Nielsen Norman Group on Sliders:
Selecting a precise value using a slider is a difficult task requiring good motor skills, even if the slider is well designed. If picking an exact value is important to the goal of the interface, choose an alternate UI element.
Raluca Budiu offers some excellent advice on using accordions to solve the problems inherent with displaying a lot of content on small screens:
Accordions conserve space on mobile but they can also cause disorientation and too much scrolling. Easy design fixes improve the usability of these UI elements.
goodui.org has 70 (so far) ideas for improving your interface. A lot of them are common knowledge, and many won’t be applicable to what you’re working on at this very moment–but it’s really great to have all of these on one page when you need a little nudge in the right direction. This link is going on my UX Bookshelf page.
I received an email at the beginning of April with the subject “Your Tax Refund Information is Enclosed”. It certainly caught my attention, but then I realized it was from Turbotax, which I don’t use. Before writing it off as a lame phishing attempt, I opened it just to see just how lame of an attempt it was.
I wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was a marketing email from the folks at Intuit. Obviously, someone had read up on crafting their email subject lines for maximum open rates. It probably eked out more than a few sales of Turbotax, but it just seems so spammy, especially after receiving a few more of these emails before April 15th.
I used to think of Intuit as an upstanding outfit, but this and Intuit’s campaign against simplified tax returns (via ma.tt) will make me think twice before using one of their products at home or at work.
Nielsen Norman Group: Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful
This is a good article to point at when someone is suggesting that placeholders serve as the sole label for input fields. The lack of labels is pervasive on mobile apps and sites. While not having labels conserves space and can make for a cleaner form, it can also make the form much less usable–especially when it comes to accessibility.
There are ways combine the clean look of a form without labels with the usability of clearly displayed labels. The float label pattern is one example. The Polymer framework includes this pattern with the floatingLabel attribute in Paper Elements, although it is turned off by default. It would be wonderful if more mobile interfaces moved away from hiding labels in favor of patterns like the floating label.
