WebWord

“Are electronic voting, early voting or other new types of balloting really improvements to the United States’ voting system? No, says a University of Buffalo professor, who indicates that until elections account for ergonomics and the human factors associated with voting, the system could remain flawed.”
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“This half-day seminar will expose you to some of the latest ideas and approaches being explored in the fields of usability and information architecture. The current thinking in the industry will be summarised, introducing practical ideas to use in the workplace. This seminar is the first of an ongoing series to introduce you to the […]

“70 percent of consumers will share information, such as their name, address, postal code, phone number, account number or give the answer to a security question to an unsolicited call or email.”
How can we make security easier for people?
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Good Experience — “Mystery solved: it was all a difference in perspective. The clerks were explaining to me how the product return affected them (they would have to call the catalog and manage the return) and not how it affected me (I could only get store credit).”
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O’Reilly — “The key is “understanding the intention of the user and enabling them to complete a task,” added Jeff Weiner, a senior vice president at Yahoo. He said that personalization can be thought of as fitting into two boxes. There is the explicit gathering of information, where users provide information about what they do […]

“A person working with a computer system has to negotiate with it to get it to do what they want it to do,” Lally says. “It’s actually about problem-solving and developing a particular set of techniques.”
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IntranetJournal — “Intranet developers and content owners are able to grab the attention of their users through momentum. Interest — caused by curiosity, marketing, word-of-mouth, or hype — is raised during initial rollout. And there will always be a surge in your Web server’s usage logs during this period. But once the novelty has worn […]

I’ve produced my third podcast. This one should be better than the first two. I’ve been working hard to improve what I am doing. Thanks for the feedback. I’m listening to you.
Here’s my RSS 2.0 feed for podcasts, if you want to subscribe. Please note, this is experimental and it is only for WebWord podcasts!
I […]

Guardian Unlimited — “Yes, but unfortunately, the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue’s The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.”
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IT Conversations — “Malcolm explores why we can’t trust people’s opinions — because we don’t have the language to express our feelings. His examples include the story of New Coke and how Coke’s market research misled them, and the development of Herman-Miller’s Aeron chair, the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, which succeeded […]

“The paper goes in face upwards, you say?”
“A lawyer’s failure to operate a fax machine correctly has been blamed for the European Commission losing a multi-million-euro court case.
The European Court of First Instance ruled in favour of five German banks which had been fined a total of €100m by the EC. In 2001 they had […]

I created another MP3 file for you to download. This is my second podcast, although I don’t have my RSS 2.0 feed ready for you. That means that you can’t use iPodder to grab the feed. Give me another day or two and we’ll be all set.
I talk about Windows Media Player 10, WinAmp, Super […]