WebWord

Matthew Oliphant writes I Can Exist Now. The NYT Said So. where he tells us how he feels about the NYT times article on usability. For the most part, he’s frustrated with the New York Times article. Here are some snippets:
“Had it been written 5 years ago, I’d be really pleased about it. But it isn’t […]

Technology’s Untanglers: They Make It Really Work (NY Times) — “Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology.”
Good, solid article. Usability is here to stay. I also liked this piece a lot because it was in the NY Times and it felt very real. […]

How to Deliver Bad News to Customers (John S. Rhodes) — “The intention of usability testing and user experience (UX) research is to help clients and end users. If you want to help people, you must first understand problems and issues. You have to explain the challenges you discover. After all, you can’t fix what […]

Unmasking the Decepticon: TransformersMovie.com Battles Usability — “Maybe I’m not the target (ugh) audience, here, but I don’t see a lot of 13 year olds having much more patience than I. I’ve seen a representative of your key demographic use a computer multiple times (many of which consist of me leaning over his shoulder to […]

Focus on the user — This is possibly the single most important thing for entrepreneurs to remember. “Every startup that dies fails to do this,” Graham says. “A lot of startups focus on their competitors or lawsuits, but what really kills startups is if users think it’s boring. It’s a much quieter and dangerous reason, […]

I LOVE this tag line: Compete On Usability
 

Users Strike Back Against Corporate Customer Service — “Creative consumers have found plenty of ways to get some personal attention from faceless corporations. No longer content to sit back and abide by the whims of fate (or customer service), empowered consumers have been on a rampage this month; let’s take a look.”
Users can be bold!

Nielsen Being Nielsen — “Humans change slower – much slower – than technology. That’s the guiding conclusion of usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who notes that 80% of Web usability guidelines from the Nineties still hold today.”

Steve Krugs Speaks – “As a designer you know too much about the site. You have to bring in people who don’t know anything about the site and have them try and use it. That’s my single best practice.”
Steve rocks.
 

I’ll get to marketing with RSS in just a moment. I’m going to give you a little background first. The context is useful. 
Many readers have been asking why WebWord hasn’t been updated regularly. The biggest reason is that I’ve been working like a dog with my brother on our marketing web site. Let me explain…
More than […]

Users won’t care about iPhone keyboard usability (Adrian Kingsley-Hughes) — “As much as I think that the glass-topped software-powered keyboard on the iPhone looks cool, I keep coming back the one thing that’s important about a keyboard to me - usability.  Do I think that the iPhone’s keyboard is going to be an efficient input […]

So how do you start a blog? Let’s think about it for a moment…
1. Have a voice. That is, don’t be generic or bland or normal. There’s enough of that in the world already. Speaking your mind is important and valuable. You don’t need to break all boundaries but you do need to have […]