WebWord

Seattle Times — “There’s no guild or brotherhood or really too many training programs in usability. You come to it by this ideological fervor and this desire to make devices more usable.”
Puff piece. The quote above seems to imply that having a passion for usability is enough. It isn’t. You need some skills and a […]

WebAIM provides a great two-part series on Cognitive disabilities and web development: “Cognitive disabilities are the least understood and least discussed type of disability among Web developers. As a result, developers rarely design Web content to be accessible to people with cognitive disabilities.”
Read the articles:
Cognitive Disabilities Part 1: We Still Know Too Little, and We […]

I’m confused but perhaps someone can help me. I thought that closed (proprietary) systems were a bad thing. Zeus technology recently announced Zoto, which seems to be a tool for adding extra information to images. Here’s a quote:
“Zoto’s primary website, www.zoto.com, enables users to access and share photographs from anywhere and with a proprietary system […]

Business Week — “Honest corporate managers will tell you that to make offshoring work, you need at least a 300% to 400% wage spread between American software writers, engineers, accountants, and call-center employees and their Indian and Chinese counterparts.
Labor costs have to be very, very low overseas — not just lower — to compensate for […]

“How can organizations avoid this cycle of endless restructurings and job losses? Using the case of the accounting at DaimlerChrysler in Spain, this article shows how to identify organizational dynamics that produce deskilling and inefficiencies within business. It illustrates also how these processes can be reversed by involving employees in organizational development and change through […]

I’ve been trying to learn more about terrorism and terrorists. I realized about five or six months ago that I didn’t know much at all but that I was making comments on the topic, like many other people. Also, I did a wide search for information but I didn’t find much at all. So, I […]

“In the end, a single event may have sealed AT&T Wireless’s fate: the opportunity for its customers to leave. A mass exodus from the Redmond carrier began late last year when, compelled by a new federal rule, wireless companies let subscribers switch among them while keeping their phone numbers. Freedom of choice meant a financial […]

“Ten years after electronic portals to the Worldwide Web were first opened to millions of computer users, ten significant trends have emerged that vividly illustrate how the Internet affects America, according to findings from the comprehensive year-to-year study of the impact of online technology by the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.”
Read more…

“This presentation follows on from the introduction to usability and user-centred design and focuses on human factors issues, beginning with a discussion of the roots of usability in the field of human factors. Through a series of everyday examples it introduces the principles of feedback, visibility, affordances, constraints and natural mapping, as discussed in Donald […]

Chicago Sun-Times — “Drivers worried about getting stuck in traffic snarls can now take a peek at “real-time” pictures of construction zones linked to the Illinois Department of Transportation Web site.”
Of course the idea is for people to look at the web site before getting on the road. However, many people have web access in […]

FOX News — “Critics of the Diebold (search) touch-screen voting machines turned their attention Wednesday from the machines themselves to the computers that will tally the final vote, saying the outcome is so easy to manipulate that even a monkey could do it. And they showed video of a monkey hacking the system to prove […]

ZDNet — “I work at an Internet help desk and get calls you wouldn’t believe. One lady called and said she had been signed up for Internet access for over a month and was wondering when I was going to send her modem to her. Once I explained that she had everything she needed and […]