I’m not so much FOR the big wait as AGAINST the many little waits.
If a site forces you to wait at every step, it had better be porn or the equivalent. Otherwise the whole experience will be stilted.
An example.
The users want content, but you don’t know what it is yet. What you should you do?
Why […]

I’ve been wireframing an online mp3 player, and pondering this trivial detail: whether to use a toggle button for play/pause, or two permanent, free-standing buttons, with only their selection state being toggled.
Considerations of space militate for the first option. Why use two buttons when one will do? And the toggling nicely encapsulate the either-or logic […]

Writing the last post (on audio help) dislodged an old memory of a TV on PBS, one where a calm man with frizzy hair painted and murmured about his process at the same time. At the end of each show, one painting was complete.
Now it strikes me that audio help might be bettered murmured than […]

Last week I attended a projection of a Breezecast at the LA Flash factory. If you had overheard the sessions, you wouldn't have been impressed. Basically, this guy hemmed and hawed and digressed and clicked happily away as he wrote some Flex-related php code.
Strange thing is, it was the best presentation of code I'd ever […]

I resent Jakob Nielsen because he is always right, and that is the worst, most infuriating habit.
Take a look at his latest directive at webmonkey. Or just peruse this summary (quoted from the article) of his current complaints about web pages:
* Links that don’t change color when visited
* Breaking the back button
* Opening new browser […]

Like every other person who has ever surfed the web, I view pop-ups with total disdain. Mostly I ignore them…but given the opportunity, if I had all of them gathered in one place, and my forefinger on the right trigger (Firefox?), my disdain would be positively genodical.
This pop-up racism, I admit, is not entirely rational. […]

Flash can do at least 2 things better than HTML: 1) create interactive experiences, and 2) create moving pictures (tweens, animations, video).
That's great. Now let me point out that Flash's two great powers are more than not antagonists, and their clash distorts and cripples many a swf.
The example of 1st-person shooters is misleading here, because […]

In my last post, I suggested centering and tightly packing buttons in order to promote muscle memory for repeated navigations or combinations of actions.

This sketch shows a collection of such buttons, which are obviously too packed to label.
So how will the user know what button does what? It seems like I should go back to […]