Via UPA.
UPA China 1st conference starts August 8th.
Here’s the English language brochure(PDF, roughly 75k).
A little late on the notification, but here it is! If you go, please take me with you. Please?
Oristus — “The purpose of this article is to examine how dates are displayed on the web and to provide people with a usable format to follow. The recommendation that is provided is general and not limited to web pages.”
While you are there, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter. All the new articles I write will be posted on Oristus. The newsletter will also include other good stuff.
evolt — “So, we’ve established that it’s important for link text to be easy to find and understand. So what can you do to achieve this goal? Simple. Follow these six guidelines for how to write effective link text and your site visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.”
Jeffrey Veen — “Why do we bother doing what we do? Why spend the time, effort, and money required to build better Web experiences? Of course you should use the full arsenal of user research methodologies to make your site better. Your audience will like your company more, they will use the site more, and they will buy from you more often. But how much more?”
Mercury News — “It wasn’t the first time technology brought a person to tears. But when one woman’s eyes watered in frustration as she struggled to use an early version of Musicmatch’s latest online music service, executives at the San Diego company took notice.”
(Thanks for the submission, Daniel.)
“While architects don’t necessarily have to look at the export market, they, too, can have trouble finding a manufacturer for their building designs, particularly when they are of an experimental bent.”
Oristus — “Open source is not open source software, and open source is not an organization. Open source is a model and we should treat it as such. Further, as an economic model, it competes with capitalism.”
BBC — “Like a rosary, the mobile has this function of keeping the mind busy. People are cuddling their phones because it promotes well-being from touching a familiar object.”
(Thanks for the submission, Dano!)
The Age — “There have been a number of studies at intersections that counted people driving with mobile phones up against their ear – it’s disappointing that motorists have not recognised that it’s dangerous.”
I just found out how SAP handles software updates and bug fixes for their mySAP installations. Let’s start with this. First, you do your installation and get your systems up to speed. Then, depending on your own internal schedules, system issues, usage, and so forth, you go from there.
There is a hierarchy that you must keep in mind going forward. At the top level you have service packs. At the next level down, you have patches for the service packs. And at the lowest level, you have hot fixes for the patches.
Now, I am not a system administrator so this stuff just makes my head swim. I honestly don’t know how these folks stay on top of this material day in and day out. Setting schedules, viewing error logs, restarting services, and rebooting servers. Eeek! I’m glad that some people enjoy this stuff and can wrap their minds around it.
These things are often documented very well. Administrators are surprisingly good at writing stuff down. However, the issue that I see repeatedly is that these materials are not tied together or put in a large map. It is often very difficult to know how the various components in the system relate to each other. If often takes a systems analyst to put together the big picture.
If your back end is not running properly it doesn’t matter how good your interface is. Back end usability, including documentation, system stability and uptime, is no joke.
Usability is not just about the interface, it is about the back end systems too. Take the time to have usable documentation and learn how the back end drives the front end, and how the front end pours in data. Usability is much more about the “big picture” than most people realize. Expand your scope and your definition to include everything that impacts your users and customers, don’t just look skin deep.
I’ll end with an analogy. If you promote a web site that has poor usability you are wasting your money. The same applies to the back end of your web site. If you promote a web site that looks great and has great usability, but it is slow or buggy, then design and usability don’t matter. You’re wasting your money.
“As part of their efforts to integrate the email/calendar application, Evolution, with the rest of the desktop (via the Evolution Data Server which makes calendar and contact information available throughout the desktop), the Gnome developers are making calendar information from Evolution (meetings, tasks, appointments, holidays, etc.) available in the desktop clock applet. The Gnome calendar is easily accessible in one click from the panel clock, and is just as easy to dismiss when you?re done with it.”
Do you use the desktop clock application to look at dates? I do it all the time.
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