WebWord

Vaspers the Grate (Steven Edward) — “Since the vast majority of blogs are authored by a single person, the chances of very many of these unknown strangers having anything important or interesting to say to you: almost zero.”
Why your blog doesn’t mean much to most people.

I’ll keep this short and sweet. Earlier this year, Chris McEvoy informed me that he rebuilt WebWord postings and comments from July 2001 through Oct 2003. This “lost” content is now found, posted, and completely available to you.
I’ll add a more permanent link in the navigation when time permits. Done!
p.s. I really miss […]

Web Pro News — “Now that usable websites have become so commonplace, especially among the major web players, it’s time to start looking to the future. Suddenly, a usable website isn’t going to be enough to separate us from our competitors (apart from those using the developers who’ve been based on Mars). There is a […]

We’ve heard it before, but it is true: old content is good content. Here’s an example of my own:
UPS: Arrival, Arrival, Departure, Arrival, Departure… It has been popular recently, but I don’t know why.
That’s something to noodle over. You can’t predict the future and you can’t know what people will want tomorrow, or next […]

Here is the request…
Here is my answer:
jean-francois,
I’ll start with a couple of caveats. First, I don’t know the goal of the site or the page. (Free internet studies?) Second, my comments and recommendations are going to be very rough. This is a very light heuristic analysis which is not based on […]

In the spirit of the holiday season, I would very much like to help a WebWord reader. I will donate approximately one hour of my time to the first person who tells me that they need usability help today. ($250 value, wink wink!) First come, first serve. I’m at your disposal…

OLD Ease of Learning: How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
NEW Ease of Doing: How fast can a user accomplish the desired task? How much time? How much energy applied per unit of measured time?
Why better? Takes into consideration […]

“For the longest time, the Web has existed as a static medium, where only animated GIFs and, later on, Flash added some life to pages. With the advent of web standards and DOM scripting, people have started to look more and more at Javascript to add interactivity to websites. With FACE, a new technology by […]

Dey Alexander comes through with a great list of persona references: Discussion articles, research articles, tutorial, case studies, examples, templates…
(Thanks for the heads up James Robertson and Anu Gupta.)

A List Apart (author: Brian Crescimanno) — “It’s often the smallest usability quirks, however, that create the biggest annoyances for users, especially when it comes to HTML forms. Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be off to a good start.”
I agree that small usability quirks are often big annoyances. My research and experience confirms this.
Read […]

The dungeon is aware and awake,
with monsters; Four heroes work
together, yet apart, as our puppets
Human masters push them: gold
Fire and magic, magic and fire
hack-n-slash!
The thrust of change,
The plunk of coins
MCMLXXXV
The dungeon gives,
but not as much as it takes
Invisible and invulnerable, yet
Death still finds, hunts, kills: drains
mountain, castle, forest, and pyramid
red, blue, green, and yellow
Warrior, Valkyrie, […]

“The goal has always been to satisfy people’s needs. This has been the case since the stone ages. If you do that well you will succeed, regardless of it includes Web 2.0 thinking. ”
Read Thomas Baekdal’s predictions for 2006…