I need to get out more . . .

We went the Apple Store on Saturday because my son is looking for a new computer. As a former Mac user I should not have been surprised at all to see: a 60+ man in tibetan monk robes with a crew cut and a screaming eagle tattoo. Yes, he seemed very contemplative.

Where to put the farm animals & the beauty of design

"It's odd to think for history's most famous architect being as obsessed with animal smells as he was with scale and proportion. But not being afraid of the ordinary side of his job was a key component of Palladio's genius. To him, architecture existed to solve problems, and he seems to have given equal weight to elevating the image of his clients, making their lives function more smoothly, and creating beautiful objects for the world. Figuring out where to put the farm animals and shaping designs of transcendent beauty were all in a day's work."

All He Surveyed, How Palladian was Palladio?
by Paul Goldberger
The New Yorker, March 30, 2009

My Least Favorite UI Control

*to view control in action: http://bit.ly/19Qb5T

Issues:

• A tab control that doesn't look like a tab.
• A tab-like presentation below instead of above the tab content.
• A tab used as a toggle to show/hide just one entry field.
• An entry field that seems to serve double duty yet is mutually exclusive, i.e. the user can only search by a City OR a Postal Code. Because a user can enter the City and Postal Code sequentially, he may assume that he is searching on the combination of his two inputs. However, his search results will be based solely on the last entry.
  
• Radius dropdown menu has label embedded and no reasonable default. (If user does not make a selection, when the search is enabled the radius defaults to 20 miles in the search results list. Therefore, would expect the radius default on the entry screen to be 20 miles.)
• Actions: the user can Save this search and have the results emailed to him or he can perform the Search. Based on placement, it is not clear that these are the action choices.
  

Suggested Layout (based on same amount of screen real estate as control above):








Design Suggestions:

• Use radio buttons to present mutually exclusive choices.
  
• Disable field associated with deselected radio button.
  
• Enable field associated with selected radio button.
• Provide an appropriate default for the Radius dropdown.
• Present action choices next to each other to emphasize that the user can select Action A or Action B.