Posts Tagged ‘ui’

User’s Bill of Rights?

April 21st, 2008

Why did I never get this taught at university, college, school, work?  I think it needs to be!  Too often the user is blamed and condemned as the source of all the industry’s ills!

1. The user is always right. If there is a problem with the use of the system, the system is the problem, not the user.

2. The user has the right to easily install software and hardware systems.

3. The user has the right to a system that performs exactly as promised.

4. The user has the right to easy-to-use instructions for understanding and utilizing a system to achieve desired goals.

5. The user has the right to be in control of the system and to be able to get the system to respond to a request for attention.

6. The user has the right to a system that provides clear, understandable, and accurate information regarding the task it is performing and the progress toward completion.

7. The user has the right to be clearly informed about all system requirements for successfully using software or hardware.

8. The user has the right to know the limits of the system’s capabilities.

9. The user has the right to communicate with the technology provider and receive a thoughtful and helpful response when raising concerns.

10. The user should be the master of software and hardware technology, not vice-versa. Products should be natural and intuitive to use.

Top 9 Icon Resources

October 2nd, 2007

GearsAs a developer the design of an applications interface can often take a second peg to the function-guts. I always like to have a dig around a selection of good icon sets though to spruce up my interfaces and these are six of those resources:

Search Engines

Iconlet – One of the two major icon search engines. Has a good selection but like IconFinder relies on submissions of open source icons to stock its coffers.

Iconfinder -The second icon search engine but provides for tagging of icons for more refined searching.

PaintSpeciality

Ajax Loader Wizard – A simple wizard for building a funky ‘ajax’ loader animated gif.

Feed Icons – If you’ve ever seen the RSS feed icon dotted about and fancied one yourself. Okay so maybe you arne’t as sad as me but if you did you can rush to this site.

Icon Sets

Fast Icons – Really fast, like flying fast. I have no idea why but thats their name. Good selection and worth a look for a wide selection of free stock icons.

FamFamFam – Small but funkey collection of free icons.

Tango Icon Desktop – The Tango set is a huge source of quality SVG and PNG icon.

Crystal Wikimedia Icons – Opened to the world these are well used across a variety of places. Still very nice selection though.

DeviantArt – They do just about everything over at DA with it being the biggest art community on the net. I just wish I could contribute something as nice as the others on there.

So thats my list of nine icon sites – if anyone has any others they think are worth adding then let me know in the comments.