Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
Insight: the path of least resistance in user-interface design is…
In: User Interface Design By: Brian Armstrong
4 Jun 2010…displaying data exactly how it’s represented in the database, instead of how humans think of it.
This person might just want a “new” Honda Accord and doesn’t care if it’s a 2010 or 2011.
It’s harder to build technology based on how humans think, but it tends to be better when you do. Google does a great job of “understanding” what you meant with fuzzy matching, for example.
The example above really isn’t even that bad (some people want to choose a year). What other examples of “database driven user-interfaces” have you come across?
Related: What should I pay for a car?
3 Responses
Leave A Comment
About this blog
Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
Most Popular Posts
- 46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money
- How To Stop Letting Little Things In Life Piss You Off
- How To Understand (and Create) A Personal Financial Statement Each Month In 5 Minutes
- Early Adopters: 5 Ways To Get Users To Your New Website
- From New Idea To Business Launch In One Month (with pictures)
- How I Learned To Live With DSPS
- Making Progress...
- Entrepreneur/Hacker Meetup In Buenos Aires
- The Most AWESOME Interview I've Ever Done - With Captain Australia
- How A Board Game (Like Monopoly) Can Teach You Financial Freedom
You should follow me on Twitter here.
- Pit: I did an advanced search with FREE ONLY marked. I found a book I liked. Let's say this one http:// [...]
- James: Congratulations, that's fantastic. I've looked into joining your site, but it seems very location-ba [...]
- Eric Northam: Great job and congratulations Brian! It's also great to see another example of hot to utilize the Fr [...]
- Walid Taha: Congrats Brian! Thank you also for the nice write up. I liked your analysis a lot. It seems the [...]
- Sushrut Kulkarni: i also love sal khan and there's is gonna educational revolution in world [...]
- UniversityTutor Races Past 200 Paying Customers
- Humans Are Not Well Designed
- Mac OS XI (Eleven)
- Make Building Blocks
- Great Post By Tony Wright On Cashing Out Of Your Business
- When To Skip The Contracts
- The Screen After A User Closes Their Account
- A New Design For UniversityTutor.com
- Kicked out of my own Google Group!
- How To Come Up With A Business Idea
Erica Douglass
June 4th, 2010 at 4:01 am
My LEAST favorite is when you type in a phone number and it errors out the whole form, saying something like “Must be 10 digits. No hyphens.”
I run into this a lot since I use a form-filler and it auto fills the form with a hyphenated number.
As a programmer, I know it’s ONE LINE of code to remove the hyphens and then check! This laziness makes me want to punch the programmer in the face. It’s the most egregious one I’ve come across.
-Erica
Greg Moreno
June 4th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Same with forms that require your credit card number or any account with letter and number combinations. They should allow spaces so users can verify their input.
Similarly, these numbers should be chunked when being displayed. Hypens and spaces can be used.
Brian Armstrong
June 4th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Yep great point – making data input conform to a database instead of a human is so common!