THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: October 30, 2004
[November 30, 2002]
Wired News: Building a Better Potato Pancake - "Eating is central to Jewish culture, and almost all the Jewish holidays feature ritual meals or symbolic foods. Hanukkah, the Jewish 'Festival of Lights,' which begins November 29 and lasts until sundown on December 7, is no exception."
Chris MacGregor - "I remember back when the AlertBox column was something to look forward too, but these days it seems to be more hype than content."
[November 29, 2002]
Happy Hannuka!
Salon.com: Microsoft wants your cellphone - "The software king has big plans for making the world of mobile phones safe for Windows. Can phone makers, and a little Norwegian company called Opera, stop the onslaught?"
Dr. William G. (Bill) Huitt (1996): Systems model of human behavior (Basics)
Voltaire - "Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well." (via The Quotations Page)
[November 28, 2002]
Jim Byrne: Understanding web typography - an introduction - "In this article I attempt to cut a swathe through the complexities of Web typography; explain the possible pitfalls; and provide some guidelines for creating accessible and easy to read web pages." [Part one: increase accessibility and readability by making informed font choices.]
Mark Bernstein (via theOTHERblog): What's Your Problem? - "I've been reading a lot of Information Architecture lately, and one idea is weirdly pervasive -- the notion that most Web sites are bad. Everywhere you look in the literature, you see warnings about unusable sites, idiotic sites, disorganized and chaotic sites. Sites that suck. Is this true? Does anyone really believe this? [...] Trying to establish a profession on the foundation of a myth is, I think, a tactical error."
Jonathan Gay: Good Software Design and the Evolution of Flash - "Legos were an early way to express my passion for building things, and they helped me learn the basics of engineering design. These basics have stayed with me through all the projects I've worked on, all the way up to Flash."
Daniel Boorstin (Historian, public servant and Pulitzer-prize winning author) - "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge." (via Wisdom Quotes)
[November 27, 2002]
Mark Nottingham (via Stephen Downes): What is an RSS Channel, Anyway?
Jay ven Eman: What Can You Do with XML Today?
"Now you can find all of your web developer news right here - on The WooDViLle Times."
eWEEK: Waiting for the Mac Tablet
[November 25, 2002]
Hypergene MediaBlog: Interview with Steven Nieker, Waypath Project - "A few years ago, we decided we couldn't stand the state of information retrieval on the Web any longer, so we set out to build something that would provide a more intuitive user experience than keyword search, but that would scale without the enormous human involvement required of taxonomic systems. [...] We chose weblogs and online journals as a place to start because they comprise an active, educated community that we believe is as knowledgeable about the Web and as frustrated with its inefficiencies as we are, if not more so. With such an energized base of users and contributors, we hope the Waypath Project will grow into a community effort."
[November 23, 2002]
OJR: A Visit With a Digital Architect - "We were lucky -- and are still lucky -- that we don't need to balance commerce with content. That really frees you up to concentrate on designing with the user."
Charles L. Mauro: "Sometimes rich, powerful technologists reveal staggering levels of stupidity when it comes to understanding the implications of their technology or, more frequently, the needs of their customers."
Wikipedia: History of the graphical user interface
The Museum of Hoaxes - History of hoaxes from the middle ages to the present.
[November 22, 2002]
Good Experience: Interview: Maryam Mohit, Amazon.com - "We have a Web metrics group, a bunch of really smart people, statisticians and the like. They measure sales metrics, monitoring them in various increments of time - by the minute, by the day, or longer. Anyone who sees an unexpected swing in a measurement can go in and investigate what the cause might be. I can't talk about everything we measure, but we do study the typical measurements - conversion, visitors, purchases - and we correlate our measurements with changes we've made on the site, to see what's driving what, how to position things on pages, and which features to delete."
Syntagm: The Lost World of E-Banking - "The usual rules of web evolution – a form of natural selection – do not apply in these isolated environments. If users get lost or confused they cannot simply switch to another web site. They must confront the monsters head on or change banks."
Syntagm: Navigate on the right? The jury is still out. - "We can improve task performance not only by moving the target closer, but by also making it larger. In fact size has the advantage over distance if we are not sure which targets users are moving between."
SitePoint: Fast-Track Your Flash Site - "This article will look at how to break your Website into multiple .swf files, and discuss why it's a good idea. [...] Flash has taken too much criticism about its load times -- these criticisms should have more rightly been directed at the designers, rather than the technology."
NewBreed Librarian (via theOTHERblog): In 75 words or less, what is the Semantic Web?
Mercury News: When to introduce your kids to the PC
New Architect: Bottoms Up - "Web design is under attack. Our enemy is a dangerous meme known as reductionism. This devious adversary is spreading the notion that we can fully understand Web sites as a combination of simpler components, and that we can break the process of design into lots of quick steps and clearly defined deliverables."
[November 21, 2002]
First Monday: By Choice or by Chance: How the Internet Is Used to Prepare for, Manage, and Share Information about Emergencies - "This article explores the implications of the Internet for agencies that work to mitigate, prepare for, and respond to natural and human-made disasters. It also looks at implications of the Internet for members of the general public who are directly or indirectly affected by disasters."
O'Reilly Network: Raising the Bar on RSS Feed Quality
Jeff Lash: Information Architecture is not Usability
[November 18, 2002]
Dan Bricklin: Tablet PC: First Impressions - "What's exciting to me, though, is that the way Microsoft is doing this will hopefully encourage tablet-centric innovation to start again throughout the hardware and software industry, so we'll continue these advances, and the rate of improvement will return to what it was in the early 1990's. The wide variations in Tablet PC form factors shows the start of that innovation."
[November 17, 2002]
The Idea Basket: Why is the Web Still Only a Single-User System? - "Why can't we converse with other people looking at the same page we are who might be interested in the same subjects? [...] Why can't we ask other users to show us how to access areas of the site that we are looking for if we can't find them ourselves?"
[November 16, 2002]
Cooper: Interface design as a life or death proposition - "In safety-critical systems, a thorough understanding of user needs and goals helps to establish workflows, environments, and behaviors that need to be supported. As technology improves and systems change, these needs will remain the same, whether the user is a clinician who needs to administer a radiation treatment or a combat controller who needs to bomb the enemy. Such accurate documentation of user research enables a company to keep user needs at the fore of the development process while incorporating technological advances and reducing the need to reinvent the product during every development cycle."
Salon.com: Voting into the void - "New touch-screen voting machines may look spiffy, but some experts say they can't be trusted."
[November 15, 2002]
Photoblogs.org - "There are several factors that determine the quality of a photoblog. This site currently focuses on the following ...
- Photo Quality: Are the photographs well done?
- Interface: How easy is it to navigate through the photoblog to find what you want?
- Photo Freshness: How often are photographs added?
- Photo Quantity: Are there enough photos to keep your interest for a decent amount of time?"
David F. Gallagher: photo weblog - "This site is made with a digital camera, Photoshop, Stickies and Blogger, in that order."
David F. Gallagher: The Web's Missing Links - "Instead of pointing readers only to sources for the item they have just read, backlinks also point to newer material that item inspired, making it easy to follow a path through the Web's marketplace of ideas. And because they can be updated automatically to reflect new incoming links, backlinks turn static Web pages into active hubs of related information."
Boxes and Arrows: Introducing Interaction Design - "Well-designed interactive products allow people and technology to carry on a complex and elegant dance relying on multiple, simultaneous forms of communication. A new 12-part series will discuss the activity of interaction design as it relates to the Web, and the relative advantages and disadvantages of the Web as an interactive medium."
Elbert Hubbard (American editor, publisher and writer, 1856-1915) - "To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." (via Wisdom Quotes)
[November 14, 2002]
Dr. Chris Chesher: Why the Digital Computer is Dead - "The term 'digital' when used in computing discourse, while necessary in the 1940s, has now become confusing. This confusion is compounded by its conflation with the wider digital/analogue distinction. The term 'digital' has lost contact with its early engineering application, and become fetishised. While the term 'digital computer' has dropped from common usage, the term 'digital' is often used quite loosely around new media technologies. It seems to refer to anything 'high-tech' or 'computerised' - digital futures, digital classrooms, digital images, digital revolutions. Now that computers function largely as media technologies - mechanisms for distributing and displaying texts, sounds and images - the fetishisation of digitality has become particularly confusing."
An interview with Dr. Jakob Nielsen, usability expert - "Usability will not always win, but it does describe the path of least resistance because it's based on the simple idea that easy is better than difficult."
Adaptive Path: Self-Service Web Applications: Less Cost, More Value - "If moving an aspect of your business to the Web will reduce the number of steps that your customer has to go through to complete their task, then consider exposing that service on the Web."
Museum of Soviet Calculators
[November 13, 2002]
CNN.com: Should Web-only businesses be required to be disabled-accessible? - "The Internet could someday become a utopian medium by which the disabled can communicate with the non-disabled on equal ground. It would be a cruel irony if the Internet, which offers so much potential for the disabled, were used as a new forum for discrimination against them instead."
anil dash: Why Tablet PCs Will Succeed - "In short, Tablet PCs, or their eventual heirs in the hardware realm, will succeed because they accommodate the human factors of collaboration better than any previous iteration of computer hardware. They won't replace desktop PCs or laptops, of course, because sometimes people do need to work on their own, focused on the task at hand. But now we'll also have the option of using a computer in social settings like a Starbucks or a conference room or during a lecture in a classroom without having to compromise our participation in the event."
AIFIA: 25 theses of information architecture - "The interface is a window to information. Even the best interface is only as good as the shape of the information behind it."
[November 10, 2002]
Computer Museum of America (via Metafilter): The computer photography of Arthur Lavine
[November 9, 2002]
SearchDay: Effective Search Engine Design - "Representatives from Google, Yahoo, and Lycos share insights into how they design for their users, and what users search for when they visit the major web navigation portals."
Robin Skyler (via WebWord): The Syntax of Links - "To click on a link is to make a choice, and to take a chance. The user doesn't know how long the next page will take to load, whether it will open a new window or not, or whether it will be there at all, or simply how long a page will be. And after all that, there's the question of how relevant it is. What web reader hasn't had the experience of following a link and immediately regretting it?"
Matthew Thomas (via Blogdex): When good interfaces go crufty - "Microsoft and Apple don't want to make their users go through any retraining, at all, for fear of losing market share. So rather than make their interfaces less crufty, they concentrate on making everything look pretty."
Cool Waste Of Time - More Google Fun: Find Out What Google Thinks Of You
[November 8, 2002]
NY Times (free registration required): Forget the Files and the Folders: Let Your Screen Reflect Life - "Meanwhile, operating systems are lapsing into senile irrelevance. An operating system connects the user (and the user's software) to the ensemble of machines we call a computer. But nowadays users no longer want to be connected to computers. They want to be connected to information, a claim that sounds vague but is clear and specific. [...] Technology's future can't possibly be based on treating computers as if they were hyped-up desks and file cabinets - passive pieces of ugly furniture. Computers are active machines, and information-management software had better treat them that way."
Holovaty.com: The content-to-code ratio - "This topic intrigued me, so I threw together an application that calculates the ratio of text content to total page size for a given Web page. It'll strip all the HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and determine how much of the document is actual text. [...] I think something's wrong when less than 10 percent of a Web page's raw code is devoted to text content."
[November 7, 2002]
Thomas Myer (IBM): How to conduct a Web site competitive analysis - "Conducting a competitive analysis is an important part of the job if you're a usability engineer or information architect. A good competitive analysis not only produces usability metrics but also aids decision makers in their strategic goal-setting and planning. Done right, a good competitive analysis can steer a Web development project in the right direction."
IEEE: "Engines that search for meaning rather than words will make the Web more manageable"
Segal's Law - "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure." (via QuotationsPage.com)
[November 6, 2002]
Nua Internet Surveys: Websites providing misleading information - "A new study suggests that consumers could be at risk because some health and finance websites are displaying information which is 'misleading, inaccurate and incomplete'. [...] The study's authors suggest that consumers should pay less attention to a website's design and more attention to the actual content provided in order to find out what sources are being used for any information displayed."
Digital Web Magazine: Accountability of Accessibility and Usability - "If the people who build Web sites don't hold themselves accountable to a set of basic standards, then someone else, probably the government, will create standards."
Brad A. Myers (1998): A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology - "This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in human-computer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field."
[November 5, 2002]
Scott Berkun: The ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projects - "The craft of designing interfaces is a unique skill. It requires an individual to have at least four personal attributes: compassion for other people, abstract problem solving skills, the ability to communicate or detail web/software design ideas, and experience crafting designs and watching people use them. Giving design authority to programmers or project managers without these traits is unlikely to work out well. [...] Many software and web development organizations have trouble separating the creative phases from the implementation phases."
AnthoBLOGy: The Case Against Public XML feeds - "HTML is designed for use by humans, while XML is designed for use by machines."
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