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Randy Jensen Online Blog | randyjensenonline.com/blog

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What Do You Consider Good Design?Yesterday

I just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. An excellent book about what makes good design good, and more importantly, bad design bad. It has many different examples but keeps coming back to a couple of everyday objects that we use everyday. The car and the door.

Norman keeps coming back to how complex a car’s interior controls are and yet for the most part, they are fairly easy to use. Without much thought, you can steer the car, make it move, park it, turn the radio on, find a station, adjust the seats, etc. A basic model car does hundreds of tasks, yet you are able to use it fairly easily.

What about the everyday door? Have you ever thought about how hard a door is to operate? Do you push or pull? If you push, what side do you push on? Does the door rotate? Revolve? Slide? Or maybe it’s automatic. Is there some type of knob or handle? Does you turn it? Do you pull down on it? Although these seem like basic concepts, you know for a fact you’ve seen someone run into a door, thinking it needs to be pushed to be opened when really it needs to be pulled. Why is there not a standard for something that everyone uses everyday and that is concept is so incredibly basic.

What Do You Think?

My question to you is, what do you consider good design or bad design in relation to something you use everyday? Since I’m a web developer, naturally I have a huge problem with a recent web site I visited. The download page for Internet Explorer (surprise, surprise that a Microsoft webpage would have terrible usability).

Nothing is intuitive. They’re pushing a beta build of the browser on people which is ironic considering if you’re still using Internet Explorer, you more than likely have no idea that the blue ‘e’ on your desktop isn’t actually ‘the internet’. The download link for IE7 is under a banner for IE8 that looks like a header image, not a banner. Finally, one of the download links is hidden in a bullet point inside the content area. This whole page is a complete nightmare.

Introducing the MacBook Wheel…January 5

The guys over at The Onion have a breaking story on the revolutionary MacBook Wheel. Why does this product remind me of the iPhone in so many ways? I could try to explain the video…but you really just need to watch it.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

"At Apple our philosophy is to create products that are simple to use. And nothing is more simple to use than a single giant button."

"Everything is just a few hundred clicks away."

"At Apple, we give customers features they don’t even realize they want yet."

"I’ll buy almost anything if it’s shiny and made by Apple."

"I like how the email automatically says ‘Sent from the MacBook Wheel’ that way people know you have one."

"The Hummingbird battery which can power the MacBook Wheel for a full 19 minutes before needing to be recharged."

"It remains to be seen if the Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around."

Related posts:

1. Apple Battery Recall Update Apparently the Apple Battery Recall Page has been updated. So...

The Design Of Everyday Things ReviewJanuary 5

I just finished reading The Design Of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. Although this book is really focused on design of physical objects, as a web designer, I always love reading about design theory in general. While I can’t use most of the examples as is, there are tons of concepts, design standards and theories that could potentially give websites an enormous edge in terms of usability.

I just wanted to put a few of my favorite quotes/saying from the book here to give you an idea of what it’s all about. Mind you this is a thousandth of the information from this book. It really is an exceptional book to read if you are at all curious about the theory of design and really knowing how much work goes into designing something as simple as a pen.

Assume that any error that can be made will be made.

Can’t Delete File In UbuntuJanuary 2

Sometimes you’ll notice that one of your files has a lock icon next to it. This usually means that for some reason, you are no longer the owner of the folder/file.

This can happen for a variety of reasons, but it’s fairly easy to correct, albeit a real nuisance sometimes. Here are a list of commands to take back ownership of just about any folder or file on Ubuntu.

Note about the examples and commands below:

• You can usually leave out GROUP as I did in my examples
• If you see a ‘\’ slash, it’s because my folder name had a space in it and this is needed to let Ubuntu know that there is a space in the file/folder name, not a new command.

An empty folder

Command: sudo chown USERNAME:GROUP /LOCATION/OF/FOLDER
Example: sudo chown randy /home/randy/Desktop/Delete\ Me

A folder with files inside

Command: sudo chown -R USERNAME:GROUP /LOCATION/OF/FOLDER
Example: sudo chown -R randy /home/randy/Desktop/Delete\ ME

A file

Command: sudo chown USERNAME:GROUP /LOCATION/OF/FILE
Example: sudo chown randy /home/randy/Desktop/myfile.jpg

Several files

Command: sudo chown USERNAME:GROUP file1.jpg file2.htm file3.png
Example: sudo chown randy image1.jpg index.h

WordPress Image Upload Issue Part 2January 1

A while back I wrote about some trouble I was having with WordPress’ flash image uploader in version 2.6. After 2.7 came out, I upgraded and the problem seemed to go away…wrong. This thing just keeps getting weirder.

There are several people reporting that adding some code to a .htaccess file and putting it in your wp-admin folder fixed it. This didn’t work for me. So I kept looking around and found other stories reporting that the issue is OS specific. Since I’m running Ubuntu with XP, Vista and Windows 7 all running virtually, I thought I’d give this theory a shot.

Here are my results:

• Ubuntu 8.04 and Firefox: I get an ‘HTTP Error’
• Windows XP and Firefox: Brings up the wp-admin login screen in the lightbox
• *Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7: Worked
• Windows XP and Safari: Takes me to a login screen with no css styling
• Windows Vista and Firefox: Brings up the wp-admin login screen in the lightbox
• *Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7: Worked
• *Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 8: Worked
• Windows 7 and Firefox: Brings up the wp-admin login screen in the lightbox
• Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8: Couldn’t login to WP. IE8 kept crashing

So after all these tests, the only consistent combination that worked correctly was Windows (any version) and Internet Explorer. During my research, I also saw many reports saying people were having the same issues on OSX with Safari and Firefox

So my question is, is this OS specific? Or is it due to poor Flash implementation in browsers other than IE? Is it because of how it’s coded in WP? Is it a limitation of Flash or PHP? Finally, why was the Flash uploader made the default when it clearly is a beta feature at best? I’m looking for answers, but no one from the WordPress camp seems to care about this issue.