WebWord

“The election of 2000 was decided not on questions of policy or character, but usability, proving that I was right all along about the evils of unfamiliar and overelaborate user interfaces. Oh yes. In this matter, I have concluded that it is now insufficient simply to browbeat everyone into buying the book, and so will […]

I am seeing the word “engagability” more and more. Does anyone have any good idea about what it means. It usually used in conjunction with usability and accessibility.

At the ASUG 2004 conference I’m learning that SAP is definitely trying to push RFID. I mentioned RFID about a year ago and I said that it was coming sooner rather than later. I’m starting to hear the same messge from corporations now. If you don’t know anything about RFID you should probably do some […]

KMorrill’s WebLog — “Our team just finished doing usability research on Visual Studio’s setup. These
studies are always fascinating to me, because even the most seemingly simple interface can completely crash and burn when presented to someone who is not biased by the effort that went into designing it.”
Read More…

Design By Fire — “I am writing to you because I have many issues with your latest Alertbox, Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience, and quite frankly, with much of what you have written in the recent past. I would like to address these points and I hope you take this letter to heart.”
Read […]

InfoSync World — “The 140 mm long PenPhone recognizes handwriting for dialing numbers and writing text messages directly into the mobile phone – no matter what surface the user writes on. Even if no writing surface is available, built-in voice recognition means you can activate the PenPhone. Additional features include an integrated loudspeaker and handsfree […]

Apple — “The Universal Access capabilities of Mac OS X will soon be enhanced with a spoken interface that provides a new way, through speech, audible cues, and keyboard navigation, to access the Macintosh.”
Read More…

Wired — “So the 24-year-old Web developer from Blaine, Minnesota, launched TinyURL.com in January 2002, a free site that converts huge strings of characters into more manageable snippets. The site’s popularity has skyrocketed as Web savants use it to pass around Web-generated maps, news clippings and newsgroup postings.” (Comments: TinyURL rocks.I’ve been using it for […]

In My Experience — “One trend I have noticed in many video games produced within the last couple of years is that the game teaches you to play it as you play it and assumes that you haven’t read the manual.”
Read More…

Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman — “At work over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing some JavaScript to fix several of my pet peeves with our Vignette-based content management system. There’s a lot that can be done with manipulating the DOM. My little scripts aren’t remotely innovative uses of the DOM for news sites, but they do […]

InfoSync — “The new mobile textphone allows two people to communicate by phone using text in real time. The textphone has a keyboard and display screen, and instead of speaking into a mouthpiece the user can type what they want to say and read the reply from the screen.” (Comments: Good stuff, but I am […]

Yahoo — “Should RIM be worrying about the latest Treo handheld? In this two-part series, NewsFactor compares the Treo 600 with RIM’s BlackBerry 7000 handheld series in terms of the features that enterprise users really want.”
Read More…