THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[April 28, 2002]
Bevan N, Kirakowski J, and Maissel J. (1992): What is usability? (about 15K as .PDF file) - "Usability lies in the interaction of the user with the product or system and can only be accurately measured by assessing user performance, satisfaction and acceptability. Any change in the characteristics of the product or system, user, task or environment may produce a change in usability. A product is not itself usable or unusable, but has attributes which will determine the usability for a particular user, task and environment."
[April 27, 2002]
Colorgenics - "By choosing various colors, in order of preference, from a color spectrum, it is possible to ascertain various characteristics of a person at a specific time. It has been found that people with similar traits have predilections for specific colors." (The Paul Goldin Clinic, Ireland)
"To change and to change for the better are two different things." - German proverb
Kuro5hin.org: Developing a Basic Numerical Metric for Web Usability - "This article proposes a unified usability metric that can be determined without the use of expensive user testing. Although flawed by its very nature, the metric attempts to unify a large number of sensible web design ideals."
BYTE.com: The Art Of Organizing Search Results
BBC: Feeling the digital force - "Touch technology being developed by researchers in Dublin could change the way we interact with the digital world."
[April 24, 2002]
What is an Intelligent Interface? (Annika Waern, 1997) - "The roots for research on interface design for intelligent interfaces lie mainly in cognitive psychology -- the theory of human thought. Intelligent interfaces are intended to be adapted to the user's way of thinking, and to some extent understand how the user thinks."
Wired News: Rotten Links Hamper Learning - "It's downright annoying to come across a broken link on the Web. And for a professor teaching a distance education course -- or referring 'traditional' students to an Internet resource -- it can be a major problem."
Terror Pays? - "Imagine yourself drinking beer in your lovely Tivoli gardens when a bomb explodes under your seat ..."
[April 22, 2002]
Wireless Developer Network: How to Double Bandwidth on the Cheap - a core issue for mobile operators - "Personalization techniques for adapting the navigation structure of a mobile portal can reduce click-distance and thus radically reduce navigation effort and improve portal usability. An intelligent personalized navigation solution that automatically reorders the menu options of a mobile portal to suit each individual user would radically reduce mobile portal click-distance on a user-by-user basis. This enables the user to get to the information he wants faster."
[April 21, 2002]
Havoc Pennington (via Slashdot): Free software and good user interfaces - "I don't have any genius definition of 'good UI'; I'm not a UI expert. But it clearly doesn't mean snazzy graphics or featuritis. In the end when I think good UI I think of MacOS classic: clean, simple, consistent, productive. You focus on your work or play and the GUI isn't in the way. OS X adds the cool graphics too, but those aren't the part that makes it a good UI, just the part that makes it fun. Another element of good UI is attention to all the little details: good error dialogs, setting up keyboard navigation, dealing with relayout when a window gets resized, accessibility, internationalization."
TaskZ.com: Top "Information Architecture" and "Interface Design" sites
[April 20, 2002]
Traffick.com: Why Yahoo Is No Longer Good - "Yahoo has added clutter bit by bit, adding services and links to every page. But worse, it has assaulted users with ever-more-annoying, ever-larger blinking ads that make it impossible to concentrate."
CHI-WEB archives: Do your designers and IAs get along? - "The biggest grey area for us has been with the IAs and the Usability team. We have many over laps since both groups focus on user centered design - but the Usability team has backgrounds in Psychology and Human Factors and focusses on objective testing and research methodology while the IAs focus on designing the great user experience that is a balance of user issues, corporate goals, business and contractual constraints. The two groups are two sides of the same coin and it makes sense that they are separate and we have seen that the end result is better."
David Hyatt: Confessions of a Mozillian
JS Online: Death of a game addict - "For people who are unhappy, socially awkward or feel unattractive, online games provide a way to reinvent themselves."
[April 19, 2002]
Mercury News: Kids prize Web simplicity, reject complex interfaces - "The biggest, and perhaps scariest, difference between kids and adults is that kids are much more likely to click on advertising banners and icons. While adults are able to quickly distinguish between editorial content and advertising, kids are much more likely to confuse the two."
[April 17, 2002]
BW Online: This Handheld Is for Techies Only - "I think users of handhelds would be well served to have an alternative to the solid but limited Palm OS and the Windows hegemony of Pocket PC. Stable, secure Linux should be an ideal candidate. But customers will--and should--choose the ease of using programs over the virtues of the operating system every time. Until Linux developers offer applications with the fit and finish consumers have come to expect on their Palms and Pocket PCs, the audience for products like the Zaurus will be limited to the techie hard core."
ZDNet: Will Pocket PC 2002 let MS dominate handhelds, too?
Gerry McGovern: Examples of cool web design - "An essential focus of web design is the effective communication of text-based content. Web design that is truly 'cool' seeks to organize and communicate information in innovative and useful ways. Quality web design is concerned with getting the right content to the right person at the right time and at the right cost."
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents." (Nathaniel Borenstein)
[April 16, 2002]
Matthew Thomas (via snowdeal.org): Why Free Software usability tends to suck - "The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers."
NY Times (free registration required): Has Grammar Lost Its Technological Edge? - "When a professor of English recently compared the grammar-checking features in Word and WordPerfect, which is owned by Corel, he found that Word 2000's grammar checker was unable to identify any of the most common errors. WordPerfect did somewhat better, but still found fewer than half."
GrokDotCom : The Case Against Autoresponders
[April 12, 2002]
Advogato: Human Engineering - Do you need it? - "Most Developers would agree that good human engineering is necessary for the success and acceptance of a project. However, most of them do not understand that human engineering transcends down to the product and design decisions."
Intranet Journal: Tools to Fight Link Rot - "Regardless of the medium, information providers have the responsibility of delivering content in an efficient manner. Nothing is more annoying to an information seeker than a site on the web or a corporate intranet flooded with broken links to vital pieces of information."
NetMechanic: Usability Tip: Add Titles To Page Elements - "Titles are also one way to increase the overall accessibility and usability of your Web pages - but they aren't a panacea. Most screen readers will pick up the TITLE content, but visitors using other types of assistive technologies may not benefit. That's because this technique is mouse-dependent: visitors who navigate using their keyboards won't see this extra information."
"Sites that are designed to be easy for dyslexics are also easy for others to use and navigate."
New Architect: Inside the philosophy and process of Frog Design
[April 10, 2002]
USA TODAY: E-mail is evolving into fee-mail - "Unlike many Web innovations that were met with indifference by the public, free e-mail has become a victim of its own success."
Design Interact: Michael Graber Contemplates The Poetics of Information Architecture - "By setting up the navigation consistently, applying user studies and usability testing to company specifics, pondering the conceptual nature of the graphic interface and making sure that all the content is tuned and pitched, the work speaks for itself."
BBC: UK online supermarkets 'disappoint' - "The most frequently encountered problems were difficulties logging on, late deliveries, and wrong orders."
Mark Simonson: The Scourge of Arial - "Arial is everywhere. If you don't know what it is, you don't use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft's influence in the world."
[April 9, 2002]
Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day
usnews.com: Israel's righteous fight - "It is critical for Israel to break the Palestinian delusion that terrorism will make
the Jewish state go away."
The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism
Flazoom: Toptronic Falls Short on Usability - "Consistency in interaction is a huge part of creating a good user experience. Even a bad interaction, when applied consistently, is better than the hodge-podge of solutions here. Once your user has figured out how to interact with your content, they should be able to apply that experience throughout your site."
[April 3, 2002]
Information & Design: Humans - A Designer's Guide - "People are still driven by the same things that motivated them before the advent of the Internet. It is unlikely that people will change the way they think and behave just because your company has launched a new web site or service."
Bandura - Self-efficacy Quotes - "What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions."
Leslie Cortes, MD: Designing a Graphical User Interface (1997) - "Whether you aspire to develop the next big software hit or simply create computer applications for your personal and office use, your applications will need effective user interfaces to fulfill their potential. Designing such an interface is part discipline (following platform conventions and good design principles), part science (usability testing) and part art (creating screen layouts that are informative, intuitive and visually pleasing)."
[April 1, 2002]
Melinda McAdams: The Newspaper Metaphor - "If those who design a system neglect the user metaphor, the users' assumptions may not correspond very well to the actual system, and as a result they will find it confusing and difficult to use. Faced with a computer response that seems strange, users often make up an explanation, which, right or wrong, then becomes part of their understanding of how the system works. Much of the literature on user interfaces refers to the need for metaphor in the interface. Just as a speaker chooses metaphors that will make his or her meaning clearer to the audience, a designer must choose metaphors that help the users understand the system."
Clickz: Designing a "My" Area - "When designing areas of your site that are personalized or ask for personal information, make sure that the user perceives these pages as different from the rest of your site. They should see them as pages that are for their eyes only."
John S. Rhodes: Some Thoughts on Extranets
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