Web Usability – Even The Big Boys Get It Wrong
At work recently I have been looking into usability principles and in particular our checkout procedure. This consists of streamlining the process by reducing the number of hoops the user must jump through whilst trying to build confidence in the customer.
Whilst booking flights to Australia the other day I was surprised that even the big boys can get it wrong! Although the checkout procedure was smooth – this screen was the first thing I saw after I clicked the “pay” button:
Not exactly confidence building! This page is supposed to redirect the user to their card holders ’secure code’ page to prevent fraud and authorise payment. However when the re-direct doesn’t work a green screen with a form button seems to be enough to maintain the users confidence confidence!
Tags: Likes
The Cat Came Back
I remembered this cartoon from my childhood today whilst speaking to my girlfriend. She hadn’t heard of it, so if you haven’t seen it you should definitely check it out!
Tags: Likes
Windows Text Editors
I’m a Mac user through and through but recently I have been required to use Windows for work. My favourite text editor for Mac is undoubtedly Textwrangler which is a free stripped-down version of Barebones BBEdit. This is a great text editor that does everything I need.
After having such good experiences with Textwranger on OS X my job was finding a Windows alternative. Other than the usual features (syntax highlighting etc) I was looking for:
- FTP Support (though I do not use this text editor feature on OS X, this was a requirement for me on Windows)
- Powerful multi-file search / replace
- Tabbed file editing
- Smart indenting- shortcuts to indent / unindent whole blocks of text
- Matching brackets
After some searching and testing of various solutions I found Crimson Edit, this is a great text editor that is also free! The only small problem I have had is a few bugs in the FTP connections but this is forgiveable and for me was the best free text editor for Windows. Crimson Edit has been open-sourced because the developer had no time for it any more.
Unfortunately Crimson Edit does not support SFTP connections so I had to look further. In the end I went for EditPlus. This application costs but is fairly cheap (35USD / 30 day trial available) and has a extermely powerful array of features (like Search / replace regular expression support and advanced (S)FTP support with file browser pane). I found out about this editor as it is used by the Magento developers.
Tags: Likes • OS X • Programming