clickable Area of Inline Links
Sparkicons
iOS WebKit browsers and auto-zooming form controls
One thing about iOS browsers that can be pretty frustrating, both as a developer and as a user, is when you open a site on an iPhone or iPod Touch (not iPad) and want to enter some text in a text field or pick an option from a select menu. Very often the browser will …
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