[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)
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 should their company intranet.” (Source: CIO Magazine, Author: Shiv Singh)
“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 for your laziness!
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 to make Car Advertisement Mock-ups
(Reference: Thomas Baekdal)
Update!
Sweeeet! (My favorite is below. See the rest here…)
(Related? Webword Superhero Gallery)
“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 not? Consider that it is not generally intuitive. It might be intuitive but that is because the programmer was able to catch the case that met your needs this time. If the programmer didn’t meet your needs would it be intuitive still? If it worked this time but not next time would it be intuitive?
At best, this slick little tool is specifically intuitive. It is good when it is good. That doesn’t make it intuitive. Usable? Certainly. It handles date input selection very well and it covers many cases and exceptions. It even fails in a reasonable manner.
Intuitive? Generally, for everyone, in all cases? Nope.
“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: Greg Nudelman)
Learn how to how to create effective and easy-to-use search-results pages
Related…
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”.
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…
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, D.C.-based law firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, says he doubts the data the government is looking for would reveal how Google executes its searches.”
So, hmm, what else?
“A public disclosure of exactly how much pornography is on the Internet and how often people look for it–the two data points that will result from fulfilling the government’s subpoena–could serve to make the Internet look bad. And Google, as its leading search engine, could look the worst.”
Pornography?
Yes, maybe pornography.
“Google and its competitors all benefit from porn sites, which help generate search queries and page views. But Google is the only portal company that makes nearly all of its revenue from click-through advertising. Restricting porn and porn advertising–the likely aim of COPA’s sponsors–could hurt Google disproportionately.”
(Source: Forbes, Authors: Chris Kraeuter and Rachel Rosmarin)
– — –
Redux: When it comes to Google maybe it ain’t about you or other users. Maybe it is about profits. Go figure.
– — –
The Straight Dope: How much of all Internet traffic is pornography?
“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. In terms of a market, this cannot be ignored. Second, in terms of usability and user needs, you might need to seriously retool your skills. Cultural knowledge is going to be of great importance in the future. Much more than today.
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 technology. I’d rather not fight the bugs and issues. Too frustrating.
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