THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[March 30, 2002]
PF Online: Dot Commentary: Statistically Speaking - "A greater issue is that hits and page views are strictly a quantitative analysis of a web site's performance. ... For me, the single most important indicator of a site's success is user feedback. The handful of e-mails that PF Online receives each month tendering kudos, offering suggestions or describing a usability problem speaks volumes more to me than any set of numbers ever could."
FCW.com: The closer you can hone down the type of user and the desired activity, the better.
Taskz.com: Formal Definition of User-Centered Design (UCD)
[March 28, 2002]
BBC: The internet. Volume One - "Millions of web pages disappear every year, as sites are updated or go out of business. Now there is a project to save a slice of Britain's internet heritage."
Forbes.com: Wall Street Embraces Linux - "But there are risks in putting so much behind Linux. For starters, there are legal implications. Does anybody own the intellectual property of the 'open-source' software? How exposed are companies to patent violation? Even more important, who is accountable? Linux is an amalgamation of the input of many companies and individual software engineers. So whom do you call when it breaks? Also, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not really 'free.' How are large-scale licensing agreements to be worked out?"
IBM: What is usability? - "Although usability is rooted in sciences such as cognitive psychology and software engineering, it is essentially a practical business, concerned with users as people. User-Centred Design, the most popular approach to usability, actively involves real users throughout the design process."
[March 25, 2002]
WebmasterBase: Interview - Kynn Bartlett - "Accessibility isn't simply about blind users; many users have cognitive disabilities which make it harder for them to read large blocks of text. Through illustrations and meaningful icons, you can make your site easier for these users with reading or comprehension difficulties. Clear, simple writing and links to definitions or glossaries can also improve comprehension, which also gives benefits to younger users or international users for whom English isn't their primary language."
[March 24, 2002]
Economist.com: A lemon law for software? - "If Microsoft made cars instead of computer programs, product-liability suits might by now have driven it out of business. Should software makers be made more accountable for damage caused by faulty programs?"
[March 23, 2002]
NUblog: Jakob Nielsen has released an accessibility report in an inaccessible format - "Inaccessible PDFs and amateur, inaccessible CDs and tapes are no way to distribute a report on accessibility. NNGroup has the money to do it right - and it isn't too late, either. Remaster the PDF in Acrobat 5, and send the report out for recording by an experienced reader using the correct format."
Geek.com: The Future of Microprocessor Design - "To sum up, we need to ditch the 'bigger faster better more' concept that's costing us all a small fortune every time we upgrade, and rather pursue an intelligent modular design capable of providing consumers a reasonable upgrade path (one that doesn't break their wallets when they desire a little more computing power) throughout the life of their machine."
Guardian Online: Web users suffer from the fall - "Designers typically spend hours worrying about the type faces used, the precise colour of the background, and whether a button is one or two pixels too far to the left, but the fact that the site doesn't actually work rarely seems to bother them. And until somebody wakes up to this brutal truth, companies are pouring billions down the drain, and making the web a worse place for all of us."
Eric Hufschmid: Linux depends on the disgust of Microsoft - "The Linux community portrays Microsoft as greedy and dishonest, and they portray themselves as angels. While I will agree that Microsoft is greedy and dishonest, I would describe the Linux community as naive, unrealistic, and disorganized."
NYTimes.com (free registration required): In a Seamless Image, the Great and Small - "Xerox engineers are designing a computer display that would allow computer users to focus on one part of an image without losing the overview."
[March 15, 2002]
ERGO/GERO: Ease of Use vs. Safety In Medical Devices - "Design of medical device interfaces and interactions differs significantly from design for nonmedical devices. Error may produce more severe consequences, not to mention expensive litigation. Interaction design requires a somewhat different set of rules and 'ease of use' cannot be the only concern."
[March 12, 2002]
Business 2.0: Cool Design Won't Save a Dud Product - "No amount of fancy design work can save a product that has too many buttons, has a crummy interface, or is awkward to hold."
[March 11, 2002]
John S. Rhodes: Web Sites That Heal - "The first purpose of this article is to explain the true causes of linkrot. The second purpose is to outline a new way to solve the linkrot problem."
O'Reilly Network: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon - "Google bridges the divide between human-generated indexes and machine-generated analysis. ... Human authors don't just put documents onto the Web; they put them into the Web, into the meshed hairball of incoming and outgoing links, indicating not only what keywords the document contains, but also who the document's author believes is authoritative, and vice versa."
[March 8, 2002]
O'Reilly Network: Identity - "Identity is expected to serve as a 'skeleton key,' unlocking purchasing ability, membership, and tailored experience on the Internet. Today's Internet may be likened to a vast neighborhood of speakeasies, its citizens boggled by the plethora of usernames and passwords they're forced to juggle. Ideally, users would pass through a single sign-on point to assume their online identity. Identity is pseudonymous; there is no guarantee of a real one-to-one relationship between online and actual identity. Although the concept of a single sign-on identity promises users a new level of convenience, two major areas of concern are security and privacy."
[March 7, 2002]
Martijn van Welie: Designing your site's navigation (about 363K as .PDF file) - "There are several ways to design the main navigation and this article will discuss common solutions for doing site navigation. Before doing so, it is important to realize that navigation is very much related to the information structure. The navigation scheme guides the users through the information structure."
[March 6, 2002]
Guardian Online: Rural area have-nots lose out on the net - "Too much research has focused on new technologies and markets, on the possibilities rather than the realities of human communication, and ignored the social context of people's needs, desires and patterns of behaviour, both at work and leisure."
The Register: Forget about Internet crackers, employees are the biggest security problem for most businesses.
HoustonChronicle.com: Texan who invented voice mail dies - "I'm not really pleased with some of the things I see voice mail being used for today," [Gordon] Matthews once said. "We didn't design this technology to annoy people, but rather make their lives easier."
[March 4, 2002]
Advogato: Project Success - Measuring it/Facilitating it - "I've just been through a series of discussions with various people about how to predict success of Free Software projects and what factors predict success. I emailed a list of experienced Free Software/Open Source developers/leaders/gurus and compiled their responses."
Gerry McGovern: Web navigation: traffic light, not neon light design - "The job of navigation is not to grab attention. Rather, navigation design is all about creating clear and consistent signs."
Jakob Nielsen: Deep Linking is Good Linking
[March 3, 2002]
Catalyst: Surviving the Adolescent Internet (about 560K as .PDF file) - "Today's Internet users will be easily frustrated by a user interface that doesn't provide advanced options for the frequent user. Therefore, sites must take great care to design interfaces that appropriately balance two design imperatives:
- Welcome New Users by offering site features that are immediately engaging and usable and clearly explain the site's content and purpose.
- Reward Frequent Users by anticipating the ways in which their needs and expectations of the site may change over time and offering more sophisticated optional functionality."
[March 1, 2002]
Croc O' Lyle: Practicing Usability in the future - "We should focus and enhance our skills so we can meet the new challenges ahead: systems that involve more integration, the need to design and test for multiple platforms and devices, and users that will come to expect an even higher level of usability and utility."
Grant Davis: Concept, consistency, clarity - "Some people would suggest that Web design is an art form - 9 times out of 10 they are wrong. Web design is about communication - allowing the user to follow the path of least resistance to the information that they came for in the first place."
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