WebWord

[Joshua Schachter] envisages [Del.icio.us] becoming something that “stores and categorises and lets you share the digital pieces of your life - a large-scale outboard memory”. (Author: Quinn Norton, Source: Guardian Unlimited)
Slowly we’re seeing the emergence of The Ghost.

From Szuc & Gaffney:
Q: How many usability people does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They’re too busy complaining about the door knob.
Can you do better?

“Time and again, employees repeatedly ask that their intranet user experience be as simple, efficient and satisfying as their Google experience. Employees don’t care that integrating information from legacy databases and enterprise systems into a single interface can be challenging and expensive. In their minds, if Google can provide a quality user experience then so […]

“It’s not me, the user, who should have to care about the string being formatted a certain way. As long as the right characters are there, I feel I’ve done my job. It’s especially annoying because the card (or whatever) you’re reading it off of usually HAS spaces in it.”
gruskada says: Don’t make me compensate […]

Friday Eye Candy — Full Cover Car Advertisements
Wonderful mock ups! There is serious passion here. I can’t point to any favorites because I love too many of these. To me, these car advertisements are usable, friendly, and fun.
Request: Does someone feel like throwing the Classic WebWord logo onto a sexy car? ;-)

Related: How […]

“DateBox is a pure JavaScript library using DHTML and advanced Date parsing to generate the date based on the grammar passed. The purpose of DateBox is to simplify the date entering process using grammatical terms we are all familiar with.”
“Intuitive” is such a loaded term but let’s play with it.
Is this tool intuitive or […]

“The engineering challenge is to provide just the right kind of sophisticated yet easy-to-use sorting and filtering tools that map well to your customers’ goals and mental models. In this article, I present some design ideas to start you on your way to creating a more usable search-results page.” (Source: Java World, Author: […]

It’s not uncommon to see seemingly conclusive results after a short period of time… but statistics can be misleading. To avoid the trap of making a hasty decision about what’s working (and what isn’t), try to wait until your best-performing page alternative has produced at least 100 “conversions”.
Read more about A/B testing…

Icons Stink — “…is the language of computing something we have to train people into doing, or is it really as easy as we’d like to believe? The answer’s in the icons, but like all pictures, the interpretation is key.” (Source: Mac Dev Center, Author: Tom Bridge)
Related…

The Anatomy of an Icon

Do icons help your sites […]

Think it is about users and privacy? Maybe not.
“Perhaps the company really is worried about protecting your privacy. Much more likely: It is worried about protecting itself.”
Why, because of trade secrets and technology? Maybe yes, maybe no.
“Google’s claim that the subpoenas could reveal trade secrets is up for debate. Aitan Goelman, partner with the Washington, […]

“At 332 million users, Asia currently weighs in at a third of the Internet’s 1 billion global users, a penetration that only taps 15% of the population worldwide today, said Cerf.” (Source: Network World, Author: Jay Gillette)
Two easy comments. First, this has a profound influence on where and how to spend your business dollars. […]

This photolog problem in Word Press 2.0 is so bad that MadMan thought some settings on his PC were the problem. In his opinion, this is an excellent example of why coders should not also be given usability testing responsibilities.
p.s. This is why I try to stay away from the cutting (bleeding!) edge of […]