Tribnet — “A growing number of retail chains and similar businesses frustrated by near-constant employee turnover are entrusting the first step of the hiring process to computers, designed to zero in on applicants likely to do a job well – and stay a while. To do that, computers gather not just names and Social Security numbers, but also work to size up an applicant’s personality, and provide managers with a list of questions for follow-up interviews.”
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The best use of something is what someone is using that something for, as long as it works well enough.
This is exactly how good enough can be great.
OK/Cancel — “We are getting to the point where we are able to successfully and repeatably interpret signals from the brain, either by crude non-invasive sensor techniques, or by crude direct wiring techniques. For Parkison’s disease there is already FDA approval for some of these early implant technologies.”
I mentioned the “monkey brains” idea about 3 years ago at Intranets 2001. In fact, the title of my talk was Flamethrowers and Monkey Brains: What They Didn’t Tell You About Intranet Usability. I used the concept of monkey brains to talk about how people communicate, and what that means in relation to web design. I think you had to be there to fully appreciate the title.
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“This paper first briefly recalls and summarizes the overall architecture of (Web-based) adaptive hypermedia systems (AHSs) to show how to extend and modularize this architecture to enable different AHSs to work together at different levels: the conceptual structure, the user models, and the adaptation. Last but not least, we point out some legal problems that arise as a consequence of opening the user model to be shared among various applications, which is technically possible but maybe legally unacceptable in the improved adaptive hypermedia architecture we propose.”
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(Found via InfoDesign.)
“When you create an account on a website, you’re helping that site in a one-two punch. First, you’re boosting their member count, helping them present a strong case to their advertisers: ads on large sites are more expensive than those on smaller sites. Second, now the site knows who they’re showing an ad to. They know about your interests from data they’ve gathered, they probably have some demographics about you, and they even know how often you click on ads. This enables them to carefully target the ads you see, and targeted advertising commands a large premium. In our research, we’ve found that nearly all of the top 20 sites on the web ask users to create an account.”
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Web Reference — “This article describes a few features of the cutting edge Web technology called XUL. XUL is a good choice for web pages that ask the user to perform complex data-entry tasks. XUL is available in Mozilla-based browsers, with various clones and alternatives now increasingly available. Here, we use the familiar task of going through a Website’s e-commerce checkout, where our shopping cart of selected goodies is reviewed, paid for, and scheduled for delivery.”
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Asterik — “I’m not sure what the “official” definition is, but to me it means making something, could be pretty much anything, not only easy for others to use, but attractive or desirable to use as well. You know? Friendly. This desirability is something that doesn’t seem to get talked about much when we talk about user-centered Web design. We talk quite a bit about ease-of-use but ease-of-use doesn’t necessarily mean friendly. In fact there are some folks out there who treat these things as always in opposition to each other.”
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Step Two Designs — “We’ve just launched a new half-day seminar titled Latest thinking in usability & IA, to be held in Canberra on 29 July 2004.”
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Boxes and Arrows — “How does a user interface designer know that a given design will work? How does anybody develop enough confidence in a design to move it toward the real world? The methods designers use to evaluate user interfaces require training and experience. But the people who need to hire designers are unlikely to have those skills. How do the people who are paying the bills know they are getting good answers?”
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roBlog — “But there is one quality that I believe all user researchers need to have to be effective, and it’s never taught nor even mentioned in any training programs I know of. A good user researcher has to like people. And I mean he has to like people, all people, not just his friends, peers, and colleagues. He has to be intrinsically interested in who they are, what work they do, how they feel about life, what they want to achieve, and so on.”
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Fool.com — “I have to admit to a morbid fascination, even admiration, for this budding telecom scam. The providers see something we now enjoy free of charge (unlisted numbers). They take it away (by listing our numbers). Then they lease it back to us with a monthly “privacy” fee. They’ll get our money for nothing and our checks for free.”
Outrageous.
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Gerry McGovern — “If your website tries to be all things to all people, it will fail. It’s very easy on the Web to try to do too much. You need to relentlessly focus on what most of your readers do most of the time. Don’t let anything else get in the way.”
What about defensive design?
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