Tab Scope is a very handy Firefox add-on that shows a pop-up preview of a tab's contents when hovering over a non-selected tab...oh, a picture probably will say it better: The developers have clearly put a huge amount of work into Tab Scope over the years and have largely got it right, and in addition to a preview image, there's a couple of controls like back, forward, refresh in the pop-up itself. After using Tab Scope version 0.3 with the fx4 theme for a couple of weeks, there's a few things on my wish list, however: Left-clicking on the actual preview image...

I've recently finished the excellent Defensive Design for the Web, authored by some of the people behind 37 Signals (Getting Real, Signal vs. Noise blog). The book is subtitled "How to improve error messages, help, forms and other crisis points", and is referenced in Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think - one of the key reasons behind me reading it (I enjoyed Steve Krug's book a lot). At only 246 pages, Defensive Design is a short book which means it's a quick read (and not very expensive!). There's lots of illustrations, and the book is neatly divided up into digestible chapters,...

Here's an interesting metric (via Usability in the News) for testing websites: Q: “What percentage of your interface contains stuff that your customers want to see?” 10% 25% 100% If you answer a, or b then you might do well, but you'll probably get blown out of the water once someone decides to enter the market with option c. (continued at "A really simple metric for measuring User Interfaces" at iQ Blog) This test could easily be applied to utility-type software whether web or windows e.g. Flickr or WinZip (it would be a little harder to apply the principle to fully-fledged applications, where "infrastructure" user interface...

Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a thin book that packs in a lot of good stuff. After reading only a few pages the strong points of the book stand out: easy to read, lots of practical examples, often funny, and technology-agnostic. I like good writing and Steve's style alone makes the book worth reading. However, the bottom line is that the content is fantastic and I think the brevity of the book works in its favor. The book is not the be-all and end-all of web usability but it's a good start that will appeal to designers and developers -...

I finished reading Steve Krug's book Don't Make Me Think (which is worthy of another post) the other day. This is a great book, easy to read, that tackles the theme of usability for the web. I drift between developing for Windows and Web, and there's lots of ideas in the book which help with both. So anyway, today I was looking at Usernomics (a usability website that I found, I think, from the book) which linked to an article on usability and accessibility that contained this quote: For a start, I think we need to understand, once and for all, that usability is...