A year ago I posted this on LinkedIn: === I tell my students to avoid select boxes. Because it’s often better to use radio buttons. But students often say “But it’ll make the page too long”. Yep, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad UX. See the page I designed to let users select a course. Huge list of radio buttons. But no issues in user research whatsoever. Does this mean you should always use radio buttons? No. But most designers would balk at a design like this even though it worked...

Last week, I had a meeting with two devs and two designers. The meeting’s purpose was to let developers raise problems and get quick design decisions. One of the devs brought up an issue with a form that had conditional radio buttons. Here’s what the screen looked like (it’s a bit different to what I’m actually working on but close enough): When the user selects “Yes” it reveals a field to enter the name: If you leave it blank and submit the form, the page refreshes and shows an error: So far...

Last Tuesday, my article about whether to use “Your” or “My” in user interfaces went viral on Hacker News. In case you don’t know, Hacker News is a site where people discuss and upvote ideas in tech and design. The gist of my article said to use “Your” when communicating to the user, like this: And to use “My” when the user is communicating to us, like this: I read through all the comments on Hacker News and picked my top 5 worth responding to (as each one has a useful design takeaway):...