WebWord

I’ve been trying to inject usability into the podcasting community. Most people are talking about about features and functions, and I have tried to remind people about usability issues. If you’ve spent any time at WebWord you know that I’ve already written two articles on these issues:
Audio Content and Podcast Usability
Podcast File Name Usability
The truth […]

Humans are funny little beans. I just found out that you can prevent a cold by wearing wet socks! It works like this. Warm your feet up first. A heat pad or hot water will do the trick. Dry them off, if they are wet. Next, take some thin cotton socks and soak them in […]

ACM — “Hannon contends that designers often disregard users’ wants because the customer who asks for the system in the first place is usually looking for an affordable, easily deployable solution that interoperates with other campus systems, rather than fulfills users’ needs. “Ease of use” is not highly prioritized by the customer on the list […]

“In Boston and New York, employees have openly admitted to arriving late or missing work over the last few days because of games that set length records. Employers, meanwhile, have noticed sluggish, distracted workers seeming to need more caffeine to function properly.”
Read more…
p.s. “Sleep deprivation has been shown to negatively affect a wide range of […]

User Strategy — “Firstly, what we perceive as commercial behavior doesn’t necessarily include activities that become embedded into our normal daily routine. Secondly, e-mail and other such digital technologies have been particularly successful in becoming ubiquitous in a very short period of time. These communication mediums have made their way into our lives so quickly […]

Cre8pc Blog — “On the Usability front, sadly, I find there are less approachable people in the industry. We’re familiar with Jakob Nielsen, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jared Spool…but none of them run forums, or project themselves as being happy to receive an email from you if you have a question. (Though of them, Mr. Zeldman is […]

“Overview visualizations for small-screen web browsers were designed to provide users with visual context and to allow them to rapidly zoom in on tiles of relevant content. Given that content in the overview is reduced, however, users are often unable to tell which tiles hold the relevant material, which can force them to adopt a […]

Oristus — “The purpose of this article is to help people create more useful and effective podcast file names. Good file names are easy to read and understand, but they also help people sort and search for what they want. A podcast file naming convention is presented for consideration.”
Read more…

The Age — “A survey has found that 89 per cent of teenagers aged between 13 and 19 in Sydney and Melbourne have mobile phones.”
Daniel Szuc writes: “What is on the horizon for mobility? What does it mean for the user? What services do people think will really take off? How will it impact the […]

Peter Merholz — “We’re beginning to see ethnoclassification in action on the social bookmarks site Del.icio.us, and the photo sharing site Flickr. Both services encourage users to apply their own freely listed tags to content — tags that others can then employ when looking for content. See a web page that looks interesting, but don’t […]

InfoWorld — “Voters worried that an electronic voting machine might accidentally eat their vote on Nov. 2 would be better off pointing the finger of blame at clueless poll workers than at shiny new touchscreen machines, according to information released by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA).”
Sure, blame users not the designers or developers, […]

“The purpose of the example was to give you the difference between mundane usability and specialized pleasurable usability. What the dictionary described in merely 3 lines, the Kamasutra enhances that mere functionality to make it a pleasure in 35 chapters. It’s easy just putting up a website. It’s tough making it a pleasure for your […]