THE WEB CAN BE A BETTER PLACE TO SURF AND DO BUSINESS !
Last Updated: November 30, 2004
[November 30, 2004]
Dave Rogers: "I eventually realized that there are people-centered consultants and process-centered consultants -- usable consultants and unusable consultants. [...] Like everywhere else, consultants run the gamut from superb to second-rate. But the best-the most usable-consultants are people-centered. They know that projects succeed when people succeed and demonstrate this belief by what they do." (via)
Hugh MacLeod: Why I prefer Windows to Macintosh
Arve Bersvendsen: Why I prefer Opera over Firefox
[November 29, 2004]
Benjamin Edelman: Who Profits from Security Holes?
[November 27, 2004]
Roger Johansson: "To me there is no doubt that frames should be avoided for public websites. They just cause too many problems. For web based applications and intranets however, many of the problems mentioned are of less concern, so there are cases where frames can be useful. Think carefully before using frames though - ask yourself whether you really need them or if there is a better solution available."
Google Holiday Logos
Physics News Graphics: Nanotube Water
[November 26, 2004]
Benjamin Roe: "When a user is working, their attention is on the work they are doing. Every time they have to move their attention away from their work to the application, it takes time for them to get back to where they were in their work. Therefore, you should minimise the amount of distraction and interference your application gives the user. Every application has an item that is its key focus - in a text editor, it's the text; in a web browser, it's the web page - so make that central to your interface." (via)
Kevin Hulsey: "Although modern technology has become so complex that it is beyond the grasp of most consumers, human curiosity and the desire to 'know' how things work will provide fertile ground for the technical illustrators of the future. [...] An effective technical illustration will always require a human touch. Only a human can decide what another human will find aesthetically pleasing and understandable. Through the use of sophisticated drawing programs, technical illustrators will have powerful new tools at their disposal to further the goal of increasing human visual understanding." (via)
Angie McKaig: "In order for your web business to be successful, it needs to have several qualities. I've broken these down into roughly two areas: Internal (attributes specific to your idea) and External (how external market and cultural forces affect your idea). We'll cover Internal in this article; look for External in a week or so.
- Internal attributes include:
Viability, expandability, scalability, and income streams - External attributes include:
Competition, consumer interest, lifestyle/culture trends"
[November 25, 2004]
New Scientist: "The UK government is spearheading a £10 million programme aimed at finding ways to avert catastrophic failures in large IT networks. Some systems are now so large they are untestable, making it impossible to predict how they will behave under all circumstances. The hidden flaws could lead to crashes in critical networks like healthcare or banking systems."
The Photography of Joachim Knill
Fractal Recursions
[November 24, 2004]
BBC News: "The proportion of surfers using Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped to below 90%, say web analysts. [...] Firefox wants to capture 10% of the market by the end of 2005."
[November 23, 2004]
Local Tech Wire: "Many companies are concerned with how best to measure emotional and subjective user reactions to their products and systems. Common measures such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups are often used to give designers a gauge of how a device or service meets the expectations of target users. These traditional methods, although useful, have shown that they are often inadequate in fully understanding a user's emotional reaction to the product of interest. Well-founded in social psychology, interdependence theory can provide usability researchers with several useful constructs in analyzing user satisfaction."
[November 22, 2004]
Wired News: "Functional MRI is helping researchers reveal how the human brain operates and the ways in which it affects emotion and reason."
[November 21, 2004]
Gerry McGovern: "As the world becomes more complex, your time will increasingly be spent deciding what not to show people. To give people a simple world, your world as a manager will become increasingly complex. Don't ask about what people need. Find out what they don't need."
Bytestart.co.uk: "A website is like an information flow, with you as the provider and your site visitors as the receivers of the information. If you don't plan your website with this in mind right from the start, you could find yourself with a brand new website that solves all your immediate needs... but not those of your site visitors." (via)
[November 19, 2004]
The Register: "Computer stress is reaching higher levels than have ever been experienced before. In the next decade, therefore, it might be important for public health professionals to show more concern about myopia and VFA [visual field abnormalities] in heavy computer users."
[November 17, 2004]
BetaNews: "Despite media reports and industry pundits over the years relegating Netscape to Internet history books, AOL has restarted the browser's development. The company plans to bring back a refreshed Netscape browser based on Firefox, which will incorporate an enhanced user interface and several new features. A prototype of the new Netscape will debut on November 30 to a limited number of beta testers, AOL told BetaNews."
[November 16, 2004]
Silicon.com: "Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University and a man who has wired up his nervous system to a computer and put an RFID chip in his arm, is looking forward to becoming a cyborg once again - but warned the day will come when computer viruses can infect humans as well as PCs. [...] If humans were networked, the implications of being hacked would be far more serious and attitudes towards hackers would be radically changed, he added."
Usability News: "Site visitors won't leave your site because you provide links to external sites. They'll leave for one of two reasons:
- They've found what they were looking for and no longer have a reason to stay on your website.
- They can't find the information they're looking for and leave to seek it elsewhere."
Scott Berkun: "Many of the failures that come to version 1.0 projects are avoidable. Here's an essay on some of the common management and psychological mistakes, and ways to avoid them."
[November 13, 2004]
Common Craft: Weblogs vs. Message Boards
How the U.S. found Saddam (via)
[November 12, 2004]
Jack Schofield: "The good news is that if you set MSN Search to maximum on both 'very popular' and 'updated recently' you may well get better results than Google. The bad news is that you have to go through a pantomime to do it: click the 'search builder' button, select 'results ranking', then move two sliders. The worse news is that for the very next search, you have to go back and do it all over again. Microsoft's usability experts must have been asleep at the wheel."
[November 11, 2004]
Dirk Knemeyer: "While companies are able to market themselves in innovative and effective ways in many forms of media, their Web sites are without heart. Instead of showing the creative sensibility present in their print or TV ads, their sites exude the heavy influence of a usability culture. [...] Not allowing a usability culture to rule does not mean abandoning it altogether. Good architecture is vital. Having usable pages is critical. Adhering to standards and following conventions is important to a degree. We need to pull, push, stretch and sometimes tear those boundaries, balancing the best of where we are now with the inevitability of the change we will lead next."
BBC News: "Microsoft hopes that its MSN search will take a significant share of the advertising revenue that Google currently generates. At its recent annual shareholder meeting Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said the company would take on Google directly."
Larry Seltzer: "The problems without SP2 far exceed those from installing it."
esotericbowl.com: visuals
[November 10, 2004]
Wired News: "Nature is pretty good at solving engineering problems, so designers are increasingly turning to biomimetics to improve their products and ideas."
Intranet Journal: "We need to realize that for all the technological security mechanisms we put into place to protect our intranets and their content, there are still human beings on the other side who must manage all of it."
The Hobby of Sand Collecting: Picture Gallery
[November 09, 2004]
Henrik Olsen: "Most usability professionals don't have a driver's licence to servers and are not aware of the steps that can be taken to make them behave in a user-friendly way. In this article, we'll take a look at how to avoid that server technology becomes an obstacle to usability."
Space.com: "A Southern California earthquake forecast based on computer models has successfully pinpointed the location of nearly every major temblor to hit the region over the last four years. Using historical seismic records as a base, the Rundle-Tiampo earthquake forecast has accurately predicted locations for 15 of the last 16 temblors with magnitudes greater than 5.0 on the Richter scale, all of which have occurred since January 2000."
A quick and dirty introduction to accessibility
[November 02, 2004]
Donna Maurer: "Usability refers to the quality of a system and the process of designing a usable system."
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