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. 

There is an entire sub-culture on the internet devoted to the strict adherence to the almight W3C “standards.”  I intentionally put standards in quotes because there isn’t any form of universal adoption of these recommendations by the major browsers just yet.  While each iteration of Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and Mozilla move us closer together the differences are still staggering in some cases.

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!