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I'll start by assuming that your last sentence suggests you're not happy with the way you access functions like the shut down menu in Windows 8.

If that's the case, I wholeheartedly agree with you there - the Settings charm is an absolutely atrocious place to locate the shutdown/reboot/sleep menu, it makes no sense at all and is very difficult to find unless you already know where it is. I have no idea what MS was thinking in order to decide to put such a vital function in an odd place. But in my opinion that is not an important issue for users like us: yes it's stupid but we know where to find it, and if you are shutting down or rebooting so frequently that it's an issue that it takes a couple of seconds longer to do, then perhaps you should put a shortcut to shutdown.exe on your desktop. I get that it's dumb, but the issue I'm debating is the Start Screen, not the Charms.

The primary way you find things in the main page of the Start Screen isn't by scanning it up and down with your eyes to find what you're looking for. It's the same way you know where that pinned app on the taskbar is, or that shortcut on the desktop, or the order of the icons on your Mac Dock - it's because you put them there; they are your most frequently used apps, the ones you use regularly. Most people generally don't specifically remember the pictures depicted by icons - they generally find it easier to remember the position of the icons (this is well documented, see here for an example). The Start Screen relies on this and is why it works well when used the way it was designed.

The All Programs view, I'll admit, I think worked better with the Start Menu than it does in the Start Screen. The reason is because as you say - it's easier to scroll through a one dimensional list than a two dimentional grid, especially when you don't know exactly where that thing you're looking for is located. However, I discourage this use of the Start Screen that way, because there are better ways to find what you're looking for. Just start typing to search for things - generally you can remember part of the name; the search function will find that for you. In the remaining case where you still can't remember exactly what it was that you wanted, the old Start Menu's 'All Programs' view might be better than the new two-dimensional grid (I think it was). However, that functionality is rarely used by the vast majority of people, so the other improvements that the Start Screen brings outweigh the drawbacks of going with a worse approach for that particular use case.

Sorry about posting AC.

This problem is huge. I know that we as the tech nerd type tend to view designers as sort of lesser non technical children.

However, it might be a good idea for us to maybe consider what they do. After all code disasters don't make all of us question the need for coders.

Instead, we might take the path that we could learn something out of the deal. There are a bunch of people who offer training to non design people on how to make their design better. most of this stuff is actually really easy to do and it pays off hugely later.

As an example Dan Rubin's Lecture Slides.

No. The difference here is that Netflix has been held up almost as high as Apple by the "user experience design" community as being a web site that "does the right thing" in design for its customers:

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=%22user+experience%22+netflix&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gl=uk

specifically, the echo chamber:

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/netflix_nails_it.php

http://www.uie.com/articles/kane_interview/

Bill Scott, their former head of UX is a high-profile UX consultant and speaker who often uses Netflix as an example of good design for profit.

Compare this to /. where everyone knows they are crap, and therefore doesn't mind.

I don't want it. I just don't want you coming to my site on your terms

This is a hot topic right now. Many content providers hope to float their expenses solely on the back of advertising dollars, and rely completely on advertising networks that do little to match the aesthetic or sensibility of an advertisement to the needs of any of the publishers' readerships.

The pattern is, Joe has a website and creates content. Maybe it's a blog, maybe it's an aggregator like /. is. Joe tries to put his website in the black by putting ads on his site. Perhaps at first, Joe vetos the annoying ads, but soon he learns that A> this requires paying attention to the ads, which costs Joe time he doesn't have, and B> this cuts into his bottom line. So he eventually allows virtually all ads though, and continues tacking on more ad networks until there are no more to add. Joe is still in the red, but has starry eyed visions of making ends meet just around the corner as his readership tanks. The last thing that Joe wants is to introduce any alternate profit models or put his eggs in more than one basket. For example, premium memberships which allow access to stories earlier than free membership, a community of commenters creating content for free and driving traffic and participation, such efforts would be fools errands and sound a little bit too much like work.

If you don't want to view the ads, then don't block them - because you consume resources and cost us money and we get nothing.

To Joe, every visitor with an AdBlocker is eating away at his profits. After all, (example numbers, YMMV) the hosting account is $20/mo for the first gigabit of transfer and $5 per gigabit thereafter, and Joe invests $2,000 per month in fixed cost generating and maintaining the content. That adds up to $2020/mo if transfer stays under a gigabit, which could baloon to $2025/mo if a ton of Adblocker readers hit the site!

Of course an AdBlocker user cannot click on the ads, but the worst part is that they never drive cross traffic either. When ad AdBlocker user sees an article he likes, he never just sends a link to his friends who lack AdBlock. Instead, AdBlocker users just sit on the same page hitting refresh constantly while cackling at the money the publisher is losing, penny by penny.

Users obviously have all the control - they can block (most) ads, they can simply stop visiting sites

One thing people don't often consider is that the internet is a great equalizer. The user and the webserver are on equal footing and have equal power. You do not have to allow those who block ads to see your website, you can use similar filtering features to keep them out and make an arms race of it.

Just like AdBlockers identify images of certain size, from certain domains, and urls that match certain regex as advertisements and block them (with the false-positive side-effects of sometimes blocking or mangling content), you can put your ads in Iframes and load the content asynchronously, contingent on the advertisement payload being delivered before the user gets to see the goods.

You will also incur false positives of innocent readers getting shafted, but that's OK, right? Just like RIAA and James Murdoch are teaching us, You don't make money by delivering content to people who play by your rules, you make money by causing misery for whoever takes too many napkins.

Remember, your most important revenue streams are spreading FUD, making people feel guilty, and optionally implementing DRM and expanding bureaucracy. You are not in the business of providing content to the people who want it, that would be silly. The only way to make money is to maximize bleeding, suffering, and eye raping.

Remember, the world is rife with people who want to patronize your content, and some will even fork cash over to you. It is your responsibility to deploy

I hate it when I read an article or a blog, want to leave a comment, but its locked behind some registration mechanism. Then I just don't bother. I'm not going to go through a tedious registration process just to leave one comment. Sometimes it's not even obvious how to register (I'm looking at you Wordpress). I imagine this costs these websites a lot of traffic. See The $300 Million Button.

No, anonymous commenting is too important. Throw up a captcha or something that anonymous commenters have to fill out, but registered ones don't (like Slashdot).

Not that I expect this kind of system, but if we did have some universal authentication I would want it to be cryptographically based rather than password login (like OpenID). Though managing keys would probably be too difficult for most people, and the system would be less flexible because users would need to carry their private keys around. With this system a user's identity is really just simply a public key, maybe with a "provider" attached to it like an email address. Once a website trusts your public key, due to a good comment, checking with some identity provider (like OpenID), or getting it from another trusted website, it doesn't need to do any more external verification. (This is how Freenet's forums work, for example.)

Jacob Nielsen stayed WAY behind the times. It's good that he emphasized usability, but he did not adapt. Just for fun, some guys did some comparison on search, and Jacob's page came dead last - using some very interesting methods which seem to be standard on usability testing (Eyetracking):

http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000068.php

I found this webpage more useful than Nielsen's when I was designing a form that has to be filled 30.000 times every day (and this guy Luke Wroblewski seems to know what he's doing, even though his seminars are way too expensive):

http://www.uie.com/

It may be overkill for what you want but have a look at http://www.uie.com/

All of which was why dontclick.it originally drove me to add an iGesture touch pad to my Christmas 2003 wishlist. At the same time I chased after my first Tablet PC. I'm happy to report in response to "news" of dontclick.it that consumers thinking differently have some great hardware alternatives, granted some of them may lock you into software "alternatives" the typical /.er might rather avoid. UMPCs with the Touch Pack have taken it to the glorious next level, where finally no other tool (pen) need be held to work with the PC, and sans anything too futuristic still like eyeball tracking lasers or brain implants. Thank you, Microsoft et al. for making it real.

How's it going? For machine performance, worky reasons I do have a desktop, with which I'm still using that iGesture, right now in fact. With a little learning, it's fantastic -- far more comfortable, natural, and powerful than any classic form mouse. Are iGesture pads the future of hardware? Hardly, sadly. Almost all people wouldn't even consider remapping for a Dvorak keyboard or any other arrangement despite numerous benefits, so good luck prying the mouse from their hands.

Aside from the mouse itself, for pure click reduction I doubt the extremity of dontclick.it can be considered a likely end for most of site or application design. One other thing dontclick.it led me to, however, was to more actively reduce the number of clicks in my user interface designs. Back in 2003, this User Interface Engineering post was also new, regarding the practicality of the Three-Click Rule. "Every piece of content should take no more than three clicks to access." The article finds via pointed clicking research that the number of clicks itself is not an issue, but it acknowledges that for designers to focus on reducing clicks is a useful means to the end of better, more user centric design.

As a software UI designer/developer, I keep it in mind. I think in terms of click reduction and it leads to simple, usable sites and software. Thank you, dontclick.it for raising the point, but yes, despite great alternatives in hardware and great intentions in software, most users still must click.

Download speed and perceived speed are not the same thing. Here is a fantastic article from a group that does empirical research on these subjects. http://www.uie.com/articles/download_time/ Nielson might want to refer to their site to see how simply, basic, text can be made more appealing then his. I am sure that his layout was designed specifically to get people to argue about it and thus up his profile. Or some such scheme.

"Towards that end, we look at how often certain pages get hit (such as help pages, search pages, site maps, the back button, hierarchial links etc) as well as surveys." (My emphasis)

Two important points here - firstly, it's well-known that a large proportion of users are search-dominant, or at least use a mixture of searching and links[1].

Although the numbers differ (eg, between the two articles), both agree that up to 80% of users use either search primarily or search and navigation links when navigating a web site.

Either way, hits on search pages don't offer a reliable indication of a problem with navigation.

Secondly, user-surveys are actually one of the worst ways to gather information about the site. It's well known in HCI circles that you simply can't trust user-surveys - users are very good at telling you what they think they did (or would do), but extremely poor at reporting what they actually did.

I think this is often because the overwhelming majority of navigation decisions users take are completely subconscious - they themselves aren't aware of why certain links look good, or why they ignore certain sections of the page (eg, because they subconsciously identify them as looking like adverts).

[1] Although hthis second article attempts to verify Jakob Nielson's figures, it appears to have its own problems - namely, confusing "search-dominant users" (who quickly default to searching) with "users who only ever use search functionality". Clearly users will have to click on a few links, merely to get onto and off of the search page(s).

Despite this, all figures I've seen (as well as my own reasearch) indicates that a mixed-search-and-navigation-links strategy is used by around 80% of users.

There is a lot of good research out there on how to use the data gathered form eye tracking. You can test web site designs and expose weaknesses in design, for example. You can also use eye tracking as an input device (PDF). I like that it can tell you what people read on the internet.

Just remember, what matters is how the technology is applied, not the technology itself. Without users, you just have slabs of technology sitting there. People make this stuff interesting.

• Jakob Neilson
• Usable Web
• Web Word
• Bruce Tognazzini
• User Interface Engineering
• Usability First
• Microsoft Usability