THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[February 26, 2002]
Advisor: Win Customers with Better Usability - "As the Web continues to make external accessibility issues moot, internal accessibility -- usability -- becomes all the more vital. User tolerance for poor design is inversely proportional to the number of alternatives available (and to the ease of accessing those alternatives)."
Advisor: Create Usable Web Sites - "There are people making rules up about what a good design process entails, but rules aren't the answer, because they'll never replace a design process that needs to address each problem individually."
NY Times (free registration required): Is Weblog Technology Here to Stay or Just Another Fad?
[February 23, 2002]
IBM Think Research: The Core of Computing - "The concept of personal computing 'anytime, anywhere, any way' is truly brought closer to reality by permitting the user's data and computing environments to be with them at all times, and available in many different forms or configurations."
valcasey.com: Notes on Visual and Interaction Design - "Information design is the skeleton; visual design is the flesh, and interaction design is the muscle that joins the two. These three elements of design well executed, and in a perfect union can create an experience for the user. Our goal is to design experiences - interactions that are longer lasting and resonate more meaningfully in a user's mind and life."
[February 22, 2002]
scottandrew.com: CSS is purely presentational. - "I don't see any value in listening to opinions on web standards from people who don't even do web design, especially when it's fairly clear they don't really care. And I'm really tired of seeing web designers and developers being treated as second-class citizens by people who don't even live in the same world."
[February 21, 2002]
Learning Technology: Information Security in the Context of eLearning - "Unlike traditional security research, which has largely been driven by military requirements to enforce secrecy, in e-learning it is not the information itself that has to be protected but the way it is presented."
scottandrew.com: Trivializing Web Standards - "We don't use web standards because the W3C says to. We use them because they make sense, and we like them."
Darcy Pattison (via Mark Bernstein): Reading on the Web - "Once we have enough data on how people actually use the web, we will be able to plan teaching strategies that will help children use the web efficiently and pleasurably."
[February 20, 2002]
BBC News: Web rage hits the internet - "We have all heard of road rage and air rage. Now we have web rage. ... High on people's stress meter is the length of time it takes websites to appear, help buttons that do not offer any help and requests for personal details before being allowed into a site."
Vicky Vickers (1999): What Makes a Good Website? - "A website is not linear or even circular. Surfers visiting your site will take different twists and turns depending on their interests and even on their moods."
Guardian Online: PC giants seek mobile market domination - "Along with Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Intel announced their intention to produce blueprints for new mobile phones and handheld computer phones that would allow mass production of handsets by companies using standard Microsoft and Intel technology."
[February 18, 2002]
USAToday: Handheld computers take focus from PCs - "As PCs sales flounder, tech companies are investing in products geared to the fast-growing handheld market. Sales of handheld computers, such as personal digital assistants and portable email devices, are expected to grow 44% from 2002 to 2004, says Gartner Dataquest. PC sales are expected to increase 21% during the same period. At that rate, it will take until 2004 for the PC market to return to its size at the height of the tech boom."
Stardock: "Object Desktop - is a desktop extension suite designed to provide Windows users the ability to completely customize their user experience to suit their specific needs."
[February 17, 2002]
Brainstorms and Raves: Olympics Site Accessibility Issues - "Accessibility means wide user access, in my opinion. While the needs of any one site may vary, a site like the 2002 Olympics site has the widest accessibility needs because of its world-encompassing audience and should therefore be built using the W3C's Accessibility Guidelines and not excluding users as it so blatantly does now. Accessibility is a part of usability, and usability is also a part of accessibility."
Brainstorms and Raves: Accessibility Lockout for Olympics 2002 Site -- Again?!
Jakob Nielsen: Overall, the official website for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City scores poorly on compliance with established usability guidelines.
Yoav Rogovin from Israel: Internet Technology News
[February 16, 2002]
Runtime Collective: Why Usability? - "Good usability design is, by definition, good design. Despite some good natured flaming between design traditionalists and Usability Tsars like myself, usability is not the antithesis of design. It's a challenge to those used to other media to engage with the special character of the web."
Da Vinci Usability's User Centered Design Methodology
[February 15, 2002]
Using Information Scent to Model User Information Needs and Actions on the Web - "On the Web, users typically forage for information by navigating from page to page along Web links. Their surfing patterns or actions are guided by their information needs. Researchers need tools to explore the complex interactions between user needs, user actions, and the structures and contents of the Web. In this paper, we describe two computational methods for understanding the relationship between user needs and user actions." (about 200K as .PDF file)
kde-artists: About good icons - "Icons have to guide the user through the interface pretty fast. To make sure that they are 'good' icons which are easy to recognize they have got to be designed in a way that is quite similar in certain aspects to the design of traffic-designs."
[February 14, 2002]
Information visualization: Dynamic queries, starfield displays, and LifeLines - "The future of user interfaces is in the direction of larger, higher resolution screens, that present perceptually-rich and information-abundant displays. With such designs, the worrisome flood of information can be turned into a productive river of knowledge." (by Ben Shneiderman)
[February 13, 2002]
Step Two Designs: How to evaluate a content management system - "This article outlines some of the lessons that we have learnt when assisting clients to chose a CMS. It offers ideas and tips, and provides an approach for identifying your business' actual requirements for a CMS."
Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus (via masukomi.org) - "An engaging experience in language and interface ..."
Wired News: Olympics Site Not Medal-Worthy - "But the Olympics site is not alone in suffering from unfriendly design. Indeed, one of its main problems -- the site's distracting advertisements -- is typical of many Web pages these days, Nielsen said."
[February 10, 2002]
Matt Pfeffer: Web style - "This style guide seeks to serve as a resource for anyone writing or editing web copy, and to document some of the conventions that distinguish good writing, as published on the web, from writing published in other media."
SiliconValley.com: Readers React to Design Changes - "The biggest problem I find with the new site (excluding the broken links) is that you can't re-size the text. So if you're disabled and have poor eye sight, its not an improvement as the text is so small."
Doc Searls: Rotten Linkage - "It should be obvious that 404s stink. I suggest we should start making it clear, whenever the subject of a 'redesign' comes up, that the first concern should be maintaining the integrity of inbound links."
[February 9, 2002]
SiliconValley.com: Net addiction diagnosis prompts concern, controversy - "Kimberly Young, executive director of the Center for On-Line Addiction in Bradford, Pa., said between 5 and 10 percent of Internet users are addicted to their machines. That number is similar to addiction rates among people who drink alcohol or gamble."
AbilityHub - "Assistive Technology for people with a disability who find operating a computer difficult, maybe even impossible. This web site will direct you to adaptive equipment and alternative methods available for accessing computers."
[February 8, 2002]
Webcrumbs: Weblog Accessibility - "The whole point of weblogs is to share knowledge, ideas, and some small amount of self promotion (or exhibitionism, depending on the blog). If you design your weblog so that a disabled user has a hard time reading your ideas and thoughts you are losing part of your audience and you are missing an opportunity to share your ideas with a wider circle."
BW Online: Finally, a No-Hassle, No-Strain Computer - "The excellent new iMac cures our greatest ergonomic ill."
Software to solve Annoyances - "The most complete collection of information, tips, fixes, workarounds, and answers for Microsoft Windows XP, 2000, Me, 98, NT, and 95."
[February 7, 2002]
noise between stations: Blurb Gallery - "I keep finding myself working on sites that have news or portal-like layouts, and each time I start from scratch thinking about how to display the headlines and summaries. No more, I started this gallery to capture the many ways it's done, and perhaps I'll eventually map these to the audience and business goals."
Interactive Map of the Internet Industry (via curiousLee)
[February 6, 2002]
Intranet Journal: Information Design Using Card Sorting - "The difficulty in organizing content stems from a lack of knowledge about how real users make use of this information. Without this, any exercise in information design is a purely theoretical one. A card sorting session can go a long way towards resolving this problem."
theWHIR: Keynote to Measure Performance of Super Bowl, Olympic Sites - "Keynote announced that it will measure and report on the performance of Web sites for a number of upcoming big events, determining how accessible these sites are for online users when there is a major online initiative."
TaskZ.com: Investing in Requirements Analysis - "Finding out prior to design what the unique requirements are, and designing to support them, is much more cost-effective in the long run than finding out after launch that your design does not meet requirements."
Computer Stupidities - "The following is a large collection of stories and anecdotes about clueless computer users. It's a baffling phenomenon that in today's society an individual, who might in other circumstances be considered smart and wise, can sit down in front of a computer screen and instantly lose every last shred of common sense he ever possessed."
[February 4, 2002]
Steve Kangas, Ph.D. (via Woodster.com): Layout and Content of Popular Sites - "Eighty-seven of the most popular sites on the web were surveyed to gather data about their use of layout and content. This study presents conclusions about the average characteristics of these sites, and some conclusions about variations between sites."
The Use of Metaphors in Iconic Interface Design - "Metaphors are tools to facilitate interface design and end-user interaction with an application. Despite their usefulness it is possible to overuse them. Overuse can lead to complicated interfaces as a result of introducing too much conceptual and cognitive complexity. It is therefore important not to use a metaphor(s) to such an extreme that it detracts from the interface usability. Indeed, we strongly recommend the identification of an optimally useful strategy when employing metaphors for iconic interface design."
Uzilla: A Usability Testing Technology Service - "Announcing a new way to conduct usability tests of websites and web applications. Uzilla is based on two components, a customized web browser that logs user activity and a internet based data collection and aggregation server."
[February 1, 2002]
Scott Andrew: The Browser War: Nobody's fault but yours. - "Developers have a new chance to change the future of the Web, if they'd just quit whining and support standards."
Joe Clark: Symbolizing accessibility - "No symbol for accessible Web sites whatsoever."
Guardian Online: The mobile manhunt - "The mobile phone is no longer just a voice device. It is fast becoming a games console, an entertainment centre and a personal digital assistant."
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