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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘User Experience (ux)’ Category

Visual Studio 2010 Ux #fail: finding the Macro Recorder and Context Menus toolbars #VS2010 #Ux

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/03/16

When you want to enable (or disable) a toolbar in Visual Studio 2010, there are three options to go, of which the last two are equivalent:

  1. Right click in the toolbar area to get a Context Menu, then check/unckeck the toolbar
  2. Right click in the toolbar area to get a Context Menu, choose Customize and check/uncheck the toolbar(s) in the dialog.
  3. In the Tools Menu, choose Customize and check/uncheck the toolbar(s) in the dialog.

The first one is the easiest; you can see the resulting Context Menu in the left picture (click on it to enlarge).
The last two require an extra step; you can see the resulting dialog in the right most picture (click on it to enlarge).

Given the size of those lists, you’d think all toolbars are in both.

Wrong!

These are missing from the Context Menu:

  • Context Menus
  • Recorder

I consider this a serious Ux problem; if the Context Menu was much shorter (like 10 entries or so), it would be pretty obvious they are not.

It took me more than 10 minutes to find the Recorder toolbar which would have been vastly shorter if both lists were the same.

(Another Ux failure that caused my search to be this long is that I was looking for ‘Macro Recorder’ since all entries in the menu contain the word ‘Macro’; Recorder could as well point to a Toolbar for screen, video or audio recording).

–jeroen

Posted in .NET, Development, Software Development, Usability, User Experience (ux), Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio and tools | Leave a Comment »

KLM online check-in #fail: each combobox enter refreshes page

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/01

Most pages don’t do a page submit when you press the Enter key in a combobox.
KLM does in their online check-in.

Which means that a keyboard groupie like me basically is forced to use the mouse to select country a zillion times (Netherlands for all of the group members for Nationality, Passport, etc).

Other sites do it right and accept this:

  1. Press down-key to open combobox
  2. Press N key a couple of time to select Netherlands
  3. Press Enter key to accept Netherlands
  4. Press Tab key to go to next field

KLM online check-in does a page submit on each time you get to step 3, refreshes the page, and moves the focus to some non-input fied.

Big #fail.

–jeroen

Posted in Opinions, User Experience (ux) | Leave a Comment »

routes.tomtom.com UI suggestion #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/26

There is an address that I have been traveling from lately quite a bit: “Weena 505, Rotterdam, NL”.

So: routes.tomtom.com has put it in my history.

So why is it then that every time I select that address from my history, and I start planning my route, I get an additional choice of addresses to choose from this selection:

From:

  • Weena 505, Rotterdam, NL
  • Weena, Rotterdam, NL
  • Weena, Rotterdam, NL
  • The Westin Rotterdam, Rotterdam, NL

Or review your input:

  • Weena 505, Rotterdam, NL

They do this for all kinds of addresses.
It drives me nuts for two reasons:

  1. It takes an extra action from my side
  2. You cannot perform that action by keyboard (you have to use a pointing device)

Are interaction designers and UI builders ever going to learn?

–jeroen

Posted in Usability, User Experience (ux) | 1 Comment »

Welcome to Classic Shell: Classic Start Menu and Classic Explorer functions for Windows 7

Posted by jpluimers on 2009/12/31

One of the things in usability is to enable old skoop people that have been using.

Windows 7 went even further than Windows Vista into changing start menu functionality and explorer functionality that had been there since Windows 95.
So things that have been working for over a decade, suddenly stopped to work, or worse: work differently.

Would you imagine what happened when someone reordered the pedals in a car (from left to right are clutch, brake and throttle) or reassign their functionality?

So some people gathered and wrote Classic Shell.

Now someone please restrore the “backspace” keyboard behaviour back to “go one level up in the folder tree” as it had been for more than a decade…

–jeroen

Posted in Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Usability, User Experience (ux) | 4 Comments »