placement - What is the important aspect to consider when deciding where windows interaction buttons should be placed?

In most windows desktops the minimize, maximize and restore buttons for a window are placed in the windows decoration on the top right. However, MacOS and now Gnome in Ubuntu have placed those buttons on the left.

What is the important aspect when deciding where to place them? Is user expectation from previous experience the most important aspect, or are there other independent aspects that relate to where the user would first look automatically? Is there a difference for localizations where the letters are written from left to right, or from right to left?

Answer

I think this is one of those things where you should do what the user expects.

What do they expect? Well that's sometimes the tricky thing to figure out. Eye movement studies have been done in excess to determine the best placement for the most important call-to-action buttons. And users often start in the upper-left hand corner. On the other hand, these window buttons are so ubiquitous and so familiar that they shouldn't require unnecessary thought. If a user is accustomed to an OS with the buttons on a certain side of the screen they will naturally be looking for them in that spot. Past experience is going to be the dominant factor in what the user expects.

So for example, if your audience is composed of 90% Windows users, I think you should absolutely put these buttons in the upper-right. Windows users will naturally look in the upper-right hand corner for these buttons because that's what they've been trained to do.

Or better yet, if you can adopt the built-in window controls (title and button placement) of the target OS, then it takes this decision out of your hands and the buttons will always be where the user expects.

equities - Why should there be an equity risk premium?

After years of mathematical finance I am still not satisfied with the idea of a risk premium in the case of stocks.

---

I agree that (often) there is a premium for long dated bonds, illiquid bonds or bonds with credit risk (which in fact they all have). I can explain this to my grandmother. My question is very much in the vein of this one. Yes, investors want to earn more than risk free but do they always get it? Or does the risk premium just fill the gap - sometimes positive sometimes negative? Finally: Do you know any really good publications where equity risk premium is explained and made plausible in the case of stocks? Does it make any sense to say "with $x\%$ volatility I expect a premium of $y\%$"? Sometimes stocks are just falling and there is risk and no premium. What do you think?

Answer

If you have the mathematical sophistication, you should review the original papers referenced on the Equity Premium Puzzle page, particularly Mehra and Prescott (1985). Note, however, that contrary to other opinions on this page, the puzzle is NOT that there is an equity risk premium. On the contrary, the puzzle is that the premium had been so high, at least empirically up to the point in time those papers were written. More recently, it has been in vogue to claim that the risk premium has recently been too low, or perhaps even nonexistent. Some also question whether there is a monotonic relationship between risk and reward in the markets (see, e.g., low volatility anomaly). But no serious thinker believes there should be no risk premium at all.

The explanation you can "tell your grandmother" is that all stocks are issued by companies to raise money. Since companies fail a lot more often than governments, particularly governments such as the US that can control their own currency, they must at least promise to investors to pay them more than what they can get "risk-free" from the government. In practice, of course, some companies will fail, and sometimes entire economies will "fail" in the sense of underperforming expectations, and actual returns to investors may not match what was promised. That does not change the fact that what was promised is always greater than what could be gotten "risk-free" from a large, stable government. That is the equity risk premium.

Building a marketplace - which one is better a unified registration or two separate ones?

I'm currently building a marketplace. And need to decide whether to:

• Have two separate registration forms - one for the buyer and one for the seller


• Have a single registration form and then when a user is registered he/she will need to choose what role they want to take (buyer/seller) and will be required to fill additional details relevant to each role

I'm asking this mainly in terms of user experience as I think that there might be a chance that a user will want to function both as a buyer and a seller (though it will probably happen only in 5% of the cases, most will function only as one).

Answer

Why would any user want to have two separate accounts?

If you ask me, I want one login for everything on the internet (and still retain control over my privacy, thank you).

You would build artificial hurdles. I'm a seller, and see something I would like to buy. Do I have to log out, log in with my new "buyers" account, find that product again?
Do I have to use a different browser if I want to monitor my sales while buying?
How many buyers will give up selling and go to ebay if they are overwhelmed by the separate account?

You are not enabling new functionality Any user wants to buy and sell through different accounts can still sign up with separate accounts.

Usability

Any decent UI can comfortably support both buying and selling. Even if you insist on completely separate interfaces, the choice can be made after login and remembered as default for that user - making it a once-in-a-lifetime click,

Build for easy transition. Your power users - those generating the most business - are the most likely to do both. Do you want to penalize your cash/click-cows?

numerical methods - What is a cubature scheme?

Ideally an intuitive explanation with an example, please.

Answer

Cubature (of a given order) is a general method that allows you to do some approximate integration by being exact on a subset of integrand. If you are given a measure $M$ over for example $\mathbb R^n$ then will approach $M$ by (typically) a discrete measure $M^d=\sum_{i=1}^m \lambda_i\delta(x_i) $ such that polynomials $P$ of degree less or equal to $\gamma$ you have :
$$\int_{\mathbb R^n}P(x)dM(x)=\sum_{i=1}^m \lambda_i.P(x_i)$$

In the context of a Stochastic Diffusion processes $X_t$ defined by an SDE (ideally in a Stratonovitch form), if you have the to calculate the expectation of a functional of the diffusion path, then you can think of this as an integration over the Wiener measure. Formally this looks like :

$$E_{\mathbb{W}}[F(X_.)]=\int_{p\in Path}F(p)d\mathbb{W}(p)$$

Of course here the problem is infinite dimensional so quite hard to address in its full generallity and in a numerically tractable form.

Anyway by using Cubature over Wiener Space you can "in a way" approximate the problem by switching to another (and simpler to use) measured space over finite variation paths (recall that Wiener measure doesn't weigh finite variation path !!!) and this approximate measure is such that it matches the values Wiener Measure moments of Iterated Wiener Integral.

This transforms then the SDE into a classical ODE (that can be eventually solved analyticaly or numercaly), and finaly your expectation of your functional becomes hopefully numerically tractable.

Regards

guidelines - Should we use 'Title Case' or 'Sentence case' for headlines and buttons?

I am wondering if we should use Title Case or Sentence case for buttons and headings in websites and web/mobile apps?

Title Case:

   

Sentence Case:

   

In Yahoo's UI guidelines I couldn't find any specific recommendation except for 'choose your style and be consistent'.

Is that all? Or are there any other (additional) recommendations. Like for specific use cases or apps where the one style would be preferred over the other?

Edit: The question refers primarily to English, but differences in other languages are also good to know.

Answer

I prefer 'Sentence case' over 'Title Case' because sentence case respects the difference between proper nouns and the other words.
I always thought that it was customary in English.
In Spanish it is not, we use sentence case, like this traditional argentine newspaper does.
This traditional USA newspaper uses Title Case instead.
These are language differences. For the Spanish for Spanish is not capitalized, same as the weekdays and month names.
US English is more capitalization-prone than Spanish.
UK newspapers use sentence case.
I suspect that Title Case propagates in Spanish pages because it's easier to write and bacause of the influence of the USA sites.

Recommended UI/UX conference in Europe?

Really liked @wnathanlee's USA-question, and it's UK-counterpart but I would like to broaden the field a bit.

I know there are some great conferences/sessions/symposiums/seminars out there on the subject of User Interface Design and Web Usability. If I had to pick one to go to within the next year, which one should it be? And why?

A few disclaimers:

• I would be restricted to a conference inside Europe


• Recommendations based on experience of actually attending are preferred


• One conference per answer, please

latex - How to draw mathematical diagrams in Inkscape

Mathematician here trying to create some diagrams for my undergraduate thesis. I' Long story short, I'd like to be able to create something like this.

I'm trying to work with inkscape and want to be able to export it into a latex file.

Any helpful tips for a complete beginner? I'm especially puzzled by how to get the angles for my vectors right and all the correct fonts.

photo editing - Photoshop a low-res image to make it appear higher-res

I want to enlarge an image to a bigger size. This will cause pixelation. So I want to apply some treatment to it in Photoshop that will suppress some of this pixelation. Of course I cannot generate new pixel information, only smoothen it etc. so that the pixelation is not so much apparent in full views and prints. Example, one effect popular with photographers is to copy the image into a second layer, set its blending mode to overlay or soft light etc., then apply a blur to it. This somewhat smoothens the image. But it also changes its appearance into a glowy kind of look (which is the aim, usually). I want a treatment that will fake the appearance of a higher-res smooth image without too many side-effects.

Any tricks of this kind that anyone knows of?

Answer

In general, enlarge the image using Bicubic interpolation (sometimes, depending on the image, "Bicubic Smoother" works better, but usually straight Bicubic is more satisfactory), then either use Smart Sharpen to bring back the edge contrast, or copy the layer, set the blend mode of the copy to Overlay, and run Filter > Other > High Pass.

Sometimes you can get a better result if you increase the size by a smaller amount, apply a sharpen (not too much!), then increase it some more, apply another sharpen, etc., until you reach the size you want. This takes patience and a lot of trial and error to make it work for any give image, so I don't recommend it except in extreme cases, but once in a while it will allow you to push enlargement beyond where you can go without that intermediate sharpen.

My experience is that the best approach varies according to the image, the amount of upsizing and the result you're looking for. There is a limit to how far you can scale any image before the result becomes too fuzzy to be useful, and the definition of what is useful depends entirely on your application. For graphic design work it is almost never worthwhile to upsize an image more than about 10%.

poetry - What makes a poem a poem?

Warning: long question. To start it off lightheartedly, here is the topic as doggerel.

There are plenty of questions with titles like these:

"What is this form?" — "Can I do this in poems?"
— "How can I be more poetic?" and so on.
What I'm after, however, is more elemental.
Which is the language that poetry uses,
which is the language of prose?
(Do they differ?)

Meter and rhyme we are all too familiar with,
inverted syntax we note and move on,
"elegant" words that abound in thesauri...
what will remain when the line breaks are gone?

---

Quite seriously, though, I've been looking at the poetry of the day and wondering what makes it poetry. I don't mean this in a curmudgeonly way (I'm repressing that instinct), but with an honest eye to seeing in them what the editors, publishers, and the public see in them.

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Modern examples

Here's the beginning of a poem by Sara Peters that won the 2015 Poetry Prize of The Walrus, a prominent Canadian magazine (the original is without line breaks):

One summer in my youth the young girl with the solar system tattooed on her face ruled the Town, and I spent all my nights wishing she would hitchhike to my parents’ farmhouse, kick down the front door, and find me. Lying on top of my quilt I listened for the girl so hard I could hear the tomatoes from our garden drying out in the oven.

Here is some John Ashbery from last August in Harper's, line breaks removed:

First of all, you aren’t telling me the whole story.

Friday saw armpit futures rise across the country. It is an acknowledged truth that you and your little brother sidled across a city of two million souls. Well, and were we supposed to forget it?

That’s not the way the soul functions in today’s suburbia.

Here is a poem very typical of Rupi Kaur, one of Canada's best-selling poets right now (again with line breaks removed):

What terrifies me most is how we foam at the mouth with envy when others succeed but sigh in relief when they are failing. Our struggle to celebrate each other is what's proven most difficult in being human.

And to stress the sincerity of this question, here is one of my favourite poets, Annie Dillard, again with line breaks removed:

For many hours the train flies along the banks of the Hudson about two feet from the water. At the stops, passengers run out, buy up bunches of celery, and run back in, chewing the stalks as they go.

Indeed, my own poetic style would resemble this last one if subjected to the same cruel linebreakectomy.

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Inklings of observations

Looking at the above examples (and needless to say, infinitely more can be found in the pages of any magazine publishing today), I might make a few observations:

• 
  

  Poetry uses sparse but striking details to quickly conjure up strong images

  
  
  
  
  • "the young girl with the solar system tattooed on her face"
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  Poetry exaggerates the literal to convey an emotion

  
  
  
  
  • "I could hear the tomatoes drying out"
  
  
  • "We foam at the mouth with envy"
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  Poetry gently bends the language in terms of what sorts of things may do what and in what way

  
  
  
  
  
  • "I listened so hard"
  
  
  • "The soul functions"
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  Poetry speaks obliquely of its subject, making central what are unusual collocations that require some untangling to figure out

  
  
  
  
  • "armpit futures"
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  Poetry makes much of the mundane, drawing the eye to the human nature in little things

  
  
  
  
  • "run out, buy up bunches of celery, chewing the stalks"
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  Poetry is not bashful about dialogue as narration, with its attendant second person, present tense, etc.

  
  
  
  
  
  • "First of all, you aren't telling me the whole story"
  
  
  
  

But for each of those points the nagging question is: Doesn't prose do so too?

Is poetry the seemingly prosaic works quoted above, or is it defined by fairly superficial formal qualities like meter, rhyme, rarity of diction, and line breaks? Can one rank the qualities of poetry in terms of those we can sacrifice, as this answer eloquently advises in matters of translation?

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Poemification

Last spring I paused work on a little program that converts prose into poetry based on just such superficial vectors (rhythm, line breaks, rhyme, synonyms, etc.). The user can configure a host of settings to produce poems in various genres. I was happy with the progress I was making, so bear with me as I share some examples.

Consider this sentence from Tolkien's The Hobbit:

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.

One configuration that privileges rhythm produces:

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole,
Filled with the ends of worms
And an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare,
Sandy hole with nothing in it to sit
Down on or to eat.

But if we privilege line-end half-rhymes, the program produced:

Not a nasty, dirty, wet
Hole, filled with the ends
Of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet
A dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit
Down on or to eat.

In another genre, here's a sentence of Faulkner ("The Bear"):

For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document.

Aiming for brevity and modernism, the program might produce:

six years man's hunter six years
heard best talking wilderness large woods
bigger and older recorded document

In another test the program analyzed this questionable prose:

I had a cat, once, named Butterscotch. He died in April. It was a long time ago, I know, but all the same, I miss him. I repeat his name often. He was the finest cat I had ever seen.

And isolated these four words:

I had
I had

And coming back to more technical forms, I took Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18", excised the line breaks, and had the program reconstruct it based on rhymes and metrical feet. (It wasn't perfect; Shakespeare rhymes "intemperate" with "date" and the program can't do eye-rhymes yet.)

The program also assigned a score to each poem based on how amenable the prose had been to these "poemifying" procedures...

I paused work on this program not only to take a little distance from it, but also because I think I fundamentally philosophically disagree with the aim.

Poetry isn't just manipulated prose. It starts from an entirely different place. It uses different metaphors, a different structure, different sorts of brevity. It treats different subjects.

Or does it?

Answer

Well, it's a very old question, and one that is not likely to get a definitive answer. It is perhaps worth making a distinction between poetry and verse. Verse is a literary form that is characterized by the use of rhythm to achieve literary effects, the most foundational of which is simply to make it easier to remember. Verse arises out of the oral tradition where stories were spoken, not written, and using verse made it easier to remember them. Verse can be defined, therefore, by certain technical properties, even if not everyone will agree on which technical properties qualify.

The word poetry, on the other hand, seems to have two principal uses: one is as a synonym for verse, the other as a term of artistic judgement, perhaps we might say a matter of affect (in the literary sense of the word).

There are a couple of infamous lines from Wordsworth:

I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Verse? Certainly. Poetry? Maybe not. It is closer to technical writing than anything else.

Life would be simple enough if we were willing to say that poetry was verse with affect. But if someone insists on separating poetry from verse, then how do you tell poetry from prose with affect (since any good novel is prose with affect)?

And I don't see how we can go any further down that road without this becoming entirely a matter of opinion, and thus entirely off topic.

pixel grid - Illustrator clipping mask leaves an outline

This question has already been asked a couple times: here and here*. Those question's answers do not satisfy me, however, and I think it is a slightly different issue. Besides, I'm using Illustrator CS6.

Say, I have a white object on a coloured background:

And I apply a clipping mask to it like so:

No matter my colour settings or way of exporting, I tend to end up with very visible coloured lines marking the places where the mask cuts off the white shape:

Is there a way to avoid this glitch? Oddly enough, it doesn't pop up when I punch out the object and then clip the resulting punched shape and place the result on the regular white background.

The fact that the offending line is lighter than the actual colour I use, makes me think it has something to do with pixel alignment. I do, however, kind of refuse to work with pixel alignment, because it prevents me from exact positioning. And I wonder how I would have to solve the issue on a clipping mask that is, say, hexagonal:

*Scott/SOIA's solution to this question, unchecking 'Anti-Aliased Artwork', doesn't do the trick for me, especially when exporting to *.jpg.

Search techniques to find related clients in a database

I am looking for a FE search technique that an agent user can use to find related clients (family members) within a database of their clients.

A new product is being launched with an option where there is value to the agent if they can group related clients together. The tool we are building will help the agent with the grouping but we only have the client list and their addresses, and we want to help provide suggestions.

Here is an example of the data we can provide:

We had originally thought the agent would search all clients under the same address, but during user testing they did not have the addresses, and did not choose to look them up. Instead going with client name.

An idea has been floated that we just give them all their matches or give them the option. You lookup client name and then checkbox to see other types of suggestions. This may work but looks pretty ugly.

Another UX question helped me find these JS Angular chips search method, which would let the agent search multiple clients to build a larger group to make selections but does not help with giving them other possible family members they may have forgotten about.

The least appealing option would be to make available a separate list for each client where we have gleaned all possible suggestion based on address or surname. This is not great because it is not dynamic, and if a group is created and they later forget to add a new policy to the group then the tool would help and a report would be less value.

Any thoughts on how to complete the search?

Note: search will be FE. All data will be loaded FE and searches/filters completed without further severside inquiries.

Answer

Redefining search results can be done with filters. Filters should be used to lower the number of results, but using filters to make a search of a search result can become confusing.

You can make use of filters manually such as the way Evernote does. For example

chicken tag:cooking created:2016

This can be achieved using some UI as the one you propose in the question.

---

If you want to recommended similar/related searches you can take a look at how Google images does it (images in the black box are similar to the one selected):

In your case something similar displaying "Clients with the same surname" or/and "Clients with the same street" could work. But in my opinion it needs to be separated from the normal search results.

Something similar to this:

It could be using a different tab, a modal, etc. The point is to make a new list of results from a selected result, not from the search field.

---

Also I don't think it is a good idea to use two search fields. You could use one and give the user both results in different tabs (think of Google image | videos | map), give the user the tag filter system commented before, or make the selection of that search in a dropdown/radio buttons ("name" | "address"). Or leave it to one search field.

website design - Content as the whole page or just the content area?

This is an opinion question that I go back and forth on every time I start a new project. In most cases, I am designing a website that has some sort of "article" element, whether it be a blog post, event listing, etc. Something that uses a template for multiple bits of the same type of content. I'm sure this is not unfamiliar.

When laying out these templates, I am usually working with a variation on the classic two-column layout (as seen on this page) with content on the left in a large area and a smaller-width sidebar to the right.

The issue is, I struggle with whether or not to make the sidebar, or at least the top few sections of the sidebar, "part" of the content of that article (or post, or event listing) or whether the sidebar should remain a constant part of the site itself and the only part that should be specific to that article is the content frame itself.

On one hand, I feel like the sidebar should be separate to focus the attention all to one frame (the content) which also makes sense considering I assume many people tune out the sidebar because it's almost always used for ads on many sites.

On the other hand, I think it also makes sense to use the sidebar for info/links pertaining to the current article (like this page, with the "similar questions" sidebar). For a functional site like stackexchange, this makes perfect sense. In other contexts, it could get muddy.

Now, I know there is not a right or wrong answer to this, but I'm very interested to see what others think about this little design tidbit. So where do you all stand: Dynamic content all within the content column or content + a customized sidebar as well?

typography - In a sentence ending with a bold or italicised word, does the period need to be bold/italicised too?

Maybe this will be considered a bit of a nitpicking argument, but I constantly find myself asking: In a paragraph where the last word is bold or italicised, should I make the period at the end bold or italicised too.

For example, which of the following is preferrable?

Today I met a lot of interesting people.
Today I met a lot of interesting people.

What would design best practices recommend? Of course at small sizes it’s hard to find a difference, but as size increases it catches the eye more and more and then I’m not sure anymore which one makes for the most appropriate choice.

Answer

The older convention was that the style of punctuation matched the immediately preceding context:

That's the Chicago Manual of Style (3rd edition, 1911), but the same convention can be seen in a French equivalent: Désiré Greffier, Les règles de la composition typographique (Paris: A. Muller, 1897), pp. 54-55.

And it's not only an older convention, as the Art. Lebedev Studio continues to advocate this same principle:

Having said that, as noted in other answers, Bringhurst seems to have imposed a different standard -- or at least he is widely cited with the instruction to ignore context and use 'upright' punctuation. His preference gets some interesting discussion, historical context, and push-back in the Typophile forum.

See also these Q&A's from elsewhere in the Stack Exchange network:

web app - Responsive design: Should I go bigger than 1024px?

I have 6 responsive variations for a web app, from 916px to 320px wide. While running some internal tests, 2 out of 6 people mentioned that they would prefer if the app responded to bigger screens too, instead of stopping at 960px. This group is not exactly representative of future users, who will most likely have 1024 or 1280 px resolutions, but I'm afraid I might be applying what I do to what I think most users will do (I have a big screen, but my browser is never maximised).

Should I consider a further responsive step to, say, 1260px? Although most people have those mentioned resolutions, is there any data around what percentage uses the browser in 'fullscreen'?

Answer

The short answer is: if you already account for 6 different mobile screen resolutions, you should also account for many large screen resolutions - keep things consistent.

The long answer: You're over-complicating this. There're 28 "standard" resolutions and creating a dedicated layout for all of them takes too much precious time. Instead, you should follow what is know as The Goldilocks Approach: 3 screen sizes of "narrow", "regular", and "wide". You can increase it to 4 or 5 if you so desire (and have the resources), but mixing responsive break points with fluid sections (i.e. widths set in percentages) will cover you for nearly any screen. See Microsoft's new website for real-world example (4 break points).

Compress large PDF files in Illustrator

I have a large PDF file (5 MB+) which is generated from a large dataset. The amount of details in the plot are very fine, which makes it nearly impossible to handle in Illustrator.

I want to effectively compress the file, but I can't find a good solution. I have tried a lot of different options, but nothing seems to work well (I can reduce the file by a factor 2 approximately).

Is there a way to reduce the amount of details in the figure (by combining anchor points or similar), so the size of the file is reduced by a factor 10+?

pagination - Why paginate/page break an infinitely scrolling dynamic list?

There is no shortage of pagination questions on UX.SE.

Still, something struck me recently while looking through Google's Image search: it's a dynamically-loaded, infinitely-scrollable list with (some form of) pagination, which seems like a unique case.

I mulled over a few reasons for it, but discarded them:

1. As an anchor for content: "Hey, Joe, search 'pagination' and check out page 2". This doesn't work because Google tailors search results per user, so my page 2 won't be Joe's page 2.


2. 'Page breaks' demarcate loading zones. Not the case; content is dynamically loaded between Page breaks. Even then, why would the user care?


3. To show how much you've already loaded. That's why scrollbars have dynamically-sized handles.

Why would a designer implement this? Is there a genuine advantage to the user that I'm missing?

Answer

I would say it's probably an artifact of the days before the infinite scroll. Probably there to keep from confusing older or less-tech-savvy users.

Possibly it's an engineering remnant, they already had everything broken up in some way and so it was easier to include the pagination than to remove it.

And a third possibility: The use case where a user comes, sees an image and wants to find it later, they remember they had to get to page 3 to see it.

Is the color red really appropriate for form validation errors?

It seems to be taken for granted that the color red is appropriate to highlight errors. In the case of serious system errors, I agree. However, I'm having doubts that it's the right choice for user generated errors, like form validation.

It's common to see something like this:

To me, this feels equivalent to blaming or yelling at the user. I've considered something like this instead:

It feels like a message with a gentler tone even though the words are the same.

My opinion: Users don't need to feel like they caused an "error", and forms are already annoying enough as it is, especially when you've made a mistake or two (because after all, the user isn't trying to pass in an invalid email on purpose). It's just a small, correctable mistake - not a show-stopper.

System errors are a different thing: they aren't necessarily the user's fault, and they can really mean that something is broken or out of the user's control. Is there any reason why user generated errors should (or should not) be red?

* ^{Note: I'm concerned about the colors, not necessarily the message text or icons.}

Answer

I think red is pretty much the convention in this context so you should use red for errors that need to be fixed before you can move on/send the form. Yellow is in general for warnings (eg. user perhaps should/could improve something, but it does not stop from proceeding). Yellow can be used with for example with one of those password strength thingies where bar shows how strong your password is: warn user when they give weak or very common password.

You should follow conventions (unless you have a very strong reason not to). To paraphrase Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience: people will spend most of their time somewhere else than on your website.

One important point to understand is that using conventional colors for errors is important because they make the errors more noticeable. User being annoyed by the color of error message is lot less of a problem than user not being able to complete the form because they didn't notice the error. At least in most cases.

fiction - What are most common tropes of a paranormal book and dark fantasy book?

I'm trying to decide what genre my novel should be. I wanna be more generic so the answers can help other people, so my question is: How to know if a story is a dark fantasy or a paranormal story? What are the typical writing styles/tropes to look for that can help make that decision?

Answer

First of all, defining a work into a genre is tricky. Most books belong to most than one genre, others don't belong to any and end up "inventing" a whole new genre.

I personally have a small grudge against dark fantasy because I feel that it is not well-defined enough and being used to draw readers. "Look at this, it's not regular boring fantasy. It's (suspense) DARK fantasy!".

But, rants aside, yours is a great question so here's my answer. Please notice that there's no "genre manual" and this is based mostly into what I feel is common knowledge.

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Dark Fantasy

Dark fantasy is generally considered to be deeply unsettling and/or scary fantasy. It takes many elements of high-fantasy and puts a twist on them to accomplish this.

The most common twists are in the lines of "the hero is actually an asshole" or "the villain is just a guy trying to survive like us all". This kind of twist makes the story more gray in moral terms and that is "dark", because the choices the heroes make keep haunting them and us, readers. There are also very weird, but surprisingly effective twists. I recently saw a story where medieval knights rode dinosaurs instead of horses.

Other twists might affect or discuss the typical stereotypes from traditional fantasy. I have seen a dark fantasy book written from the POV of orcs. This is "dark" not only because archetypal orcs are brutal killing machines, but also because they are the heroes and you are rooting for them. You want them to be brutal killing machines. And that's scary, discovering such bloodlust within yourself. The orc main characters are also effective because they put everything you thought you knew about fantasy through another perspective. What if the Fellowship of the Ring were the bad guys, after all?

Dark fantasy also is frequently paired with a glorification of violence rarely found on more traditional fantasy. While a "light fantasy" book might simply say an enemy was killed, a dark fantasy one will say it was brutally stabbed, dark blood spraying from the uneven cut while its limbs trembled and an horrid dying cry came out of his mouth while it drowned on its own blood.

There's also huge emphasis on the various forms of suffering and human imperfection. Expect a lot of cruel characters, ugly characters, crippled characters, homeless characters, outlaws, prostitutes, assassins, tyrants, war, plague, pollution, famine, death, you name it. If it's something bad (or an indicator of something bad), there's a good chance it will show up in dark fantasy.

---

Paranormal

As the name implies, paranormal stories focus on something from out of what is considered "normal".

However, "normal" is an incredibly subjective matter. What is normal for you might not be normal for your characters and vice versa. Lord of the Rings has dwarves, elves and dragons, things very far from our reality, but the characters barely bat an eye at them.

Paranormal stories are about the paranormal element, why it is paranormal and what consequences it brings to what was normal. Paranormal things disturb the normal reality and that's what makes them disturbing. Ghosts are disturbing because they can do very unusual things (traversing walls being the classical example), they are beyond any explanation and they prove there is life beyond death, which raises a lot of unsettling questions. When you are being pursued by a ghost, you're not only being followed by a sheet with holes for eyes. You are being pursued by something you cannot evade, who can kill or harm you, even being dead itself, and challenges your very notion of reality.

Also, keep in mind that simply showing something out of the reality is not enough. If a ghost shows up, says "hey" and then disappears, never to be seen again, it is not a paranormal story. It's a story with a paranormal element. For it to be a paranormal story, you have to focus in how the character's reality is being threatened by the paranormal event. Fear and paranoia are good places to start.

Is pixelmator a viable alternative for photoshop?

I've always been a photoshop user, i know the ins and outs and know my way around all the tools i need for my webdesign work. But now i'm faced with a dilemma, for my new job i haven't got the budget for a full photoshop license so i'm wondering, is pixelmator a good alternative?

I use Photoshop mainly to slice a design into separate images so enable/disable layers is a must, PSD compatibility too, ...

Anyone has experience with Pixelmator?

Answer

No.

Pixelmator is quite nice--especially for the price. And I've been using it for a while for my own personal side projects. 2.0 came out and added some nice features.

Alas, it has issues. The big ones:

• it's buggy. I think it's a bit premature to call it '2.0' IMHO. Still feels a little beta.


• doesn't support full range of PSD layer information. It can open PSD files, but since it can't bring over all the layer effects and styles, it's really not practical.


• very limited export abilities. The big one is PNG files. If you let it compress them, you get big color shifts. If you export it as a non-web PNG, it's huge, and then you have to use 3rd party tools to further compress.

I think it has a lot of potential, and eventually will be a great runner-up, but it still won't be PhotoShop.

As for slicing, it does do that (aside from the PNG issues). (I'd suggest not using a 'slice n dice' workflow anymore, but that's a different discussion...)

resources - Reference books for data visualisation and dashboard design

Please could you recommend some reference texts or other resources concerned with business data visualisation and dashboard design.

There's Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few on Amazon but perhaps you can recommended others.

adobe illustrator - Can somone explain the layer target icon?

In the Illustrator layer pallete, somtimes the layer target icon is filled in, and somtimes not.

Can somone explain to me what the difference is?

Answer

From the Illustrator help pages

The target icon indicates whether an item in the layer hierarchy has any appearance attributes and whether it is targeted

The filled in icon means the layer has appearance attributes beyond a single fill and a single stroke.

You can read more here: https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/appearance-attributes.html

svg - Inkscape: How to overlay objects with transparent fill?

I'm trying to create a spherical triangle with 3 circles placed on top of it in Inkscape. The fill of the circles and the triangle should be transparent. Here's my progress so far:

How do I cut the path of the triangle that goes inside the circle? I've tried the options in the Path menu such as Union, Difference, Intersection, etc. but none of them seem to do what I want.

Answer

Duplicate the circle by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+D. That generates another circle on the top.

Select the triangle holding shift at the same time. Now you should have the top circle and the triangle selected, one circle should be unselected. (BTW. learn how to make the selections in the layers panel, you see what is selected, what's not and what is the actual ordering of the shapes)

Goto Path > Cut Path. Top circle vanishes, one stays. (In succesful path operations the topmost path often vanishes. Here you started with making a copy.)

Select the tip of the triangle and press DEL

psychology - Why do some apps feel "heavy" while others feel "light"?

I have come up with a new concept and that is that every application or interface has a 'heavyness factor'.

Let me give you an example:

Google chrome feels 'light', it loads fast, doesn't take long to perform various functions etc etc. Firefox feels 'heavy', it takes longer to load, always asks me for updates etc, I have to devote more effort into using it.

My question: does this perception of software as 'heavy' or 'light' have psychological roots? Does it have a proper name? Is there a term in HCI where we observe users describing non-real objects with real-world metaphors?

optimization - Sharpe Maximization under Quadratic Constraints

When doing Sharpe optimization

$$ \max_x \frac{\mu^T x}{\sqrt{x^T Q x}} $$

there is a common trick (section 5.2) used to put the problem in convex form. You add a variable $\kappa$ such that $x = y/\kappa$ choose $\kappa$ s.t. $\mu^T y=1$. Changing the problem to the simple convex problem

$$ \min_{y,\kappa} y^T Q y \; \text{where} \; \mu^T y = 1, \kappa > 0 $$

which is easy to solve.

Unfortunately, my problem also has a second-order constraint that becomes non-convex in $(y,\kappa)$ $$ x^T P x \leq \sigma^2 \implies y^T P y \leq \kappa^2 \sigma^2 $$

Is there a trick to keep this problem convex and allow the use of second-order cone programming algorithms?

gui design - Should the OK/Cancel buttons be aligned right or centered?

Where should I put the OK/Cancel buttons on my dialogs? At the bottom centered or aligned right? I've seen both and I personally don't care, but I want to create a consistent look across my application. Are there any guidelines for this or should I just do whatever I want?

Answer

I think this applies to this question too and answers it:

(Spoiler: It doesn't matter.)

In cases like this, it often doesn't matter what you do. Either choice has good arguments in its favor, and no choice is likely to cause usability catastrophes. It might save some users 0.1 seconds if you pick the "right" choice for certain circumstances, but it's simply not worth it to conduct sufficiently elaborate research to find out what that choice is. Better to spend your usability resources on those things that can change your key performance indicators by 83% or more.

More info: useit.com/alertbox/ok-cancel.html

creative writing - How does a code monkey become a novelist?

I have always loved creative writing, but honestly do not see software engineers that write fiction all that often. Heck, I do not see software engineers that read fiction all that often either.

To those who have done it:

• Did the transition from coder to novelist come as a result of laborious study and training(professional/self), or did you employ some other strategy?


• What characteristics of the coder mind set lend themselves to writing fiction well, and which ones are a hindrance?


• Are there any habits or "mind hacks" that you can recommend for getting the coder mind in shape to do serious fiction writing?

Answer

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a novelist, not by a long shot. I've written some (local award winner) short stories as a teenager and I'm working on my first novel, but that's it. On the other hand, I've been practically born an engineer :)

Having said that, I guess there are many different approaches to writing, as many as there are people. As a programmer you probably have developed rational thinking an analytic skills, that can be extremely handy when attempting to write.

I'm approaching writing from that perspective. I'm very interested in books that deal with narrative structure - in a way, I'm trying to figure out "how stories work". For example, The Writer's Journey deals with the classical myth structure and archetypes. I also liked Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach.

But the book I connected with most is Writing Fiction for Dummies. Yes, it's a For Dummies book, but it's written by a guy who is both a published, award-winning novelist AND a PhD in astrophysics and/or math (not sure). His approach is called "The Snowflake Method", in reference to the fractal structure of snowflakes, which he uses as an analogy for the structure of fiction.

He has a very interesting blog and website with articles (just ignore the ugly design). I'm in no way affiliated with them nor with the books, I'm just a reader and fan :)

In summary, I think as engineers wearing the fiction writer hat, we should definitely take advantage of our strengths.

scanning - How can I merge an image scanned in parts into one complete whole?

I have a large image I traced and cut into smaller images to scan (because I have a small scanner).

I need to manually merge the images back together but am only finding automated features that won't work for me because there is no overlap.

Anyone have suggestions?

gimp - Cleaning up line art with choppy edges

So, a while back I created this icon from a game, but looking back on it behind a white background instead of an alpha-channel its edges are super choppy in some places while it's smooth in others, which is possibly due to the method I used to select certain regions before bucket-filling it. I was using GIMP and I was wondering if there is any possible way to easily fix this (ie make all edges even instead of choppy). Maybe some rendering filters or selection methods that I don't know about? I've googled and youtubed but with no avail.

My image:

(As you can see, the inner crescent-shaped things are choppy as well as the exterior of the circle on the left and right is choppy)

Answer

I'd say there's no quick and dirty fix for choppy lines, you just gotta recreate it using vectors. The following took me 3 minutes in Photoshop with Circles and Stroke effect:

I'm not going to do it all for you, but all you need is two more half circles and you've got a shape based logo, which should scale beautifully to any size. So that's 6 circles, two semi-circles and a stroke applied to some of them. In your case it's very simple to recreate, but a detailed logo would take a lot longer.

There are various ways to do this, though in your case I'd just knuckle down and spend a little while doing this, if you're proficient with any GD software that creates shapes, this shouldn't even take half an hour and if you aren't, now is a good time to learn a few reusable skills.

Also Save for Web & Devices..

fx - Forex trading scenarios - calculating units

I'm trying to build an automated forex trading system and I'm trying to understand how to calculate the number of units I should specify for each trade in different scenarios. Say for example I have an account with a broker in USD and I've deposited $1000. Ignoring leverage, I'd like to allocate my entire balance in each of the following scenarios. In each scenario I've tried to explain how I think the calculation should be performed..

Long USD/JPY

Buy USD, sell JPY
USD is the base currency so units (USD) = 1000

Long EUR/USD

Buy EUR, sell USD
units (EUR) = 1000 / [EUR/USD].Ask

Long EUR/JPY

Buy euros, sell yen
How many yen can we get with 1000 dollars?

Buy yen with dollars
Instrument = USD/JPY
USD (selling) is the base currency so multiply by the bid
So yen = 1000 * [USD/JPY].Bid
units (EUR) = yen * [EUR/JPY].Ask

Update:

units (EUR) = yen / [EUR/JPY].Ask

Long GBP/NZD

Buy GBP, sell NZD
How many NZD can we get with 1000 USD
Instrument = NZD/USD
USD (selling) is the quote currency so divide by the ask
So NZD = 1000 / [NZD/USD].Ask
units (GBP) = NZD / [GBP/NZD].Ask

Short USD/JPY

Sell dollars for yen
units (USD) = 1000

Short EUR/USD

Sell euros, buy dollars
units (EUR) = 1000 * [EUR/USD].Ask

Update:

units (EUR) = 1000 / [EUR/USD].Bid

Short EUR/JPY

Sell euros, buy yen
How many euros can I buy with 1000 dollars?
Instrument EUR/USD
USD (selling) is the quote currency so divide by the ask

units (EUR) = 1000 / [EUR/USD].Ask

Short CHF/JPY

Sell CHF and hold JPY
How much CHF can we buy with 1000 USD?
Instrument = USD/CHF
USD (selling) is the base currency to multiply by the bid
units (CHF) = 1000 * [USD/CHF].Bid

So the question is - have I got the logic right in each scenario?

[ This is a follow up question to my previous question - Calculating units in a cross currency short trade ]

Is it bad UX to omit a progress indicator?

Background: Stack Exchange now lets you paste images from the clipboard into the image upload dialog. Unfortunately, there is no indication that an upload is going on. I am wondering if this is really bad UX or it just affects me.

There are generally some functions in an app that take an unpredictable amount of time. Let's take an upload for example.

Is it OK to omit any indicator of the fact that the upload is indeed in progress? It doesn't matter if it shows how much the upload has proceeded, something like which says "Something is going on, please wait. There is no need to keep clicking that button." is fine as well. I'm comparing situations when you press a button and nothing happens until the upload (or whatever) is complete.

Is this a bad UX decision? Have there been any studies on this?

Answer

There's plenty of research about this. Much of it is in the area of perceived performance -- how long it feels like an action takes. Steve Seow has an excellent book titled Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software.

One of its major results is how we perceive response time:

• "instantaneous" (0.1 – 0.2 seconds)


• "immediate" (0.5 – 1 second)


• "longer" (2-5 seconds or more)

If an action is instantaneous or immediate, then you don't need to show a progress indicator. But if it's over 1s, then you should show a progress indicator. Determinate progress indicators are better than indeterminate progress indicators, but an indeterminate progress indicator is better than nothing. If a user has taken an action but there is nothing to indicate that the system is actually doing something, then the user loses trust in the system.

user expectation - Pencil icon for create vs edit - Is there a correct answer?

I recently faced this scenario where I had to use 3 icons, for create, edit and add, respectively. The idea is that users will be able to create documents, add sections within the document and edit documents/sections.

A quick search on Google's Material design fetches this. I understand that the suggestion is to use the pencil icon as create while designing for content and as edit while designing for image manipulation.

Often, different apps and services use this icon interchangeably for both create and edit actions. Is there a consensus or literature on when the pencil icon must be used, and how to distinguish between 'create' and 'edit' actions? (I understand that a simple + can be used for create, but in my case, I was using it already for adding sections).

Answer

It's important to remember that every icon's meaning is interpreted based on its context. For example, a plus icon in one scenario might mean zoom in, in another scenario add; a magnifying glass might mean zoom or search.

I've looked at a few apps, here's how I see the pencil icon being used:

Create

I've seen this usage in Dropbox Paper to create a document and in Signal and Telegram to write a message. In each of these, I found the meaning of the icon intuitive, in context it was clear that the icon means "write a message" or "write a document" rather than "edit". It's important to note that this meaning probably wouldn't carry across in situations where one doesn't write—e.g. to create a shape.

Edit

This usage seems to be more common. I've seen it in Todoist, Google Docs, and Camera, to name a few. Interestingly, it's used in Dropbox Paper to mean "edit document" as well, and the meaning is clear from context.

Take-aways

A pencil icon is useful for both situations, even though there may exist alternatives. It's important to make sure that the meaning of the icon is clear in context. As long as that's guaranteed, choosing a pencil icon for writing a message as opposed to a plus is similar to choosing "Write message" vs. "Create message" as its label.

Your situation

You may very well use the same icon for creating documents, adding sections, and editing documents. Or you may find that a plus icon works better for some items and a pencil icon for others.

Just make sure it's clear from the context what the icon does (and double-check through user testing).

options - What is the analogue used by Hull to price European calls with known cash dividends?

From The Book by Hull:

And Hull's comment:

2. This rule is analogous to the one developed in Section 14.12 for valuing a European option on a stock paying known cash dividends. (In that case we concluded that it is correct to reduce the stock price by the present value of the dividends; in this case we discount the stock price at the dividend yield rate.)

What 14.12 says is if there is a known future cash dividend $(D,\tau)$ then the European call price at the beginning is the value obtained by replacing $S_0$ with $S_0-D_0$ in the BS formula where $D_0=De^{-r\tau}$ represents the present value of the cash dividend at time $0$.

However, I'm quite confused how Hull has developed this analogue.

My attempt to analogise his argument for continuous dividend yield: in the case of a known cash dividend $(D,\tau)$ suppose our stock grows from $S_0$ at time $0$ to $S_T$ at time $T$; then in the absence of this dividend I think the stock would grow to $S_T + De^{r(T-\tau)}$ (a bit dubious); the ratio of growth is thus $(S_T + De^{r(T-\tau)})/S_0$. Now, without any dividend, what initial stock price would grow to $S_T$ following this ratio? It must be $S_T/((S_T + De^{r(T-\tau)})/S_0)$. So it means that replacing $S_0$ with this amount in the BS formula gives the price in case of a known cash dividend, which is completely ridiculous, as the correct formula Hull gives replaces $S_0$ with $S_0-De^{-r\tau}$ instead.

So what is wrong with my reasoning and what should be the correct way to prove this analogue?

Answer

Remember that Black-Scholes formula applies to lognormally distributed (under $\Bbb{Q}$) terminal asset prices $S_T$. It is convenient to write this assumption $$ S_T \underset{\Bbb{Q}}{\sim} \ln \mathcal{N}\left( \ln(F(0,T))-\frac{1}{2}\sigma^2 T, \sigma^2 T \right) \tag{A} $$ since it shows that the forward price is the risk-neutral expectation of the future asset price $$\Bbb{E}_0^\Bbb{Q} [ S_T ] = F(0,T)$$

When $(A)$ holds, the price of a European call of strike $K$ and maturity $T$ reads (Black-Scholes formula) $$ C(K,T) = DF(0,T) \left( F(0,T) N(d_+) - K N(d_-) \right) $$ $$ d_{\pm} = \frac{\ln\left( \frac{F(0,T)}{K}\right) \pm \frac{1}{2}\sigma^2 T}{\sigma \sqrt{T}} $$

Now think of how dividends, impact the forward price in [MODEL 1] (dividend yield model) and [MODEL 2] (escrowed model).

• 
  

  [MODEL 1]: Solving the corresponding SDE $$ dS_t/S_t = (r-q)dt + \sigma dW_t^\Bbb{Q},\,\,\, S(0)=S_0 $$ yields $S_T = S_0 e^{(r-q)T} \mathcal{E}\left[\sigma W_T^\Bbb{Q}\right]$ (lognormal), hence a forward price $$ F(0,T) = S_0 e^{(r-q)T} = \underbrace{S_0 e^{-qT}}_{S_0^*} e^{rT} \tag{B} $$

  
  


• 
  

  [MODEL 2]: Solving the corresponding SDE $$ dS_t/S_t = r dt + \sigma dW_t^\Bbb{Q},\,\, S(0)=S_0-De^{-r\tau} $$ yields $S_T = S(0)e^{(r)T} \mathcal{E}\left[\sigma W_T^\Bbb{Q}\right]$ (lognormal), hence a forward price $$ F(0,T) = \underbrace{\left( S_0 -De^{-r\tau} \right)}_{S_0^*} e^{rT} \tag{C} $$

  
  

This shows that, under both of these models, one can use BS formula $(A)$ by provided one replaces the forward price by what it is under each respective modelling assumption, which is mathematically equivalent (looking at the BS formula only) to using the spot value $S_0^*$ (see $(B)$ and $(C)$) instead of $S_0$.

adobe illustrator - Inkscape's "Stroke to path" produces hole in the middle

I start with an "i" in Chalkboard SE, font size 32 and stroke width 8px. Then I click "Path > Stroke to path" and the design now has a hole in the middle of the dot of the i. The larger the stroke width, the larger the hole, but only in the dot of the "i", not in the main body. Illustrator also gives the same result (after Expand of Object and Fill and Expand of Fill and Stroke, then hiding the fill).

Even more puzzling, with a French cursive font (direct link to .ttf font here), the "i" with font size 47.5px, stroke width 5 pixels, with stroke path expanded and united with the original object still has two holes, one in the middle of the dot of the i, another small one at the end of the tail to the right. Illustrator does not produce this second hole.

How can I avoid the holes in converting from a stroke to a path?

Update: After @Moini suggested the dynamic offset and "object to path" in an answer, I tested with j in cursive standard and also got a hole in the body of the j. Notice the anchor points inside the outline of this screenshot:

Of course, I could remove the hole by hand, but I want to use the stroke width or path outset programmatically, so fixing it by hand afterwards is tedious.

Second update: I tried stroke width and all the relevant commands under the menu item "Path": outset, dynamic offset, and linked offset. I found no solution. I attach a picture below that summarizes this issue. Expanding an "i" with stroke width produces a hole in the middle, the outset command turns a straight line into a curved line so I didn't try further, and both dynamic offset and linked offset create extraneous paths inside the region that would mess up the design for the laser cutter. I tried both "Object to path" and "stroke to path".

workflow - Version Control for Design files

Can someone describe their workflow they use to handle multiple versions of a file ? For example,

• if more than one person worked on it


• or you explored an idea with the design then realized you have to undo state multiple times and hope you reach the previous state you needed

Does one just save under a different filename every hour / every 15 minutes ?

As a sole designer does one even need version control ?

Answer

I never had to work on the same file with other person but I have 3 ways to deal with multiple versions of a design file.

Milestones

I used milestones for a moment when we were trying the AGILE way as designers (like some developers do). It's quite efficient but takes quite some times (more when you begin to use this. At the end, it's quite nice). Lots of organisation needed.

Number/dates/details in file name

When I started design, I dealt with numbers for versioning. Horrible. Seriously, don't. Or be organize. "Design1.psd" "Design2.psd" etc...

Dates/Hours are nice if you got a good memory of what did I do yesterday?. In my case, less horrible than number but not much more powerful. "Design20100801-1112.psd"

Details are better. I used names like "Design20100801-1112-add-pattern.psd" = date-hour-details. Quite long filenames but it's fast to use and you find your file quite faster than any previous method.

SVN or GIT

a.k.a the real version control

I, now, use SVN. I save regurally the same file "Design1.psd" for example. And every hour or every pause I commit my modifications and give details about it.

If I made an error or the client wanted the previous version, I just update to version xxx and it's done.

It also gives you the power of branches and tags which are really interesting to handle milestones.

There's a reason why developers use version control software/DB/etc... It's efficient and designers should use it too. (But it's quite hard to understand/use in the beginning)

font identification - Star Trek interior plaques

I'm looking for the font found in Star Trek that most likely was routed onto plastic plaque boards during the 60s-70s in offices in general. It looked like the pic provided.

The closest my brother found was DIN Condensed (Rounded) but unfortunately the project Im working on has no budget at all so spending $50-300 for the font is out of the question. Does anyone have an alternative?

irfanview - How can I see what Irfan View did to my original image?

I used Irfan View's "Auto Adjust Colors" to remove yellow tint in bathroom image under. But I want see all changes and steps so I can learn myself what variables to adjust.

Answer

Just look at the histograms before and after.

So basically the adjustment was just black point adjustment per channel, and white point per channel (so spread colors across full range).

info visualisation - Customer testimonials - Embedded tweet vs custom design

Do you think that embedded tweets would work better than custom design to show testimonials?

Embedded tweet are live proof which people can see by clicking on embedded tweet and also embeded tweet can be Favorited and re-tweeted too. Though we can also add link to custom design testimonial but I think twitter embed looks more authentic and recognizable.

Twitter embed example

Custom Design testimonial example

Answer

If you look at the elements that are supposed to make it seem more 'credible' and 'trustworthy', they are:

• Images of the people (along with their name), which traditionally works better than having no images or an anonymous feedback. T


• Having a brand name associated with the feedback (i.e. Twitter) which is probably the more subjective part of the what different people might think about the brand.


• Having an actual way to contact the person, which allows the skeptical people to follow through and verify the testimony. Even though people probably won't go that far and do it, just having the means to do so seems to make it more credible.

I think if you can create those elements in a customized way as well then it probably doesn't matter what option you go with, although you might consider the cost and effort of implementing it.

gui design - Alternative control to drag and drop for assigning tasks to an individual?

I am working on a web application for Branch Managers at an investment bank to assign accounts that are without Financial Advisers for whatever reason. Some reasons are the Financial Adviser has resigned or the client doesn't like them, etc. Branch Managers will have the ability to view accounts that need assigning and view available Financial Advisers. Many accounts can be assigned to only one Financial Adviser.

My application is being developed in Ext and I see through their demos that users can drag and drop items. This seems like a clunky way to assign accounts to new financial advisers, especially since assignments could easily be made in error (choosing the wrong individual). Users will be able to back out if they made a mistake, but this doesn't seem like the best solution. I once worked on a ticketing system that had this ability to drag and drop additional items onto an open ticket and it became very messy.

Do any other types of patterns come to mind for anyone?

typography - What is kerning and what is the point of it?

From what I see here, it seems kerning is just rearranging the space between letters. However, the comments here lead me to believe there's more to the story. Is kerning really that simple? Is the only purpose of it to look nicer or is there some practical reasoning for it?

Answer

I think the Wikipedia kerning article essentially covers it, but the bulk of the article is about adding kerning information to a font during its design, or applications automatically using this built-in information to improve composition of a font's characters -- rather than the a fine-tuning a designer might do on a particularly problematic pair of characters in a headline.

As an example, say the revolutionary new product, the

iVone

was launched; that combination of italic/oblique and roman characters would probably not have been foreseen by the font designer, and so would require special treatment to avoid the dot of the i from colliding with the V.

Letter-letter, or letter-punctuation combinations that are only used in some languages are other situations that might require custom kerning by a designer.

Also to note, fonts contain widely varying amounts of kerning information - this is one of the key differentiators between amateur and professionally produced fonts, or even between different versions of the same font.

adobe illustrator - How to bind line to rectangle

I want to create some kind of flow chart with Illustrator CS3. In other programs it is possible to bind a line or arrow to a rectangle and whenever I drag the rectangle, the binded line is adapted in a way that the line is still "connected" to the rectangle. Is that possible with Illustrator CS3? Thank you!

Answer

There is no way of doing this properly in Illustrator. You'd need to use something like Visio, PowerPoint, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress.

You can select the rectangle and the line's endpoint and move them together, leaving the line's other control points where they are though. Do this using the Direct Selection Tool (white arrow)

I created files AI files using adobe creative cloud. How can I open .eps files in AI CS6?

I created a bunch of files using Adobe Creative Cloud, saved files in both .ai and .eps, but have since decided switch to AI CS6.

I am able to open the .ai file versions without a problem, but when I attempt to open the .eps versions, I get a legacy error message. How can I get the .eps files to open? This is the message I get when I attempt to open the .eps file versions.

transparency - Transparent path/stroke fill in Illustrator

This is an odd request and something I've never had to worry about in Illustrator until now. I'm building out a logo that will be printed on a shirt. Instead of having a solid black border around the vector hand, the client wants the black border to be "transparent" so when it is placed on top of a pattern, you see the pattern background. I have an example below of what I'm trying to accomplish.

The second photo I mocked up in Photoshop to show what I'm trying to do. It's very easy to select the border path in Photoshop and simply wipe it out. Does Illustrator have a "transparent" fill option in the Path area? Selecting a color and dropping the transparent percentage didn't do the trick.

Answer

There is a little known feature, in Illustrator, that allows you to do this non-destructively. That is without expanding and using pathfinder. This can bring some future flexibility to your designs. As a bonus its also less work and works inside effects.

1. 
   

   First turn on transparency grid or put something behind your graphic. This ensures that you can observe the effect.

   
   


2. 
   

   Select the entire graphic (not the background) and group it. This group will determine what gets transparent.

   
   
   
   
   • In the transparency window click on knockout group (If you can not see options in the panel menu enable extra options).
   
   
   
   
   


3. 
   

   Assign the strokes/shapes you want to make transparent with 0% opacity in the transparency panel (if you just want strokes transparent use appearences panel see here). Because of the knockout group option this will now carve through your grouped shape.

   
   

Image 1: Example result.

creative writing - How do you earn the reader's trust?

Recently, I have stumbled upon a problem. After releasing an issue, I think that I failed to earn the trust of my readers. My analysis is that they did not have enough faith in me to make the "right choices" about my story. Let me explain:

One of my protagonist closest friend is a traitor secretly working for the bad guy. He plans to kill the hero, and the reader is not aware of that. I have made sure that he looks like a genuine sidekick, though there is plenty of evidence that suggests he will do something.

Before a battle, he ultimately poisons the hero with a unique type of toxin designed to induce bloodlust and insanity amongst men. I introduced a Chekhov's gun just before to showcase the moment Traitor poisons the hero, but nothing is explicit, a.k.a. the reader does not know that the hero has been poisoned. Then, during the battle, the hero goes on a rampage and kills people from both sides due to the effect of the poison. An action which causes him to lose most of his support and makes him question everything he has been fighting for.

Following this event, he will find a way to win without fighting because he fears to lose his mind a second time. It's only later that we learn the hero rampage was caused by the poison, and that it was all Traitor's fault.

The scene during which the protagonist goes insane was all but successful. Instead of asking themselves "what happened", "why did the hero do that", the readers came with critics like "the hero would never do that", "it makes no sense" or "the story lost its potential". Moreover, if I try to bring the poison and explains it all now, it will sound forced and as if I was trying to "make up" for my mistake (even though it was definitely planned!).

I am confused about this reaction, and I don't know how to handle it. I don't think the plot is the cause. The hero had to go through this trial, and the traitor had to provoke it. Yet, I have been wondering what went wrong. The explanation I came with is that I did not build enough trust. Which begs the question:

What should have I done to have the readers trust me and my story?

Answer

What you should have done, and should do in rewrite, is make it clear to the reader a traitor exists, perhaps make it clear a poison that does exactly that exists, etc. You can do that early in your book, in a story or fable.

The readers already believe the MC would never do this thing. So you need to hang a lantern on this behavior during the battle. Say the poison is called "rage oil", somebody in the battle can scream "Bob's been roofied on rage oil! He killed Stanley! Stay clear!"

So the reader gets it; yes, Bob would never, but Bob's on rage oil, so yeah. Then their focus is indeed on "Who roofied Bob?" You can still leave that part a mystery.

It messes a little with the rest of your plot; now there are people looking for a traitor they can't find. Bob doesn't suspect the real traitor. The real traitor may manage to frame somebody else, or one of the dead. Perhaps, out of caution, he even did that before the battle, getting the poison into Bob's food or drink that got served by someone else. The servant girl that mysteriously ended up with her throat cut once the battle was done. (Traitor killed her).

But it can still be true that Bob is motivated to solve the problem without battle.

In general you have to provide enough clues that the reader has SOME reason for a character to do something they would never do. Go back and plant the seeds earlier in your story, hang a lantern on the MC's behavior during the battle, and leave them with a question that makes sense (who is the traitor), not a contradiction of what they already knew.

This in turn primes the reader for your later reveal; you can't just surprise them out of nowhere with a best friend that was a traitor all along; that feels like a deus ex machina. Now they KNOW there was a traitor, and you can make the dead servant girl seems too darn convenient so the reader knows the traitor is probably still out there. Then they aren't surprised BY the traitor being revealed, only by who it is. But it doesn't look like a deus ex machina, they are forewarned that some trusted person is the traitor, and the best friend was in a position to execute all the sabotages.

Nested Menus in Mobile Apps

Please take a look below. Is it ok to have nested menus like the ones shown below? The main menu is Activity/Practice and Sub menu for Practice is Me/Everyone. Is this ok to do?

Name the on-click menu-in-circle-around-object interface

What is the name for this type of interface?

I would like to learn more about it but first I need to find it's proper name. Any links to related reading are welcome.

EDIT: While adding tags I have discovered the radial-menu tag that led me to a Pie menu on Wikipedia. Links to related reading are welcome. How usable or recommended is the radial menu?

Answer

The biggest advantage of radial or pie menus is their speed. To quote this article.

Radial Menus Are Fast

Radial menus are faster to access than list-based menus in every kind of pointer-based UI, including cursor, stylus, and touch. One big part of that is because every option is spaced at the same distance from the pointer. That’s classic Fitts’ Law: the closer the target and the bigger it is, the easier and faster it is to hit.

Even better: you get faster with radial menus over time, because they take advantage of muscle memory in a way that list-based menus cannot. Radial menus are essentially gesture-based: touch-swipe-release. That’s why some call radial menus “marker menus”: it’s like making a mark on the screen. Swiping to 2 o’clock has one meaning, and swiping to 6 o’clock another. Like all physical actions—playing an instrument, typing a keyboard, serving a tennis ball—gestures get embedded in muscle memory, which is faster to access than visual memory. Tap-swipe is faster than scanning for an item in a linear list, just like touch-typing is faster than hunt-and-peck.

The same article references two rather old research papers which have this to say on the merits of radial selections

Research paper 1 : Do note this paper is no longer available on the net hence there is no way to validate if the reference is correct.To quote the article

The research on this has been in the can for nearly 25 years. A 1988 study did the comparison and found that for a specific test of eight-item lists, users were faster with radial menus than linear ones. And it turns out that speed only improves.

Research paper (2) - User Learning and Performance with Marking Menus : This is the article linked in the earlier extract and the summary is given below

The more you use radial menus, the faster you become. That was borne out in a 1994 study by Bill Buxton and Gordon Kurtenbach, who tested radial-menu speed with a stylus. Over time, they found that expert users stopped looking at the menu at all. They no longer needed the visual cues and went entirely “blind,” marking the screen with gestures, or “marks,” instead of pecking at buttons:

Using a mark on average was 3.5 times faster than selection using the menu. … A user begins by using the menu, but, with practice, graduates to making marks. Users reported that marking was relatively error free and empirical data showed marking was substantially faster than using the menu. … Marking menus, however, are not appropiate when the list of items changes dynamically. In this situation, users can still use the menus but will never graduate to using marks since menu item locations change.

There have also been multiple usability tests conducted on the usability of radial menus as quoted in this article

Jack Callahan's study compares the seek time and error rates in pies versus linear menus. There is a hypothesis known as Fitt's law, which states that the "seek time" required to point the cursor at the target depends on the target's area and distance. The wedge-shaped slices of a pie menu are all large and close to the cursor, so Fitt's law predicts good times for pie menus. In comparison, the rectangular target areas of a traditional linear menu are small, and each is placed at a different distance from the starting location.

Callahan's controlled experiment supports the result predicted by Fitt's law. Three types of eight-item menu task groupings were used: Pie tasks (North, NE, East, and so on), linear tasks (First, Second, Third, and so on), and unclassified tasks (Center, Bold, Italic, and so on). Subjects with little or no mouse experience were presented menus in both linear and pie formats, and told to make a certain selection from each. Those subjects uising pie menus were able to make selection significantly faster and with fewer errors for all three task groupings.

The fewer the items, the faster and more reliable pie menus are, because of their bigger slices. But other factors contribute to their efficiency. Pies with an even number of items are symmetric, so the directional angles are convenient to remember and articulate. Certain numbers of items work well with various metaphors, such as a clock, an on/off switch, or a compass. Eight-item pies are optimal for many tasks: They're symmetric, evenly divisible along vertical, horizontal, and diagonal axes, and have distinct, well-known directions.

Gordon Kurtenbach carried out an experiment comparing pie menus with different visual feedback styles, numbers of slices, and input devices. One interesting result was that menus with an even number of items were generally better than those with odd numbers. Also, menus with eight items were especially fast and easy to learn, because of their primary and secondary compass directions. Another result of Kurtenbach's experiment was that, with regard to speed and accuracy, pens were better than mice, and mice were better than trackballs.