“It is somewhat surprising that in spite of over 30 years of research in the areas of empirical studies of programmers (ESP) and human-computer interaction (HCI), the designs of new programming languages and debugging tools have generally not taken advantage of what has been discovered. For example, the C#, JavaScript, and Java languages use the same mechanisms for looping, conditionals, and assignments shown to cause many errors for both beginning and expert programmers in the C language.”
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Need a good laugh? Having a rough Tuesday?
David Lee Roth Trains to Become Paramedic
Pennies pay off when Ohio collector cashes in
eBay cancels bids for Virgin Mary sandwich
1969 Mustang and Shovel Man
The proof is in the pudding
1999 BMW 7-Series 750iL (eBay) — “Before I owned this car I couldn’t get a date to save my life. Now, I am dating a beautiful Russian model. No more Star Trek conventions and Dungeon’s and Dragons for me!”
“But that’s not all: take one look at their signature character — the deliciously anthropomorphized Luxo lamp — and you’ll agree that design looms large in this new world vision. And thanks to Edna Mode, we now we have our very own superhero to prove it.”
Summary: Design rules in The Incredibles.
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SitePoint — “A portion of a new research report I am working on includes a basic rundown on web log analytics software. During the research process I assembled this matrix of web log analysis software and wanted to make it available for review.”
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America is getting older. Consider this information:
“The population aged 65 and older is projected to double over the next three decades from 35.3 million to nearly 70 million. In 2030, people 65-plus are expected to make up 20 percent of the population. The Census Bureau projects the 65-plus population to be 39.7 million in 2010, 53.7 million in 2020 and 70.3 million in 2030.”
Here’s my main question: How much did age influence the results of the 2004 presidential election? Common sense tells me that older folks are more conservative. There is some data to back this up, of course. (As time goes on, I’m less and less surprised that Bush won.)
How much will age influence the development of the internet over the next few years? What issues can we expect? Certainly usability will be important.
BBC — “Heavy computer use could be linked to glaucoma, especially among those who are short-sighted, fear researchers.”
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Related: Vision, Reading and Computer Users
“While Christmas 2004 is expected to see record mobile phone sales, new handsets supporting advanced mobile services may not yield the additional revenues that mobile operators have set their hopes on. 85 per cent of consumers admit to being ‘too dumb’ to access or use mobile services due to increasing device complexity, finding mobile phones more complex to use than 2 years ago. Nearly three quarters feel that handsets have become too difficult to navigate around.”
Users blame themselves for poor design when they should blame designers, developers, engineers, and product managers. Grrr!
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What is a portal?
What does the future hold for portals?
How can you drive user traffic to portals?
How much traffic do portals drive?
What are the best practices for integrating content into portals?
When should you use portal technology?
What are the top portal security issues?
What tools generally compete with portals? Search engines? Blogs? Wikis?
What are the biggest problems with portals? Weaknesses?
Are portals useful? Why? Why not?
Are intranet portals different than internet portals? How?
How important is personalization in portals?
How are roles defined in portals?
Are their design best practices for portals?
What are the key usability issues with portals?
What are some great examples of portals?
Are there any big names (people) in portal development?
Are there any great articles about portals?
Are there any good web sites or discussion lists about portals?
What are the top portal technologies?
Feel free to throw me some answers or post your answers here?
Forum Nokia Usability –”Mobile banking solutions provide users with a service that enables them to transact their financial business irrespective of time and place. [...] Following basic usability guidelines, with a mobile-use context in mind is a good foundation for designing applications for mobile browsers.”
Read the article…
“Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.”
Very useful web site. Remember folks, although Google indexes 8 billion pages, they don’t capture the invisible web very well.
Visit the site…
ProfiMail for Series 60 — “This is what I’ve been waiting for since I got my first Nokia 7650, a replacement for the integrated email client that comes pre-installed on Series 60 phones. For whatever reason, Nokia just hasn’t put many resources into making sure the email part of the “Inbox” works fast and reliably, nor does it check for emails on a scheduled basis (say once every 20 minutes or so). I’ve tried it on various phones via
POP and IMAP and it’s always been just painful to use. How bad? Well, when I was using my Motorola phone for a week or so back a month ago, I was amazed at how much more useful that phone’s email client was. And that phone doesn’t even have a real OS.”
My ringtone — “Having returned the Sony Ericsson T627 I bought last week because it has the worst UI in history, I now have a Motorola v220. So far so good, but why can’t I record my own voice saying “Pick up the damn phone, fool!” and use that as my ring tone? Why isn’t that a standard feature of all cell phones?”
(There are other examples. Trust me! Feel free to share your frustrations.)
“The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on “loss leaders,” severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. “They can wreak enormous economic havoc,” says Mr. Anderson.”
Sounds new, right? Wrong. Sounds like a bad idea, right? Nope, it is generally a good idea to get rid of bad customers (i.e., low-profit, low-margin). Not always, but usually. Of course, you have to make sure that these folks are ones you really, really want to eliminate. They can become high-profit customers, and they can open up holes in your business strategy. Be careful, do analysis, get rid of bad customers, watch them, and watch competitors that pick them up. Bottom line: Definitely dump bad customers, but be smart about it.
Use business intelligence to dump bad customers and target promotions
Fire your bad customers gently
How to Eliminate Bad Customers Gracefully
Limit ‘bad’ customers and target promotions
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