Change thrives on me
My bus ride home trippled in time last night because of some construction so I had the opportunity to watch this TED talk.
This really drove home the power of defaults in user interface choices and how it is the responsibility of good designers to default to the right behaviour, especially when the options are complex.
Posted in Design
I always advocate against simple (and especially modal) dialogs in user interfaces because they aren’t there to help the user get past the problem, more like work through the emotional issues the software is having.
Dialogs aren’t the real evil, though they usually aren’t great, it’s the lack of real negotiation. In the book Getting to Yes it states that you “Make emotions explicit and acknowledge them as legitimate…”, however don’t stop there.
A useful dialog would negotiate with your users. Give them actions and power to change their situation. Don’t ask users to acknowledge your troubles and stop the negotiation there. Reconnect! Try Again! Even simple actions can help people correct the situation.
Posted in mozilla
How do you make the dualbutton always appear like the last two sets of screenshots (as it does on hover)?
I’m looking to make dualbuttons always show their dropdown button with a real button like look. This dualbutton reply button is going to land in Thunderbird 3 soon and I’d like the style to look correct for both Linux and Windows (Mac is using its own button style).
However this doesn’t appear to be some kind of toolkit CSS hover issue. The windows CSS is decidedly worse than the Linux right now so that may be a separate issue all together; and if so we can attempt that in the same way we handled the Mac.
Hints, answers, and the like are greatly appreciated in the comments.
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