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Notable quotes:
- In UX, we try to hide the fact that our interfaces are built on top of machines — hunks of metal coursing with electricity, executing strict logic in the face of physical resource constraints. We strive to make our systems fault-tolerant, or at least to fail gracefully, though it goes against the machine’s boolean grain. It’s shameful for an app to freeze up, even for a second, or to show the user a cryptic error message. The blue screen of death is an HCI faux pas roughly equivalent to vomiting on the dinner table: it halts the proceedings and reminds us all-too-graphically what’s gone wrong in the bowels of the system.
- Hospitality is considerate. It’s in the little touches. The most gracious hosts will remember and cater to their guests as individuals. They’ll go above and beyond to anticipate needs and create wonderful experiences. But mostly they’ll stay out of the way, working behind the scenes and minimizing guest effort.
user-inactivated · 4214 days ago · link ·
Firefox does this I just checked. For the record.Garry Tan calls our attention to a great example of interface hospitality: Chrome’s tab-closing behavior. When you click the ‘x’ to close a tab, the remaining tabs shift or resize so that the next tab’s ‘x’ is right underneath your cursor. This way you can close multiple tabs without moving your mouse. Once you get used to it, the behavior of other browsers starts to seem uncouth in comparison.