WebWord

“Cut weeks from your inventory project. Whether you have ten, one hundred or one thousand domains, MAXAMINE can conduct a complete inventory in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take.”
Question: What free or open source tools compete with Maxamine Instant Inventory?
Visit the Instant Inventory product page…

Google Prediction #42 >>> Google Talk
Is Google 2.0 coming? For those keeping track, back in 2001 I predicted that Google would create a browser. Well, not exactly a browser, but sort of a browser. A Google client is what I called it, and I literally said that the Google client might […]

Introduction
Search is a killer application on the web and in the enterprise. Perhaps it is the killer app. Therefore, by definition and practice, it is a success story. At the same time, however, no one has explained search. That is, no one has explained the fundamental nature of search. Where is the psychology behind search? […]

“Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers.”
Read the article…
Related […]

CNN — “Online shopping has grown steadily in popularity in the United States in recent years with retailers offering Internet-only deals and shipping discounts and as consumers have come to trust the Internet for sharing financial information.”
Does improved usability account for any of this acceptance and trust?
Read the (short) article…

Adaptive Path (Dan Saffer) — “The main cause of this mess is that half of the personas out there are entirely made up, with no user research to back them. In most cases, no one on the design team has talked directly to users to find out who they are, so designers come up with […]

Ergoweb — “Reviewers say tiny screens mar experiences like viewing pictures, browsing the Internet and emailing. Many regard the profusion of features as clutter, and want just the basics. Slow Web surfing, confusing icons and graphics and impenetrable instructions round out the picture of discontent.”
I’m waiting for a phone that projects a screen and projects […]

Site Point — “How many swear words have you muttered watching Acrobat suddenly spontaneously launch itself moments after clicking on a seemingly innocent-looking link?”
Read the article…

Ars Technica — “Apple has done what was considered impossible by the HCI world — keeping one-button simplicity (which continually comes back over and over in usability tests as the most suitable mouse solution for the majority of computer users, who are often very, very confused when they are told to “right click”) while finally […]

Builder.com (UK) — “It’s the process of judging the extent to which various elements of an interface comply with recognised usability principles (or ‘heuristics’). It’s a systematic process of inspection intended to identify specific usability problems which you can then address throughout the iterative design of the product. You can carry out heuristic evaluation on […]

Builder.com (UK) — “Two of the most popular belong to a set of techniques called Usability Inspection methods, and are known as Thinking Aloud and Cognitive Walkthrough.”
Not a bad introduction if you are not familiar with these techniques.
Read the article…

WebWord is back thanks to some help from Sean Murphy and a lot of help from MadMan. I’ll tell the full story later but it is very much like my stories over the years: technology blows up, WebWord suffers.