I haven’t gotten many ideas on the question of redesigning the ATM buttons – too bad, I thought it was an interesting challenge. Maybe you’ve posted ideas on your blogs and I haven’t seen them yet?

Here is another bad example, on the same basic issue of communicating the affordance of clickability. I guess it’s more of a rant than an example, since it is so obviously wrong and the solution is so simple. Interesting to note, however, how something so simple and easy (can I click this or not?) is still a source of so many errors.

How do you think this works, in Blackboard Learn? What do I have to do to download the assignments? How would you fix this?

OK, but how do I download the files?! Where do I click?!

I hope the examples I post serve to remind you to post your own examples. And reading reflections. And RAAs.

This is a bit too obvious of an error to be more than an oversight (I hope).

I’ve been using group blogging on Posterous for a team project and it’s been working very well. Today, I wanted to create a new group blog (“space” in Posterous lingo) and I saw this menu on the right side of my “Manage your spaces” page.

The cursor changes to a pointed finger on mouseover on both the black and the white parts communicating the affordance of clickability. This left me to wonder what is the difference between the two options. Turns out there is none. Clicking the black part causes no action. Clicking the white part opens the new space creation dialog.

After some thinking, I figure out the black part must be a heading. Clearly unnecessary. It made me think. It made me click around and think some more to try to figure out what’s what. It communicated clickability when there was none.

This example is so obvious that I am afraid it is not educational enough – it is more of a rant. Thank you for bearing with me.

I am sure that the people at Posterous know these principles. I wonder why they did not notice. What do you think a design team should do to ensure that no such oversights happen?