I’ve long thought that the split between the Desktop and Metro UIs would confuse newbies, though perhaps not so badly as the ARM/x86 issue. A lot of the people who ran out and bought the Surface tablet will probably be irritated when they learn that their x86 software won’t run on it, since the binaries are incompatible with the ARM architecture.

It’s an interesting read.

Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users [UseIt]

Most websites (and many other applications) mask passwords as users type them, and thereby theoretically prevent miscreants from looking over users’ shoulders. Of course, a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard and note which keys are being pressed. So, password masking doesn’t even protect fully against snoopers.

More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website.

This is wrong on so many levels.Have you ever set your laptop up in a public place, such as a café, a library, an airport? How often is there someone else in the room when you use a computer? Have you ever had your laptop hooked up to a projector? In Nielsen’s private world, there are only people typing away at computers isolated by four walls. In the real world, people, intentionally or not, “shoulder surf.”

The argument that “a truly skilled criminal can simply look at the keyboard” is about as logical as saying that you don’t need a key for your car or house, because a truly skilled criminal will break in anyway. Password masking protects against more casual (or even accidental) snoopers. It’s not easy at all to get someone’s password by watching them type, unless they are very slow, “hunt and peck” typist.

When you press a key, it’s only for a second. Blink. You missed it. What key did I just press? If you remove the masking feature on password fields, which is required by the upcoming HTML 5 standard, your password is shown in full for a much longer length of time.

A checkbox to toggle the functionality on and off, as Nielsen recommends, breaks a more important design and usability principle that I believe Nielsen stands behind: That you should present as few options as possible to the user.

Slashdot has plenty to say on the matter:

I’ve never been impressed by the argument that ‘I can’t think why we need this (standard) security measure, so let’s drop it.’ It usually indicates a lack of imagination of the speaker. But in this case, does usability outweigh security?

If I look outside my office window, I can see about 48 office windows (without standing up) and all of them have the lights on and it’s dusk outside. Give me a dSLR and a decent set of long distance lenses and I’ll prove you wrong.

To a usability expert, expectations are your friends. You trust them. You believe in them.

To a security expert, expectations are your enemies. You distrust them. You try to figure out what they’re hiding from you.

Of course, everyone agrees that what is expected and what happens *should* be the same, but I think here the securities guys have the more legitimate concern. Mr. Nielson doesn’t even considers the possibility that his expectations might be violated. He assumes they are benign as long as they are “usually” right.

In any computing environment, security trumps usability. Password masking is such a minor usability issue, and one that can be overcome with just a little bit of education on the matter. It’s not worth creating a security risk because one segment of the population can’t do something as simple as typing a password properly.

Part of having a successful website is attracting visitors. Keeping those visitors on your site, however, is another topic altogether. Of course, once you have the visitor on your site you’ll want to keep them around for a while rather than seeing them quickly leaving to go somewhere else.

In order to do a good job of retaining visitors, increasing pageviews and time on the site, it’s important to think about what could cause visitors to leave. By knowing some of the major reasons that people are leaving your site, you can make adjustments to improve this situation.

The list covers the main areas that you want to pay attention to to successfuly optimize your site in this manner, which pretty much fall into the categories of content, design, and advertisements. Keep in mind though, that if people notice that you are actively trying to keep them on your site, it will be a major turn off. So don’t

• Be stingy with outgoing links
• Open external links in pop-up windows
• Try to disable the Back button

Stay away from little tricks like that that hinder the user experience.

The Usability Post covers, well, usability. It’s focus is not the visual aspect of design, but how design works. From the About page:

The Usability Post is a blog about design. Design isn’t what something looks like, design is about how it works. Making something usable means understanding what people expect from your product and thinking of ways to make the use of the product simple and enjoyable.

The blog shows promise, and is worth checking out.

Here are a couple of posts from Usability Post that I enjoyed:

• Usability Tip: Use Verbs as Labels on Buttons
• 5 Steps for the Perfect Tabbed Navigation Menu

Designing the Obvious is a guide to designing highly usable web applications, featuring the idea that simplicity is the key to usability. It covers plenty of bases, and is very thorough with its advice and explanations. The book is easy to understand, and is a good read for anyone who develops web applications, or is involved in the design of any sort of website.

There are plenty of examples, in the form of diagrams screen shots from websites, to illustrate the points, and overall the book strikes me as being very blog-like. The writing style, the assortment of interesting pictures, and the way the type is set all remind me of a blog.

Being an advocate of simplicity in interface design, the author has included several examples from Apple and Google, of course, as well as 37Signals’ Backpack. I found his theory that instead of using a modal prompt when deleting data, you should instead delete it immediately and offer to undo it after (as seen in GMail), particularly enlightening.

Mr. Hoekman strikes me as being very knowledgeable in the area of web app design, and I found myself agreeing with a good portion of his points, and I think I learned a few things as I read the book. If you do a bit of web design, whether it’s related to web apps or not, I would recommend giving the book a try.

In my opinion, the most annoying real website ever

• Always resizes your browser to exactly 120% of your screen resolution.
• Launches three pop-up ads on page load.
• Has a black background (or distracting tiled picture) with bright yellow text.
• Has at least two animated banner ads that say “click this ad for a free iPod!” through your speakers.
• Opens external links in new windows.
• Has horrible navigation.
• Has little design whatsoever.
• Makes you register to leave a comment. During the registration, you have to confirm your account via email, and say “no” to the 23 mailing lists you would otherwise be subscribed to.
• Says “best viewed in Internet Explorer” at the top of the page, and does not work well in any other (more standards-compliant) browser.
• Takes two minutes to load at 780k/sec.
• Plays music on page load.
• Has so many typos and grammatical errors it’s impossible to understand anything.
• Copies and pastes entire content from other sites instead of linking.
• Is stingy with links, and uses nofollow (or JavaScript onClick) to avoid passing any PageRank.
• Offers an email subscription, but not RSS, and assumes that you would still want to subscribe after seeing their site.
• Opens more pop-ups when you leave.

I spent half an hour in Photoshop making the image you see above. I’d say it looks sufficiently annoying.