A while ago during a project we were asked to implement autofocus on the generic search field that every page in the application has. At a first glance a pretty straightforward task, from a technical perspective that is. Not from a user perspective, as indicated by a colleague mentioning his dislike of such autofocus fields “because they prevent backspace going to the previous page”. In this post I will outline some usability considerations and conclude with a jQuery plugin that will take away some of the possible hindrance of autofocusing a field.…

Banners play an essential role in many site’s business models so they are an inevitable price paid for all the free content that is available on the internet. To get a user’s attention a lot of practices are employed like animation, placement or sound (horrible). Today I stumbled on a T-mobile advert on the site nu.nl that indeed attracts a lot of attention but does so in a questionable way: It makes using the visited site almost impossible.…

Past saturday (february 7th) I visited Engineering World, a conference organised by Sogeti, as both attendant and speaker. With my colleague Richard de Vries I delivered a presentation on the topic usability. I attended some interesing presentations of which two were about methodologies: One about SCRUM and the closing keynote by Ian Spence of Ivar Jacobsen International about Agile. The latter with all of the myths about Agile (Doesn’t matter where the team is going, as long as it’s going somewhere) being tackled in true Mythbuster fashion.…