If your alert message needs instructions, you’re doing something wrong. This is what you get when you ignore the poor usability warning signs.

I’ve been exploring backing files up to various cloud services lately.  I’m tired of disks, and I’m tired of having to think about it (because who really backs stuff up as frequently as they should?), so I want something that I can set up once and from then on it backs up automatically without my [...]

I recently wrote a post about desiging for people who don’t feel like they can understand computers.  Specifically, I said, “The trick is adding a sense of empowerment and taking out the disempowering elements.”  That can mean all sorts of things in different situations, but I saw a really interesting example of it in a [...]

Over thanksgiving weekend I had the experience of helping my mother reset her Facebook password.  Now, she doesn’t really know anything about computers, but she’s an intelligent woman and perfectly capable of learning if she only believed she could.  The whole conversation between us was littered with her saying she couldn’t possibly do it herself, [...]