How to ruin a perfectly good sentence

In this gem, the author uses 'u' instead of 'you' in the middle of a sentence (which he has since corrected in some versions of this article) .

I've never been a big fan of using the 'txtspk' shortcuts in any sort of document or article. It looks unprofessional, and in the case of this article snippet, it shows a generally inconsistency. Most of the time, the author uses a proper 'you', but slips up once. Bad form.

Side note: txtspk shortcuts are great when there is actually a limitation on the number of characters you can type, but not when you have a full keyboard and unlimited space. There's a time and place for that sort of thing, but it's not here.

A pop up calendar in the wrong place, but right time at least.

This is from a credit union site. It presents you with transactions for the current month and allows you to look back at the past history of transactions. However, when you click on the calendar icon, it opens another small window -- well away from where your mouse pointer is located. For me, this violates a couple of different design patterns:

• Fitt's Law -- you're given a small target far away from the initial location.
• Least Surprise -- it's a bit of shock to suddenly see another window open outside of the main window. What's it for? A spam ad?

There's a discordant association with the main window and the sub-window. What if you don't notice it? Then what?

A more viable solution would have been to connect the calendar icon with a menu drop, instead, that would let the user immediately understand the association between clicking on the icon and the results, as well as immediately knowing that clicking on the resulting small calendar would create the expected results. It would also prevent the user from having to move his or her mouse outside the scope of focus.

Traditional Address Ordering and Duplication of effort

When signing up for Dice, I got this page:

About

What's this all about? Well, for the moment, it's just repository for those little annoying flaws in the Internet that I experience on an almost daily basis.

In most cases, it's simple human error. A spelling mistake, perhaps. Or just a inexperience in design and implementation for a personal or small, one person business site. But for large corporations, it's almost inexcusable. At the very least, they should have a person who vets the design for usability. Aesthetics are important too, but, as has been said elsewhere, what are you going to remember -- a bad looking site or a site you had a bad experience with?

Why does 'cd' work differently for drives and paths?

This has been a frustrating pet peeve of mine for a while.

When I hope my Windows command line, it starts me out on a network drive, specifically "H:", which of course I rarely have a need to be in. My first instinct, which is always wrong, is to type:

• H:>cd c:

in an attempt to get to "C:" drive. I may even have include a path like this: "c:\path\to\my\folder".

This always fails, because what Windows expects you to do is this:

• H:>c:

which will nicely give you the C:> prompt from which you can then navigate.

Why? Is there a way around this? My main problem is that I don't use the Windows command line that often, so I forget the nuance of switching between drives as opposed to switching paths. and why do I have to type the colon?

Unix flavors don't do this. The notion of naming something after an arbitrary letter of the alphabet doesn't even enter into the equation. Everything has a name, and accessing something, be it a file, a folder, or a hard drive, all happens the same way: $cd /This/Is/My/Path (where $ is the command prompt).

[Re-posted from Code Fog]

Titles in Web Pages

This is an interesting topic for me; I can think of multiple arguments for why people choose the titles of their websites like they do. But really, I wonder how many people even really think about it at all.

When I find a site I like or need, I often bookmark it, but also often find that I have to rename it so that when I'm glancing through my bookmarks, it's easy to find.

Starting the title of a site with the name of a company or the division, or the website itself is no good (unless it's the main page). Take this example from Qualcomm:


After saving it as a link, I end up with this in my bookmarks:


It's the highlighted one, if it wasn't obvious. And that's my point. Notice the other two Qualcomm links near the bottom. The only difference between them is capitalization (which violates the Consistency pattern). I can't tell what they actually link to. The bookmark titled "Customer ..." is actually the renamed version of the highlighted one above. Just by the fav icon (denoting Brew, Qualcomm's mobile software platform) and the word "Customer" I know that it's the customer support portal website for Brew. But I had to take action to get that to happen; it wasn't as simple as if Qualcomm had simply rearranged the title to be "Customer Support Portal | Qualcomm Brew" instead.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]

Password Requirement Clarifications

This is from QUALCOMM's BREW MP website, after having attempted to input a new password. It says: "Please enter a password with at least 6 character, including three distinct characters and at least one number."

What is a distinct character? 'a', 'b', and 'c' are all distinct characters. Perhaps they meant at least one alphabetic, one numeric, and one non-alphanumeric character. Or does capitalization also make a character distinct?

What led up to this is even more interesting. When I registered for the site, it didn't ask me for a password, just an e-mail address (and lamely, an alias for the forums, which I obviously hadn't gotten to seeing yet, since I had to register first; don't make me determine a unique alias until I actually need it and understand the context). I couldn't log in (because of the lack of password) until I clicked on the "Forgot password?" link, which then brought me to the issue I started this article with.

QC seems to have issues with password and account registration... not the first time I've had to run through hoops to get a registration working, especially with the original BREW website.

[Re-posted from Code Fog.]