Usability

Tiny epic usability fail

by Matthew Stibbe on May 11, 2010

Today I spent 45 minutes helping my father-in-law fix a problem that had been caused by a kludgy bit of UI design in Windows 7. It has so many options and buttons and ways to do things that it’s really easy for a naive user to do something that appears logical but actually causes real [...]

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Interview with Microsoft’s head of web design

by Matthew Stibbe on November 27, 2006

I am passionate about website usability. Good copy is an important part of that but not everything. So I asked John Allwright, head of web design and development at Microsoft UK, and John Harris, a user experience evangelist there, to talk about what makes websites good. Full disclosure: my company, Articulate Marketing, does a lot [...]

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Is PowerPoint really that bad?

by Matthew Stibbe on August 29, 2006

I’ve just finished reading Don Norman’s spirited and well-argued defence of PowerPoint. In his view it is not PowerPoint that corrupts but bad arguments, bad speeches and poor preparation. He takes issue with Edward Tufte‘s arguments against PowerPoint (e.g. here in a Wired article: PowerPoint is evil): Finally, let me review Tufte’s complaint about the [...]

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Rules of thumb for writing

by Matthew Stibbe on July 10, 2006

There are different, competing claims about the origin of the term ‘rule of thumb‘. I prefer the idea that it stems from the fact that the length from the tip of the thumb to the knuckle is about one inch (or if you’re a pilot and you use 1:500,000 charts, about 10 nautical miles). In [...]

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