Trash Can Compulsive Disorder
When there’s something in [the trash can], it’s not right, and I have to empty it right away. [...] The trash can has been around for decades and I’ve always treated it this way. I no longer torture myself by trying to change how I think about it — this particular battle is okay to lose. (Also: rm is my good friend.)
I’m exactly the same. It’s kinda weird, the trash can is often presented as a particularly good example of using metaphors in graphical user interfaces (also by myself, and to some degree it is a good metaphor), yet it never really worked well for me personally.
Alex King on Android UI consistency:
How can developers be expected to identify and follow consistent UI guidelines and patterns when the very basics of the OS user interface change from manufacturer to manufacturer and device to device?
Making Sense of Complex Controls
The New York Times on how IDEO supported Ford in creating a new UI design language and framework:
New ideas were tested on drivers. Ideo teams quickly mocked up ideas, often using little more than sticky notes, cardboard and modeling clay.
For this project, a PlayStation 2 game console and a dashboard from an older Ford Edge were pressed into service, Ms. Brace said. For a driving simulator, the group used a projector showing the video game Gran Turismo 3. The controls — pedals and steering wheel — were worked up from controllers intended for racing video games.
In-car user interfaces are a fascinating, yet completely impenetrable topic to me. There seem to be many distinct systems with every manufacturer rolling his own and it’s impossible to buy a new car every six months just to fool around with its gadgetry and associated interfaces like you could with phones. Are there any weblogs specializing on in-car user interfaces? I would totally read those.
Infinite Scrolling and Scrollbars
The reason that I don’t like infinite scrolling is that I actually use the scrollbar to scroll. That is, I move my cursor over the scrollbar, click and drag. Infinite scrolling makes this unworkable: the scrollbar under my cursor jumps around as new content is loaded.
So infinite scrolling destroys the purpose of scrollbars as visual indicators of page length and it interferes with their utility as an indicator of scrolling position within a page and their usability as navigational tools. Which begs the question, are there any characteristics of scrollbars that infinite scrolling doesn’t negatively impact? Are there any characteristics of scrollbars that it improves? And how would you redesign the scrollbar to properly support infinite scrolling?
