If you want me to press yes when I want a receipt then give me a button that says “Yes.”. Instead the genius that made this pump thought it’s be better to give me a “Receipt/Yes” button.

I enjoy Trip Advisor for my vacation and travel planning research.  The information is typically easy to access and even though the design can be very busy at times there is just a ton of great user feedback on the site.

While planning a trip to Nags Head though I came upon the following interaction and it drove me nuts!

One of the questions I get asked and think about a lot is: How do you design a User Interface?

I think it’s a strange question because devoid of context there really isn’t any response to that question that isn’t another question.  User Interface has a strange history, particularly when we’re talking about the internet, because far more falls into the UI category than most people would imagine. 

I just read Jakob Nielsen’s “Top-10 Application Design Mistakes” and thought I’d post some notes on it here and encourage everyone to read it since it is a great summary/categorization of the common issues.  Why am I qualified to comment on this list?  Well, I’ve made a lot of these mistakes in my own work and had to figure out how to avoid them the hard way!

There are thousands of high quality Wordpress Themes available on the internet. In fact, there are so many that only the prolific number of sites powered by Wordpress could even come close to re-using them all. The theme I was using was supposed to be temporary when I put it in place in mid-2007. Here it is 2008 and I was still on it. I had to change it to give my site it’s own look.