Since I started putting together my entry for the Mozilla Labs “Reinventing Tabs” challenge, I have been thinking about Fitts’s Law. Here’s what I have been thinking: does the shape of the click target affect the ease of acquisition?

More simply put, is it easier or more difficult to acquire a rectangular target that is (say) three times as wide as it is high than a square target of the same area?

And also, does the orientation of the rectangle make it easier or harder to acquire? (That is, does it make any difference whether the rectangle’s long side or short side is facing towards the pointer?)

Why does this matter? Well, if you have a bunch of tabs stacked up the left side of the screen (as in my entry), the answer could mean that they are easier or harder to click on than regular tabs of the same size that are strung out horizontally above the content area.

And now I have found a paper that contains the answer. At least, it contains the answer to the second part of my question (about orientation).

If you want to read it, go ahead, but here is the money quote:

... when possible graphical widgets should be extended along
the more frequent movement direction. ... horizontally enlongated widgets, which are often due to the labeling in English words, should be placed on the left or right rather than the top or bottom edge of the desktop interface.

But there is a caveat:

However, the average horizontal movement distance is somewhat longer due to the landscape display geometry in most computers.

In plain English, tabs that are stacked at the side are easier to acquire than ones of the same size and shape along the top. But because monitors (especially modern wide-screen ones) are wider than they are high, this advantage may be mitigated (or even outweighed) by the extra (average) distance that the pointer must cover.

I want an Apple Mac Mini. But in Israel they’re stupid-expensive. Here are the prices in Israel, the UK, and the US, converted into US dollars (for the higher-spec version with 2GB of memory and a 320 GB hard drive):

I also checked the Office Depot (Israel) price, but it’s the same as iDigital’s.

This is nuts.

This is my entry for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge, Summer 09: “Reinventing Tabs in the Browser – How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?”

Best viewed in HQ mode, full screen.

A week or so ago, there was much furore on Twitter when the company removed an option from its interface. You used to be able to choose which @ replies you saw—only those addressed to people you are following, or those addressed to anyone. Now you can’t choose—the only option is the first one.

Some people (a small minority, it must be said), chose the second option. This helped them (they say) to find interesting new people to follow. And now they are a bit miffed. Fair enough.

Twitter says that the option that they removed has scalability problems (after initially claiming that they removed it because it was too confusing). They also say that they are working on new functionality that will make it easier to discover interesting people to follow.

In the meantime, people (again, a small minority) have found a workaround. Prefix the @ with any character and everyone who is following you sees it.

And so we finally come to the point of this post. This change has moved the responsibility for who sees what from the content consumer to the content producer. When I post a message to someone, I now know that only people who follow both me and the person it’s addressed to will see what I write, unless I specifically choose to broadcast it to all my followers.

I’m starting to think that this is the way that it should be. After all, it’s my content. Shouldn’t I be the one who decides who gets to see it?

The problem: there are lots of slide decks on Slideshare that don’t have audio (or video). And somewhere on the web, the audio that was recorded when the person presented their slideshow exists. Sometimes, it is video, not audio.

The solution: I have set up a new blog here called UX TV. Whenever I come across an interesting UX-related slideshow for which there is audio or video, I will post them here, together.

As an initial experiment, I have paired Joe Sokohl’s “UX in the Wind” presentation from the 2008 IA Summit with the audio from the Boxes and Arrows podcast. You can see/hear it here.

I hope you like it.

If you read this blog on the web (rather than in an RSS reader), you may have noticed that it looks a bit different.

Well, I was getting embarrassed by the ugly built-in Drupal theme, so I grabbed a basic “theme builder” theme (atck) and fiddled with it a bit.

My aim was a minimal, elegant design, without all the junk I had loaded the site down with previously.

What do you think?

Tim McCoy has an interesting (and very valid) piece up on the Cooper blog. In it, he argues that building architecture is a poor analogue for software design, and that we should discard it in favor of film production.

He has a point—film production is like software design and dev, in that it is not set in stone (pun intended)—there are feedback loops of evaluation and adjustment throughout the process.

But in throwing out architecture as a model, aren’t we missing out on something important?

Like: the importance of having a fully fleshed-out plan of what you want to build before you build it. (Granted, film has its equivalent.)

Like: the similarities between the things that end up getting built. Software and buildings are similar in that people interact with them. People don’t really interact with a movie—it is a much more passive, one-way experience. What difference does this make? You can look at how people interact with a building or a piece of software and so judge whether it successfully fulfills its design brief. And from this, learn things for future projects. Can you do this with film?

What do you think?

At the Mount Hermon ski hill, they have installed new RFID ski pass readers. This is a Good Thing. But the old barcode readers are still there.

Guess what most people do the first time they try to use one?

UPDATE: Image was upside down. Now fixed.

When I save my presentation in Powerpoint 2007, it pops this up:

OK, I understand the message, but what does “Cancel” mean here? Does it mean cancel the save? Or does it mean get rid of the message box?

This morning, I noticed that the Flickr badge on my site has the words “no such photos” overlaid on it. A page refresh got rid of it.

How odd.