Nudge Up

Sweating the Small Stuff in UX Design

A friend of mine who’s just getting into UX design recently emailed me this question:

When you have a pull-down menu which displays a list of names - pronouns, and selecting one is a link to a detail page… what descriptor do you prefer to be in the menu at the top?

Here’s my response:

I prefer “Choose…” with the ellipses and without the “one”. It’s a nice simple action prompt and I think “one” is implicit from the type of control. 

I also think “choose” feels a bit more like a singular action rather than “select” but it’s probably me and a really subtle distinction. “Select” feels like you could  select more than one, like in a checkbox group. 

It’s interesting to me that questions like these remind me how much UX design is about sweating the small stuff and really thinking about the subtle differences in language and delivering your message to the user with the least amount of UI noise possible. Good stuff.

Apple vs. Google: Looking for Anything to Fuel the Fire

So there’s another conspiracy theory making the rounds that Apple removed the Google button from Safari Search interface in iPhone OS 4 SDK. Man, talk about looking for anything to fuel the fire. Not only does the placeholder text for the search field still say “Google”, but if you start entering in keywords, you get Google Suggestions. Funny how this search state isn’t used in the controversial article.

Continue reading…

Instapaper: It’s the little things…

There are many things I appreciate about the incredible design practices of Marco’s Instapaper but I have to admit it’s the little things that mean so much. It may be subtle at first but that’s exactly as it should be. Take for instance the page marker in Instapaper 2.0.

Marco described how arrived at the new paging option but what delighted me is when I noticed the page marker that cues you to how far into the article you are. Just 2px wide and slightly darker in contrast, this marker subtly informs you of your position in the article. I’ve called it out here but on the iPhone it runs along the edge of the screen. It’s truly invisible until you’re looking for something that serves this function. Then it’s right there as it always was. This is what good UX designers strive for: an invisible user interface that gets out of the way until you, the user, call upon it.