Devaluing Email Addresses

Attacking back at the Spammers

Some of my friends and acquaintances know that I am have been experimenting with a new scheme to control spam email.  Like many people, I have had to abandon email addresses in the past due to over-abundance of spam.  When you open a new email address, there is no spam.  But as you continue to use the box, eventually the knowledge that you are actually using a particular email address gets out.  Once your email address becomes known to the spammers there is no sure way to get them to forget it.

Errors & Learning Opportunities

This button in this situation produces an error report … therefor the button should be disabled.

I question this line of reasoning.  I have observed this reasoning used at all levels, from programmers, to UI designers, to Product managers, and even to customers (users) themselves.  The goal seems to be “protect the user from error messages”.   Some people naively think

Identity Update: Browsers with OpenID?

For about a year I have been pushing OpenID and OAuth as a key component to a large scale “Social Process” system (see posts here, here, and here). In the past year I have tested these ideas with a project called “Process Leaves” which is essentially a wiki which supports a couple of non-profit organizations I volunteer with. In order to access the protected content, you must log in with an OpenId. Yet there is still a problem.

Rethinking the Pop-Up Dialog

The more I use windows UI, the more I believe that the concept of the “moded pop up dialog box” is not useful and unnecessary.

The “moded pop up dialog box” is a user interface technique that allows you to have a screen on display, and allow a user action to cause a new window to appear on top of it. The new window takes control.

More on Disabling UI Controls

I have been arguing for years that disabled (greyed-out) menu items and buttons are in general a bad idea because it is impossible for users to know why the associated function is not enabled at the. It is quite frustrating: the user sees a menu command that looks like it might be what is needed, but it is disabled, and there is not at all obvious why it is disabled.