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THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !

Last Updated: October 30, 2004

[January 31, 2003]

USA TODAY: Battle for supremacy between man and machine - Kasparov: "Fischer-Spassky was about politics, the lone American warrior taking on the evil Soviet machine. This contest is a pure test of human intelligence."

Mike Kuniavsky (Adaptive Path): Face to Face With Your Users: Running a Nondirected Interview - "Here are some guidelines for how to ask questions that will limit (though likely never eliminate) bias [...] Interviewees are remarkably understanding, and your goal is not to become friends, but to exchange information."

The Inquirer: CRM software 'dehumanises' people - "The more intuitive and easy-to-use the software, the happier and more empowered staff are likely to be, which means they are also likely to treat customers better."

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III - "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." (via QotD)

[January 29, 2003]

A Brief History of Mechanical Calculators - "The purpose of this document is to briefly describe the most common non-electronic calculating devices within an historical context, and to create a source of reference to other pages in the Internet related with this topic."

[January 28, 2003]

BusinessWeek Online: The Network Is the Battlefield - "Using information efficiently will also be a daunting task. The amount of data on the U.S. military's global grid is huge. So how does someone in the field find the right info at the right moment? The solution lies in new network protocols such as XML (extensible markup language), which can tag data with key information that allows software itself to distribute the most relevant information to foxholes."

Stephen Downes: Voice Interfaces: Assessing the Potential - "To understand voice as interface, you have to redefine your understanding of the interface, and Nielsen hasn't done that."

Louise Ferguson: City of Bits Blog - "Weblog on user experience, communities, paper, ethnography, society and technology, medical usability, e-democracy and public policy..."

FILExt - The File Extension Source

[January 27, 2003]

Mercury News: Tech chiefs enter 2003 with dim hopes - Sun's McNealy: "Tech still has the shelf life of a banana. It will quickly go brown and mushy. There's an opportunity to keep developing because people will need a new banana."

[January 24, 2003]

OJR: "RSS feeds offer info-warriors a way to take the pulse of hundreds of sites"

BBC: E-cyclopedia's glossary of 2002 - "Many of the defining moments of 2002 spawned their own words and phrases."

[January 23, 2003]

Scott Berkun: "If you are early in a project, critique meetings should emphasize the higher level user, customer and business goals, and minimize the focus on specific engineering constraints. It will be worth flagging design ideas that engineers or business managers have large concerns about, but hold off on completely eliminating them from the discussion."

Christopher Rusay (Digital Web Magazine): User-Centered Design for Large Government Portals - "Many government sites are difficult to use, preventing users from finding information and services because they follow their own internal structure and language instead of speaking the language of citizens."

Steven Garrity (Acts of Volition): The Neglected Page Website Design Test - "Something I like to do when evaluating the design of a new website I've come across is look for a neglected page - I often use the contact page, because they tend to be easy to find. Privacy policy pages are also good for this purpose."

[January 21, 2003]

Roedy Green: How To Write Unmaintainable Code - "In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!"

Zen Haiku: Usability for Programmers - "Why aren't there standard comment characters across languages? Some programing languages use the same characters other language use for comments to actually do stuff. #, anyone?"

Jakob Nielsen: Recruiting Test Participants for Usability Studies

So, you think you cleaned all your personal files from that old computer you got rid of?

Aldous Huxley - "Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."

[January 19, 2003]

kuro5hin.org: Great UI design lies - "Forget the experts - they have little to teach. Go and test your design. If you are Microsoft or Red Hat, fill a hall full of end users and make them try your product. If you're Johnny Freshmeat, use your mum. I would say that UI design is in its Aristotelian age, where great attention is paid to Great Minds. We now need to move to the age of Galileo. [...] Don't trust the gurus. They get paid to have clever, radical opinions. That's how they get hits to their website. (Because they don't have real proper jobs, you see.) Trust the end users. It is the only way to find out what works."

Joan Baez - "The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one." (via QotD)

[January 18, 2003]

Guardian Online: The web should net all - "Pull-down menus, hierarchically walking menus, and other moving interface elements cause problems for the elderly who are not always steady with the mouse. These designs are even worse for users with motor-skill disabilities. It is better to use static user interfaces and designs that do not require pixel-perfect pointing."

Gary Kebbel, news director at America Online - "Newspapers should look at their online sites as one-stop-shop information and community sites that extend the paper's brand. News is a key part of why people come to the site, but it's just one of the many lures that get readers and customers through the virtual door." (via Editor & Publisher Online)

[January 17, 2003]

Shiv Singh (Digital Web Magazine): Building Intranets that Matter - "Remember that an intranet is a business productivity tool. [...] In other words, think about which user groups would save the most time by using an intranet, and how much time that would actually be. Would those users work more efficiently because of an intranet? Would they make better business decisions? Simple user satisfaction is less meaningful than tangible, measurable economic benefits to the organization."

Gerd Waloszek (SAP Design Guild): How Much Documentation Do Applications Need? - A Simple Example - "Documentation and online help are often unpopular issues in software companies. They are regarded as superfluous - as something that costs money and human resources but provides nothing in return. But experience has shown that software that does not need documentation, is still a pipe dream."

Ryan Olshavsky: "You've devoted time and energy to creating the perfect, goal-directed design for your product. Your programmers are ready and eager to start putting that design into code. So...now what? How do you communicate your design to your development team, accurately and in sufficient detail? One approach is to produce a Form & Behavior Specification."

Greg Harvey (SitePoint.com): "Website Defacers - the Graffiti Artists of the Internet?"

E. B. White (1899 - 1985) - "The best writing is rewriting."

[January 15, 2003]

Phil Wainewright (Loosely Coupled weblog): Invaders on the LAN - "In these days of wireless connection and the ubiquitous web, the LAN is no longer a haven of safety. There are too many routes in and out of your network that a firewall won't give you any meaningful protection at all. Here are three good examples [...]"

[January 14, 2003]

Jared M. Spool (User Interface Engineering): "We've found that once we can identify which personality the users fall into, it can give the design team clear direction for producing an interface that really delights the users."

Gary Starkweather (San Jose Mercury News): Redefining the PC - "Our role in bringing personal computing to the masses should not just be a computer terminal; it should enable a human being to utilize their senses in a more productive fashion. Anything that can help you express creativity and look at information in new ways is going to be a benefit."

[January 12, 2003]

Boxes and Arrows: Prognostication Digitalis - "Transportation systems, military applications, biomedical systems, gaming, PDA/phone/wireless applications, and financial services will be the areas where the most interactive work will occur. [...] Somebody else will come up with a formula for ROI of Design and Information Architecture."

Dave Winer - "The Web uniquely wants to be used by everyone, not just for the purposes of big companies and their profits and paranoia. This is a foundation that I think we agree on."

Colorblind Web Page Filter - See your own web site through color blind eyes.

[January 10, 2003]

Hobbes' Internet Timeline - the definitive ARPAnet & Internet history

Bruce Damer's Personal Histories of the Desktop User Interface - A Retrospective of the Xerox Alto, Star 8010, 6085 and Elixir Desktop at the Birth of the Desktop Metaphor

[January 9, 2003]

Intranet Focus Blog: Intranet search is different! - "If search is not given due attention by an organisation the result is likely to be that the investment in content management software is unlikely to be recovered through the effective re-use of the information contained in the documents. All we will have is the digital equivalent of the chained libraries of the medieval monasteries."

Alexei Shulgin: desktop is a reflection of your individuality

[January 7, 2003]

Technology Research News: Interface gets the point - "Understanding how humans and computers can interact using several different types of communication will become increasingly important [...]"

David Strom: "The web has become the time-sensitive family information delivery mechanism of choice."

Third Annual Weblog Awards

[January 6, 2003]

InfoVis.net: Rules to make a bad graphic representation - "An excellent graphic should make us exclaim: what interesting data! If what catches our attention from a graphic or a table is its colours or the way it is done, means that either the data is not shown appropriately or it has no interest at all. As we have already said about design on other occasions, a good graphic is one that is not perceived. It's just there to reveal the data and to show the phenomena underlying it."

WebmasterWorld: What Were The First Search Engines?

Carl Rogers (1902 - 1987) - "The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it." On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

[January 3, 2003]

Henrik Olsen: Business-centred design - "Factors such as trust, comfort, confidence, and ease of the process are often more important to the customer than price and hard facts. The persuasive architecture has to account for these aspects. It has to create trust and confidence, demonstrate value, and guide the customer through the decision-making process. If you never get to prove to prospects that you are competent and trustworthy, they will never get to feel comfortable doing business with you."

Richard Gabriel: The Poetry of Programming - "I think developers already know but are a little afraid to admit that writing software is a creative activity that requires a lot of interaction with the people who are going to use it. Writing software is a highly iterative, dynamic process requiring user feedback."

"Welcome to Preferential! The Preferential project aims to provide all users of Gecko browsers (eg. Mozilla, Phoenix) with a simple, accessible GUI that allows the modification of any preference set within that browser environment."

[January 2, 2003]

TechTV: Robots Replacing Human Pharmacists - "Hundreds of hospitals and drugstores now rely on automated technology to count, bottle, and label prescription drugs just as people do -- except the robots are almost always accurate, and they're a lot faster."

Pacman's Portal: A comprehensive list of programs that are loaded at start-up. - Do you really need all of them?

[January 1, 2003]

David Vogeleer (via Flazoom.com): When Opportunity Knocks... - "As I stated earlier, html was not designed with dynamacy in mind, it was designed to hold, and format data all at once, and if someone ever wanted to update a site, they would have to go into the source code to update it. Flash on the other hand can not only hold data and format it, but it can also send and receive data then format it."

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