philwilson.org

22 posts tagged with "usability"

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Dark Wikipedia

01 May, 2025 - 137 words
I use a browser extension which always redirect wikipedia articles to their mobile equivalent (chrome, firefox). I find this much less cluttered and much more legible but it hides the settings scr...

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Making a bigger back button in Firefox

09 March, 2025 - 193 words
I've been hacking Firefox CSS to make the "Back" button bigger since 2004. Here's the latest version, so that you can have small toolbar buttons except for the Back button, which for obvious Fitt's law reasons, you want to be bigger b...

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leaddev.com has great content that is hard to read

19 November, 2021 - 145 words
I really like a lot of the content on https://leaddev.com/ – ranging from simple advice for new tech leaders to insightful ideas for veterans, it is worth getting on their mailing list by using the signup box at the bottom of every page. But. Every article I...

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OpenID usability

05 October, 2008 - 68 words
People complain a lot that users don’t understand about OpenID logins booting them to another website to authenticate. Don’t Google already do this with Blogger and Yahoo with Flickr? That is to say: don’t tens of millions of people do this regularly already? I mean, what’s the big difference? I know there are other usability complaints/problems, but this one sounds eerily like a ...

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Square-bracket hell

16 February, 2007 - 290 words
There is little wiki syntax interoperability. In fact, it’s so bad that there are dedicated libraries for converting between almost every wiki system, the best probably being a Perl l...

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5 buttons? Wireless? *kabloom*

15 February, 2007 - 415 words
The computer mouse is one of the worst human-computer interaction devices ever invented and I hope it dies a rapid death. Every year or so I explode with fury at the absolute inadequacy of the mouse. It forces my hand to adpot some permanently cramped expression of agony only emulated in the natural world when you fall into a pit of lava and your outstretched arm is the last thing to be ...

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Teaching website shambles

16 November, 2006 - 805 words
The Times Educational Supplement is the UK’s premier newspaper for those working in the world of primary, secondary and further education. They have a thriving online ...

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Things that annoy me about Firefox 2 UI

05 November, 2006 - 104 words
No close button on every tab No close button at the right of the tab bar highlight text, right-click, search uses the selected Search Box engine, not Google scrolling tab bar constant switching between “extensions” and “add-ons” between Firefox versions atrocious options pane for Windows users (this is actually a Firefox 1.5+ problem) ...

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Flock you, Ninger!

09 March, 2006 - 162 words
Lately, I’ve been saying Ninged a lot. It’s shorthand for a chasm in usability. Though you’ve created new market space, the share of that market that’s valuable in the real world is tiny; though many might want to use this set of services, only geeks can use them – you’ve built a better mousetrap, but only

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Use an elastic layout on your weblog, web "professionals"!

13 February, 2006 - 158 words
I’ve had a couple of several-hundred-word posts hanging around on this topic for months now, but my frustration has finally got to the point where the technical stuff can wait – if you have a weblog which has centred text (even Hivelogic and Andy Budd fall foul of this) then make your contents elastic!

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