THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[July 31, 2002]
Cooper: Learning from the mistakes of Internet banks - "Online banking is a good example of how bricks-and-mortar institutions can stumble when they try to solve new economy problems with old world approaches."
WebVisions 2002: Exploring the future of the Web - "The WebVisions series gathers the thought leaders and visionaries in design, user experience and content creation. In this one-day event, WebVisions 2002 will unfold the roadmaps and take a look ahead. Discover the future of web design, witness new trends in content creation and learn how other web pros are recrafting the user experience." (August 16th at Portland State University)
[July 30, 2002]
ZDNet: Do we really need that new PC? - "The average person using technology often faces an unfamiliar vocabulary of acronyms and abstract high-tech terms that he or she doesn't understand. ... How about starting by communicating in terms that explain the real benefits that people will receive from their technology investment. Let's motivate people with a reason to buy targeted to solve their unique needs rather than with some cool technology feature."
[July 28, 2002]
UniSci: Linking Microscope Images To Quantitative Information - "A team of computer scientists working with cell biologists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has created BioSig, a web-based bioinformatic system that links collections of microscope images to a wide variety of quantitative experimental data."
[July 27, 2002]
Hypertext Now: Judging Web Sites: Usability or Criticism? - "Usability studies can reveal flaws in poorly-designed hypertexts, but cannot prove that a hypertext is well written or well executed."
IBM: A Tale of Two Sales - "Barry Beith, President of HumanCentric Technologies, Inc., highlights the less-examined concept of perceived usability as equally important for usability professionals to focus their efforts on as objective usability. ... The question addressed by Dr. Beith is: how early can we get into the user experience?"
How to Preserve Digital Art
[July 26, 2002]
Software Usability Research Lab: Determining Cognitive Predictors of User Performance within Complex User Interfaces - "It is very common these days to encounter user interfaces that contain multiple information sources that are densely displayed-such as with online travel and brokerage sites. When creating these types of interfaces, designers should take into consideration our cognitive and motor limitations. From these results certain design recommendations can be suggested. Specifically, layouts should be designed to reduce the cognitive burden associated with spatial visualization and visual-motor coordination."
Software Usability Research Lab: Reading Online News: A Comparison of Three Presentation Formats - "This study suggests that providing a small amount of information about an article on a page is superior to having long, scrolling pages filled with articles."
Software Usability Research Lab: The Effects of Line Length on Children and Adults' Online Reading Performance - "For adults, it is suggested that medium line lengths should be presented (approximately 65 to 75 CPL). Children, on the other hand, indicated their preference for the narrowest line length (45 CPL) and, thus, it may be beneficial to use narrow line lengths when possible."
Blogroots (via Lucpher): Using Blogs in Business - "This chapter explores another powerful way in which blogs can be used: in a business environment. There is great potential for business weblog use, from project-based team weblogs to the constant churn of content through a weblog on a corporate site. This chapter shows you different ways you can use weblogs in your business, and also examines the benefits of doing so."
[July 25, 2002]
Gerry McGovern: Design for stupid people - "The days of the Web as a frontier for pioneers are over. In a growing number of countries, the Web reflects the society at large. Ebay, AOL and Yahoo have long designed websites that are simple and easy-to-use. Web design needs to focus on ordinary people who are relatively unfamiliar with the Internet. Simplicity of design is the number one characteristic of website design that works."
[July 24, 2002]
Digital Web Magazine: Look Before You Ask - "Let search remain to maximize your site's usability, but tone down its presentation just enough to encourage a click or two. The goal is not to eliminate search as an option, but to expose the audience to an alternate, and possibly superior, mode of site navigation."
Internetworking: Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web - "Future design must strive to create intelligent and intuitive systems that engage the user in meaningful negotiations with information on their own terms. In the end the success or failure of a given solution lies not on new technologies, but on understanding human needs and behaviors. This paper is a call to develop more intelligent, intuitive systems that are user-centered and support fundamental human information needs and goals."
"There's a distinction between retrieving a piece of information that you know exists and searching for new information."
A Summary of Principles for User-Interface Design. (1998)
[July 23, 2002]
ClickTracks - "A new way of seeing website user behavior. ClickTracks graphically presents each page of your site together with behavior patterns - where people click, how long they stay, when they leave the site, and much more. ... It can separate out data for the users that matter most and illustrate their preferences. How do referrals from search engines navigate your site, compared to referrals from advertising partners? How long do they spend on a page? ClickTracks presents all behavior data in a visual form, quickly and clearly."
[July 22, 2002]
css-discuss: Practical discussions of CSS and its use
Dave Polaschek: Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important - "I want to make clear that I'm not saying you should never use tables. Tables are in HTML, and when you want to display tabular data, you should use them. But for layout, there are other options."
Jakob Nielsen: "To reach the goal of making technology truly suited for humans, the world will need about half a million new usability professionals over the next 20 years."
[July 21, 2002]
Web Style Guide, 2nd Edition - "Planning a Web site is a two-part process: first you gather your development partners, analyze your needs and goals, and work through the development process outlined here to refine your plans. The second part is creating a site specification document that details what you intend to do and why, what technology and content you'll need, how long the process will take, what you will spend to do it, and how you will assess the results of your efforts."
Metaphors We Compute By (via Guide to Ease)
Minimalist Web Project (via WebGraphics) - "This is a collection of good-looking websites that are built with minimalism in mind, the idea of beauty through 'less is more'. I started this project June 27th, 2002 ..."
[July 20, 2002]
afterchaos: Flash - to use or not to use, that is the question - "To effectively use flash requires design and programming skills, two different sides of the brain. Most designers aren't programmers and vice-versa, so the best solution is a collaborative one (if possible)."
[July 19, 2002]
Boxes and Arrows: Improving Usability with a Website Index - "Whenever possible, a professional indexer should be hired. Such individuals are thoroughly experienced in analyzing content, accounting for user terminology and in creating an appropriate index structure."
New Scientist: Email security filter spawns new words - "Hundreds of websites have been found to contain bizarre new words thanks to an email security filter used by US internet company Yahoo!."
Microsoft unveils plans for new MSN Web site, features
[July 18, 2002]
New Architect: The Culture of Usability - "It is possible to do less work and get better results while spending less money. By bringing usability testing in-house and breaking tests into more manageable sessions, you can vastly improve your online offering without affecting your profit margin."
WebReview.com: Site Testing: Preventing the Breakdown - "Faulty content will kill you every time. Some sites start very strong, but then over time show signs of weakness. But a few tools can help you to ensure information that you add adheres to the same quality that you'd expect from other sites."
Will Mac users pay for 'Mac experience'?
Carnegie Mellon University: Essays on Software Architecture
SecurityFocus: Survey: Are Security Professionals Wasting their Time? - "57% of the respondents felt that they did not spend too much time searching for security information, even though 42% spend more than 2.0 hours/day searching for security information, and 18% spend more than 6.0 hours/day."
[July 16, 2002]
PromotionBase: The Hot Headline How-To - "Headlines and opening paragraphs have long troubled those who develop, own and promote Websites. Article, press release, or direct email -- whatever the format, it's the headline and first paragraph that decide whether your user opens the communication, or simply ignores it."
Guardian Online: Second sight - "Rather than struggling to bring people to technology, figure out how to bring technology to people... After all, the technology is supposed to be serving the people - not the other way around."
[July 14, 2002]
Gerry McGovern: The lifecycle of intranets - "Starting usually with the lone evangelist, they can quickly grow to a point where small intranets are sprouting up everywhere around the organization. With this tremendous growth come problems of manageability. Navigation becomes difficult. Content goes out-of-date. Decisions made at this stage will define whether the intranet will mature or decline."
CNET News.com: "Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts."
[July 12, 2002]
Digital Web Magazine: Three Ways to Improve External Search Engine Usability - "Many sites spend significant resources ensuring high placement in search engines, but usually little effort is spent on designing how those results are displayed and whether the pages they point to will help the visitor achieve their goal. With on-site search engines, it is easy to control the way results are presented to visitors, provide similar search suggestions, and ensure that the results are relevant and helpful. This is more difficult with external search engines, but not impossible. Here are some thoughts as to how to evaluate the usability of results on search engines and improve their effectiveness and relevance."
Intranet Journal: The Search Isn't Broken - "Instead of wading through information, users are now drowning in it. In addition, search technology has created an interesting and ironic paradox: regardless of the product or a user's ability to use it, effective searches require the user to know the terms they need to use before they type them into the search engine. This all means that intranet and Internet users are increasingly frustrated by their inability to find what they're looking for in a timely manner."
IBM: Information architecture concepts - "An information architect is a vital member of a Web development team, playing a critical role in how content is organized on a Web site. This article seeks to clear up some of the misconceptions about information architecture and help define the role an information architect plays in Web site development."
[July 10, 2002]
Geek.com: Websites starting to crack down on deep-linking - "If deep-linking litigation and enforcement does gain momentum the Internet will suffer, as fundamentally it is just a huge network of links and information. If restrictions are suddenly put on what you can and cannot link to, that introduces limits and restrictions, which is not what the 'Net is about."
[July 9, 2002]
The Register: Show us the bugs - users want full disclosure - "I think we will soon see test cases in the courts to try to develop some requirements and standards for vendors. It will be interesting to see whether those cases will be successful, and whether standards will ultimately solve the problem for end users."
Guardian Online: "Theft of online design - from whole sites to individual elements - is rife"
Pirated Sites Relaunch
BBC: Searching is starting to replace surfing.
[July 5, 2002]
Diane Wilson: Generating Metaphors for Graphical User Interfaces - "As the user uses a metaphor to mesh his or her mental model with an application, the metaphor may lead to misunderstandings about the capabilities of the software. This happens when the user attempts to apply the metaphor to problem solving; designers must understand and anticipate this."
The Best Practice: Browse-By and Sort-By Navigation: Fast, Easy and Flexible
Chris Johnson: Interactive Systems Design (1997) - "If the interface is wrong then users suffer from high fatigue, stress, irritation, medical problems (backs, wrists, eyes). Clients suffer from high training costs, fast staff turnover, long learning periods and extented training. Developers suffer from poor customer reaction, high maintenance costs, penalty clauses and increased development costs."
[July 3, 2002]
SearchDay: AltaVista Introduces Prisma Results - "AltaVista has launched Prisma, a new search refinement and assistance tool designed to help users improve their results with just a few additional clicks. ... According to Bullock [Chief Marketing Officer for AltaVista's Internet division], Prisma results combine the best aspects of categorization and clustering of results, with the addition of 'parallel' terms to help point users toward associated topics of interest or documents they may not have even anticipated finding or needing."
[July 2, 2002]
Grantastic Designs: Glossary of graphic design and web page design terms
Grantastic Designs: Guidelines for selecting a logo design - "One reason your logo should be simple is that people process an image in their mind more readily than words alone. The other reason that your logo should be 'simple' is that the simpler your logo is, the easier it will be for your graphic designer to resize and recolor it for various design purposes."
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