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Reference for the quotes: Let’s stop drugging kids

“This year, the Food and Drug Administration has mandated a black-box label on antidepressants warning of the potential for increased suicidal thoughts and behavior with children and adolescents.”

Aren’t antidepressants supposed to improve your mood? Does this mean that these medications are making people happy but violent? Can someone please solve this paradox?

“Not surprisingly, psychiatrists have never developed any physical test to detect depression or any mental illness, and all diagnosis is done based solely on symptoms. In other words, antidepressants and all other psychiatric medications are not in fact being prescribed to treat bona fide diseases.”

Response: There is No Spoon and there is No Usability? When does usability testing get at behavior (symptoms) and when does it get at bona fide issues? How do we know? More importantly, does this question matter at all if we are able to help users and improve ROI?

“Siemens researchers have developed a cell phone featuring a built-in projector system. A laboratory model was presented at CeBIT 2005 in Hanover. The system makes it possible to project a complete keypad or display onto a surface. With a special pen, users can write on the virtual keypad and operate the phone’s functions.”

Includes a picture.

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“Seems that most of the guidelines are focused on folks with disabilities. To be brutally honest, free-market companies care very little about the disabled as they represent only a very small portion of the market. On the other hand, there does not seem to be focus on usability for mainstream consumers.”

Read the article…

CNN — “A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets, the inventor of the World Wide Web said.”

Read the article…

In my world the week starts on Monday.

Monday — Monday is a fine day. I’m fresh from the weekend. Even bad weekends make me fresh for Monday. When I start work on Monday, I often have plenty of fluff to plow through. That is, I can ease into the week by burning through emails, especially easy ones. If you are like me, you expect Mondays to be bad which doesn’t make them bad at all. In this way I accidentally manage my own expectations. I almost always expect Mondays to be terrible but when I actually experience Monday, it isn’t nearly that bad. Monday ain’t so bad.

Tuesday — What a nasty day! I never expect Tuesday to suck me into the pit, but it does. First of all, Tuesday is still very near the start of the week. It is the Monday I expected but it is a day later. Also, any work pushed from Monday piles up on Tuesday. For me, Tuesday is all about work and plowing through stacks of stuff. People around me expect stuff done on Tuesdays.

Wednesday — This is the middle of the week, obviously. Wednesdays go by quickly; I get a lot done; they are bland. If I want to really think about something, or if I want to socialize during the week with colleagues (not friends) then Wednesday is the day. Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Goodbye Wednesday.

Thursday — Like Tuesday, Thursday is a working day. Many people are getting ready for the weekend. The Friday Hype begins. People around me start to itch and grasp for the Weekend. On Thursdays I expect to have 1,000,000 meetings. I expect phone calls. Thursdays are better than Tuesdays — certainly — but they are still kind of rough most of the time. Tuesaday and Thursday; TNT.

Friday — Friday is normally a good day, but it is a false weekend day. Most folks work on Friday. So, it isn’t that Friday the day is great, it is that Friday the night is great. Most people lose sight of that. They think they like FriDAY but what they really like is FriNIGHT. Interestingly, since most people are busy thinking about the FriNIGHT and the weekend, I get a lot of work done. I can play my cards so that other folks leave me alone and I can kick booty. It is amazing how much you can get done on a FriAFTERNOON or FriNIGHT.

Saturday — The weekend has arrived for real. The entire day is mine, unless I choose otherwise. This isn’t always true, but generally Saturday is mine. Like most slugs, I often plan to have fun. My trick is having mild FriNIGHTS so that I am ready to blast off on Saturday. I’m ready. Saturday is mine.

Sunday — Although Monday is coming soon, Sunday can be a good day. In many ways, Sunday is like a weekday because you have to get prepared for the week. That’s fine. I generally prepare by being mildly social (family and friends, but not really colleagues). I also make sure that I eat good food on Sunday. I’m not entirely sure why I do this, but I try very hard to have yummy food.

(I’ll openly admit that this posting is an experiment. It is long and personal. It has little to do with usability. However, it was on my mind and I wanted to share. Enjoy it; ignore it. Share your thoughts, if you please.)

Paul Graham — “I think most businesses that fail do it because they don’t give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?”

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Usability…

“Somewhere along the way, the myth developed that justified type conveys more of a hard news feel — and that and rag right is more featurey. Readers don’t make any differentiation between the two. Some reasearch has shown that rag right is easier to read because justified text can create large spaces and more hyphenation. Either way, the achieve the best reader experience, it’s important to have someone with a skilled eye tweaking the size, letter and word spacing, and acceptable hyphenation.”

Read the article…

“Beginning in 2006, Microsoft says it will ship with its operating system and other software products six brand new typefaces created especially for extended on-screen reading.”

Read the article…

From Thoman Baekdal: XMLHttpRequest Usability GuidelinesAuthor and Usable XMLHttpRequest in PracticeAuthor

IA versus UX. Or, as I like to say, structure first, usability second. There is no “experience” without having something to first experience. There is no house without plans, building materials, and some construction.