I don’t understand why so many websites do this, and I am sure you have run into this problem before.  You go to a website and you try all the various username/passwords that you can think of but no luck, so you are forced to use the “Forgot Password” or “Reset Password” links. Here is the problem, you probably spent a good deal of time finding what you were looking for, and then you need to login to get at “something”.  Either you want to reply to a forum post, download a file, etc.  Now you have to walk through a 2 or 3 step password reset process that takes you away from what you were trying to get at and you end at a page that says “Your password has been sent to you”, with no link on the page to get back to the place you were originally trying to go.

From a workflow perspective you can make your users much happier if you do two things:

1. Include a link in the password reset email to take you back to the original location you were trying to go to
2. Allow you to re-enter your email and password on the “Your password has been sent to you” page and take you back to your original location

This will save your users from spending another 10 minutes trying to get back to where they originally wanted to go.

Also, one other thing you can do to make your users happier…if you send the user a “reset” version of their password make it easier for them to set it back to something that they can remember.  Maybe suggest that on the landing page for the link they click in the email that they can change their password “here“.  This will prevent them from having to go through this negative user experience again the next time they try to login to your site.

Ooops. Sucks for the Nationals that nobody caught this jersey mistake.

…do they ever make some bad UI decisions.

Given the context of the “Close Account” button here, right next to your account details, what would you think the “Close Account” button does? If you have a Skype account, I dare you to click it and find out.

Doug LeMoine blogs about how the usability of ESPN.COM has deteriorated. At one time in my life I would read ESPN.com several times a day, but now it is so filled with adds, and pop-ups and garbage I can’t read it any more.

See the picture below. The highlighted and arrowed 300×500 pixel area is the only real content in a page that is 1260×3000 pixels.

I actually had a tough time trying to highlight the area I viewed as actual content. The colors are so bright on the page it makes it difficult to actually draw someones attention to a specific area.

They have even managed to fit in another ad in the content area.

I just upgraded to Office 2007, and I am a little confused as to why the Paste button is here when sending an email in Outlook 2007. Shouldn’t the send button be there instead (like it was in Office 2003)?

Don’t get me wrong, the new Office is pretty cool, but I just thought this was odd, as I almost never paste into emails, and I always Send emails I begin.

So why not place the Send button in the same location that it was in Office 2003?

When I worked in product support for eHelp, Macromedia and Adobe, there was a common phrase that you would hear around the product support department.

It was RTFM.

In case you don’t know what this stands for, it stands for Read The F***ing Manual.

One thing people who say this never realize is that nobody reads the manual, especially with software manuals. Software manuals are boring, and for most products (Articulate not included), are poorly written.

Good software shouldn’t need an extensive manual, and if it does, users won’t ever read it, and people will never figure out how to use the software.

Rant On:
It really bugs me when software programs have no error handling whatsoever. Take for example OnTime. If at any time you loose internet connectivity when trying to use OnTime (a bug tracking system) OnTime throws the unhandled exception shown below.
To me it is shocking that:
A. That they had no error handling for what is likely to be a common error
B. No QA guy or gal ever caught this

Imagine for a moment if every time you tried to publish a presentation from Articulate Presenter without first saving the Powerpoint file we through up this exception, then crashed Powerpoint…How annoying would that be?

Thankfully Articulate Presenter has better error handling than this.

BTW…if anyone from Axosoft reads this, it would be awesome if you fixed this.
Rant off.

Sorry, I felt compelled to write about a program I disliked after my last post about a product I liked. I wanted to maintain some balance

If you aren’t reading this post via a RSS reader you have probably noticed the new site design. I use blogger as my blogging tool and they give you a choice of about 20 different templates to choose from. So I spent the last couple of hours modifying the site to use a new custom layout I designed. I tried to make it have somewhat of a comic book feel without being too unprofessional. I also added a new search feature that is specifically tailored for this site. Hopefully this will enable people to find old posts a little easier. If you have a feelings about the new site design please feel free to leave me comments, I will be interested to hear some feedback.