instanceof me

Poorly chosen abstractions or rampant over-abstractions are problems, of course, but they are hardly “clever,” they’re just poorly chosen. Abstractions are a win when either of two things occur:

1. The effort to learn the abstraction is an order of magnitude less than the effort to reproduce the underlying mechanism, or;
2. You have correctly predicted in advance that the implementation will need to change and can do so without breaking the rest of the application.

(Source: news.ycombinator.com)

The New York Times is redesigning its Web site — starting with the article experience.

(Source: sidebar.io)

A To-Don’t List by Stoyan Stefanov

Imagine a scenario where we had a blog that has a language switcher between English and German. Generally German words are longer than English so we might want to set the reading length on the German version of our article to a slightly wider value.

The CSS might look something like this:

article {
   max-width:33em;
}
:lang(de) article {
  max-width:40em;
}

As soon as the ‘lang’ attribute is changed from the default en to de (through a mechanism like a language select dropdown) the width of the <article> changes to a wider reading length making a (potentially) easier read for our German readers.

(Source: twitter.com)

(Source: twitter.com)

From Data and Reality:

The thing that makes computers so hard to deal with is not their complexity, but their utter simplicity. … The real mystique behind computers is how anybody can manage to get such elaborate behavior out of such a limited set of basic capabilities. The art of computer programming is somewhat like the art of getting an imbecile to play bridge or to fill out his tax return by himself. It can be done, provided you know how to exploit the imbecile’s limited talents, and are willing to have enormous patience with his inability to make the the most trivial common sense deductions on his own.

(Source: twitter.com)

Never use ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’ when you could use a verb instead.

And you can almost always use a verb instead of ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’.

I agree with Lukas Mathis’ postulation that nobody reads your dialog boxes. Use a verb whenever possible instead of ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’ because your buttons will make sense out of context with the explanatory text or title.

While we’re at wording, another interesting StackExchange UX “User Experience @ StackExchange” question: Should error messages apologize?

(Source: twitter.com)

A common, naive approach to history is to keep a simple linear ring-buffer. When the buffer fills, we simply overwrite the element from some time ago. An advantage of this technique is constant space overhead. Unfortunately, a linear history too easily loses important contextual information about the deep past due to minute updates in the recent past.

The further into the past we look, the less information we need, but we don’t want to have any particular cutoff where we lose the history. What we need is a decay model with predictable computational properties. What we need is exponential decay or something similar – i.e. information with a half-life.