Usability: October 2003 Archive Page

Please -- Never Do This!E-Mail)

This message, with the uninformative subject line "November Hours," an empty body, and a 45K MS-Windows attachment (see tips #1, #2 and #3 of "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips") went out to about 450 people

By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across Seton Hill University. A better alternative would have been a plain text list, or posting the file online and inviting people to download it if they want it.

On the other hand, it also motivated me to learn how to use the "pixellation" feature on my image editor.

How Amazon can make money from books you already own.

We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one. | "Search inside" could be the perfect solution to this common problem. --Steven Johnson --The Best Search Idea Since Google (Slate)

Amazon's "Search Inside" is starting to feel more and more like Vannevar Bush's memex.

At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. | But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. --Paul Majendie --Bubble bursts for electronic books (SignOnSanDiego)

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. | But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. --Jo Twist --Web guru fights info pollution (BBC)

A good interview with Jakob Nielsen. The bit about procrastination isn't new to anyone who's spent time on a college campus recently... and I'm definitely guilty of using my blog as a way to convince myself I'm being productive when I've got ten or fifteen minutes to kill... when in reality, I often read gad about online for an hour or more before I find something that really motivates me to blog.

P.S. Jo Twist? Really?

A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters' confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have dismissed or ignored the butterfly layout's problematic design as an aberration—a stupid mistake on the part of local officials. --Jessie Scanlon --Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot (Slate)

See also "Why Usability Testing Matters" -- my quick-n-dirty treatment of the Florida presidential ballot that caused so much controversy in 2000. While usability got a bit of broader exposure due to that flap, it looks like local officials haven't tackled the real problem yet.

A while ago, I lamented that, when copying and pasting from an online source, it's a pain to have to re-create the links and other HTML embedded in the text. DrWeb sent me this e-mail, and gave me permission to post it here:

Just a note.. saw your post on the Kaironews site, and decided to write since I am not registered there to post or comment.. Re: http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3352

I found this pretty neat plug-in for Web Developers that works, from, um, Microsoft site, and it allows your wish for IE5.x versions. I tried it out tonight, and it works. You highlight text you want to blog and cite, and right-click, and on the menu, you pick "view partial source." It grabs the links and text in that partial source code --viola!

I found the answer via Blogzilla, see http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/ie_phantom_pain.html

and the small downloadable script/code is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webaccess/webdevaccess.asp for View Selection [Partial] Source and a DOM tree.

Best,
DrWeb

--
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb@earthlink.net
San Diego, CA
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
This tagline only to be removed by the consumer.

View Source add-in IE (to help in blogging)...E-Mail)

I've tested it out, and it works just fine. I'll still have to do some hand coding, but this is a great time-saver. I've been virtuously keeping my blogging to a minimum today, since I've got a backlog of student papers to grade.

[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans - many of them season ticket holders - were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without the stubs. --Stuck at the Gate  (NY Daily News)

Blame the user -- a typical management ploy. I haven't seen a picture of the tickets in question, but if 1,000 people all made the same mistake, the ticket books were poorly designed. Period. Usability testing could have caught that long before it angered so many people.