Articles tagged “user-experience”

• Tags and categories: what's the difference? This ar­ti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Stack Ex­change. Is there a dif­fer­ence be­tween tags and cat­e­gories? Is this dif­fer­ence clear for peo­ple with­out tech­ni­cal back­ground, i.e. or­di­nary users? Tags…
  user-experience 11 tagging 4
• Bad, bad passwords Pass­words are an aber­ra­tion. In a ide­al world, we wouldn't have pass­words, but only keys. The con­cept of a pass­word as a se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure is flawed, and leads to mul­ti­ple is­sues. Among oth­ers: When the pass­word is sent by the client to the serv­er,…
  security 8 user-experience 11
• Why do I need to install SQL Server for a simple Hello World ASP.NET MVC website? I need­ed to cre­ate a small serv­er-side web-based ap­pli­ca­tion. The ap­pli­ca­tion is ex­treme­ly sim­ple, just a few lines of code. Host­ing provider seems to sup­port only PHP and ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC, and I picked the last one, since the ap­pli­ca­tion may…
  short 50 rant 34 user-experience 11
• Servers monitoring UI proposal In the young in­dus­try which is soft­ware de­vel­op­ment, most do­mains are filled with ap­pli­ca­tions made by de­vel­op­ers with no thoughts about the end users. Bul­letin boards, for in­stance, were an ex­cel­lent ex­am­ple of ter­ri­ble, un­ac­cept­able user…
  user-experience 11 interaction-design 10 productivity 37
• Beautiful identifiers In the vast area of mis­treat­ed de­sign el­e­ments, there is one which is im­ple­ment­ed con­sis­tent­ly wrong: the iden­ti­fiers. In IT, iden­ti­fiers are every­where. Make a pur­chase on Ama­zon, and your or­der gets an iden­ti­fi­er. Once the pack­age is shipped, the…
  user-experience 11
• Reinventing authentication I'm de­light­ed by the sim­plic­i­ty of OAuth 2.0 (as far as its in­te­gra­tion into Flask and ex­press takes takes less than five min­utes) and the fact that it makes pass­word man­age­ment some­one else's prob­lem.¹ Re­al­ly, I'm so de­light­ed that I now use it in…
  security 8 user-experience 11
• On bug tracking systems There are no good bug track­ing sys­tems, and I'm about to ex­plain what makes them not good and why good sys­tems weren't de­vel­oped yet. To be­gin, let's il­lus­trate a jour­ney of two per­sons work­ing on the same team: one of the pro­gram­mers and a prod­uct…
  rant 34 productivity 37 user-experience 11 productivity 37 management 34
• Identifiers in bug tracking systems One an­noy­ing as­pect of bug track­ing sys­tems is the iden­ti­fiers. In sys­tems such as Jira, every time a tick­et is cre­at­ed, an iden­ti­fi­er is as­signed to it. The iden­ti­fi­er is based on a num­ber which in­cre­ments every time. For ex­am­ple, I cre­ate two…
  interaction-design 10 user-experience 11 short 50
• Monochrome laziness Twelve years ago, Win­dows Vista was re­leased, im­press­ing every­one by its shiny, elab­o­rate icons. For in­stance, a re­cy­cle bin was il­lus­trat­ed by a shiny trans­par­ent waste bas­ket. Search func­tion­al­i­ty was shown in a form of a metal­lic mag­ni­fy­ing glass.…
  rant 34 design 2 interaction-design 10 user-experience 11 quality 36
• Edge cases Soft­ware prod­ucts are de­signed for the cas­es where things go right, the sit­u­a­tions, where net­works are per­fect­ly flaw­less, servers don't re­boot ran­dom­ly, and process­es hap­pen as they would hap­pen in…
  quality 36 management 34 interaction-design 10 user-experience 11
• The reassuring save button Re­cent­ly, I at­tempt­ed to an­swer a ques­tion on SE.SE, which was a bla­tant XY prob­lem. The au­thor of the ques­tion mis­un­der­stood the prob­lem he was fac­ing, came up with a so­lu­tion which would only make…
  user-experience 11 interaction-design 10