One thing I think Microsoft nailed in Office 2010 is making it easier to use & explain: we brought back the “File” menu that was disguised as an orb in Office 2007 (the  proper name is “Office Button”)

Yes, “File” as in “How do you print? You click File then you click Print.” If you missed this, there was no “File” in Office 2007. Well, no matter, it’s back in Office 2010.

It’s interesting that the hot-off-the-presses Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta apps, which have an Office-like feel, haven’t caught up on this change, and are stuck in a very awkward spot between Office 2007 and Office 2010:

(OneNote 2010, the coolest application you never used, has a “File” menu.)

(Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011, the other coolest application you never used, has a, um, well I guess it’s a menu.)

I suspect the Windows Live team built on foundation laid for Windows 7 apps, which came out when Office teams had made the from “orb” to “tab”, but hadn’t got as far as bringing the text “File” back.

Please Windows Live team… bust that foundation up and do it right. This button has no reasonable name. It looks like a desk phone, I suppose. At least the orb was describable as an orb!

Elevator door open and close buttons in this style don’t work for me:

Open and closing doors don’t have a vertical line. A vertical line represents a future where doors are closed. The buttons say:

Imagine what’s done is done, but we can go back in time: would you unclose, or close even more?

I suspect the writers of the do-over & button-pushing oriented TV show LOST like elevators.

If what the The New Yorker says is true, that the close button is often a placebo:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.

then pushing both buttons is a good appendage-saving strategy, and might work as well as trying to figure these buttons out in a hurry.

It’s amazing how search engines are wrapping some sites with a task-oriented interface that trumps the site’s own interface.

The accident: I type “fedex.com” as “fedex.copm” into the Address bar by mistake, and hit Enter before I even see what I did.

What happened: The search engine which handles the DNS lookup failure (bing.com on my computer) provides a whole navigation layer on top of the “best match” (aka “most clicked”) result (which is fedex.com, obviously) including "Track", but more importantly the input field I was going to look for when I got to FedEx, "Track a package”:

I see this, past in the tracking ID I had, and I’m done. Really slick.

I’ll call out Bing here once again: Bing’s fantastic & you should use it as your default for this reason & others.

Some thoughts:

• Do users really look beyond even the “Best Match” line and see & use these tasks? I do, and it’s a huge timesaver.
• Browsers will eventually (and I think in the case of Google Chrome, are) strip even the search page layer away. (Why not show the Track a package input field as an option when I type the  "fedex.cop…" into the browser’s address bar?) Now, is it better for users that a browser do this, or the functionality stay in the resulting page?
• If browser integration is better for users, what’s the existing or emerging standard for this that all browsers can implement?

I use the Live Search for mobile application to find local business and directions… it’s got maps, pushpins, text search, voice search, find a person, and GPS. Yeah, tons of mobile mapping applications do that.

The different thing about this application is special purpose searches, and in particular, the underappreciated “Collections”:

Here’s how Collections works. You create a collection of points on a map on the web, save it, then find & view the collection on your mobile device. Imagine your vacation: plan out beaches of interest (or restaurants of interest) at home, armed with 16 travel books, websites, and a PC mouse & keyboard… and you can be guided to those points when you’re on vacation by your phone.

You can also search for local collections created by others, although on a phone I think that’s more of a novelty.

The latest version I downloaded has a small, but really important usability improvement. In previous versions, there was self-glorifying banner:

Double-lame.

Worse than the duplication, the banner makes a vertical scrollbar appear, and if you’ve ever used scrollbars… well, I’ve dropped my phone with an overhand throwing motion when trying to use scrollbars.

Well, you’ll see above that the banner’s gone, and the scrollbar with it. Big deal, you say? Now my beloved Collections feature isn’t scrolled off the screen.

You can download this application for Blackberry or Windows Mobile directly to your phone at the Microsoft download site.

Try not to disguise success with something that looks like an error.

Here’s a typical internet error:

Google Groups’ “speedbump” page looks like this:

Would you click the link to continue? I didn’t. My brain said “well that didn’t work” and I clicked back.

Congratulations, you passed.

What Jakob Nielson did not actually say a few years ago ago, followed up on from the accessibility angle by the Sibling Of Cake at Opera. 

I wonder how this article came about… Opera has great JavaScript performance, but I wonder how Opera Mobile/Mini handle it? In my experience mobile browser users (me) suffer from some of the same issues that’d be dismissed as only accessibility issues for desktop users.

The user problem of knowing which program to run on a product disk was avoided in DOS by naming conventions. “Everyone just knows” you insert the floppy disk and run “a:setup.exe.” This is made well-known by instruction manuals and people who shout “MOVE over” and take your keyboard away.

With autorun, a well-known file on the product CD tells the system what to do when the CD’s inserted. Usually it just runs the well-known “d:setup.exe”.

Now we download software from the internet. I queued a few downloads from microsoft.com yesterday, went to a meeting, and forgot all about them.

This morning I found a few “setup.exe” files on my desktop:

… and this is my other brother setup.exe.

Earth to Microsoft… name files you intend people to download something other than “setup.exe.” NameOfTheProduct.exe is a good choice. Pick an icon other than the standard setup.exe one. This isn’t perfect documentation that the file is the product I downloaded yesterday, but it’s something… the only thing well-known about “setup.exe” is that I shouldn’t run it. I don’t even know what it is.

Why Ajax Sucks fooled me, a few Forest Service folks, and probably the rest of the internet tomorrow: So Jakob Nielsen doesn’t like Ajax.

Here’s a serious rebuttal, followed up with the truth: Jakob Nielsen thinks most things suck, and his articles make good templates.

But Ajax may actually suck! I actually like Ajax, but I’ll try to be spoofer’s-advocate for the moment.

The unit of the internet is the page. Addressibility of a page is coming on strong in social web systems. We talk about it a lot at ProClarity too. A URL points at something to look at and to talk about. If what’s “at” the URL depends on people, or things, diddling with dynamic widgets on the “page” first, that’s a problem for those systems, because what’s being talked about is an entry point, not anything that interesting.

You certainly can solve this, and it’s not Ajax’s fault (the rebuttler rebutts), but will “the web is a VB form” programmers using Ajax bother to solve it? Sounds like work. Mmm, don’t like work. Ajax shiny.

I wonder how the Windows Presentation Framework navigation model deals with addressibility?