April 2016
Intermediate to advanced
325 pages
9h 24m
English
Content preview from Designed for Use, 2nd Edition
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Interrupt Users Only For Truly Urgent Decisions
You should never interrupt a user just to inform her that something has happened. Aza Raskin, Mozilla’s former creative lead for Firefox, says that decisionless interruptions have “an efficiency of 0 percent,” because the user can do only one thing; the user is never giving the computer any new information, regardless of how he reacts to such an interruption.[95]
What people are actually seeing in those cases is something like this:
If the information is not particularly important, don’t show it. If ...