Radio buttons, by their very nature, have only one option selected at a time. For the sake of consistency, it is important to have a default option when presenting the user with radio buttons. The current four candidates for U.S. president all have contribution pages on their websites that let users choose a contribution amount through radio buttons, but none of them have a default option for the contribution amount.

They not only misuse the radio button–they miss an opportunity to anchor users’ expectations for how much they ought to contribute to the campaign. Read More

Command line interfaces are the wave of the future.

Aza Raskin does this subject justice in the latest issue of Interactions (January+February 2008), envisioning a linguistic command line that figures out what you want rather than requiring a structured syntax.

Still, I find myself typing all the time rather than using the mouse. When I starting using a Mac recently, I left Spotlight alone, up in the corner of the screen. Then, I needed something that wasn’t in my dock and it seemed like too much trouble to root around on the hard drive looking for the application, so I figured I’d give searching a try. Success. Read More