And you are here why?

For those who have known me for a while, my antipathy towards pie-charts (and donut charts!) should be nothing new FWIW, it’s not something off the cuff - pie-charts are,  almost always  better off being replaced by something different (bar graphs being the obvious replacement). Why? Because Quantity is represented by angles and humans are   VERY   bad at identifying differences in angles (87 °   vs 82 ° ? Labeling slices ends up confusing stuff even more Small percentages (which might be important) get goofy Anything above 2-3 items in the pie chart are crazy difficult to figure out Don’t get me started on donut charts, that just take all of the above, and make it Even harder to deal with And it’s not just me, Stephen Few ( Perceptual Edg e. Think “grandmaster of all things Visualizaion”. Hell, he, literally, invented the  bullet graph …) wrote the definitive “ DO NOT USE PIE CHARTS ” article back in 2007. And yeah, if you don’t feel like reading the whole...

A friend (call her Alice) shows up at our local pub everyday at 6pm and has a glass of Albariño. It’s like clockwork, to the point where the bartender (Bob) pours a glass out around 5:58, so that it’s ready for Alice when she shows up. The fun part here is that every now and then, Bob pours out something  different —  say, a Vermentino, or a Pigato, or some such — and Alice is quite OK with this. The reasoning being • The “fuzziness” around a routine : Alice likes a little variety. Not too much, but every now and then, mixing up the wines gives her a little jolt of satisfaction. Doing the same thing over and over may be efficient, but it can also remove some of the color from life. Deviation from the mundane can make life just a little bit more happy. • The lack of self-knowledge that we all have : Alice used to think that she only liked Sauvignon Blanc, till she accidentally had an Albariño, and now she’s hooked. Sometimes you need to be thrown a curve-ball to waken you to ...

/via http://turnoff.us/geek/annoying-software-3/ This one really gets my goat. Yes, I know, UX is hard etc. etc., but even a little bit of googling will come up with  some core principles for date entry . And of these principles, the one that should stand above all (for me at least!) is that  you should not require users to enter special characters to format dates. Oh, if you want to show people a greyed-out  / , that’s fine, go for it. But  making  them enter it? Ugh!

/via https://www.monkeyuser.com/2016/development-platforms/ When it comes to browsers, I’ve always found the “Too many display formats on Android” argument to be somewhat humorous, because, compared to the living hell that is doing anything on PCs/Macs Android is a bit of a walk in the park. For good or for bad, people tend to swap their phones out somewhat frequently. Ok, maybe not every year (cough), but you’re unlikely to find 5 year old phones out there. But theirPCs? Boy Howdy. Seriously, it’s not just that you can still find low-rez laptops for sale today, it’s that if you find somebody using a five year old PC,  it’s not even surprising! . And life gets even more entertaining when it comes to corporations, where they don’t just have geriatric computers, they even mandate fun stuff like “ Everything must work with IE11 ”. IE11! Which, the last time I checked, doesn’t support CSS Grids, PWA, and most other things that are —  finally!  — making for actually cool/usefu...