Usability: March 2005 Archive Page

Many people think teens are technowizards who surf the Web with abandon. It's also commonly assumed that the best way to appeal to teens is to load up on heavy, glitzy, blinking graphics.

Our study refuted these stereotypes. Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites. --Jakob Nielsen --Usability of Websites for Teenagers (Alertbox)

I haven't checked Nielsen's website in a while.

I wonder if parents of teenagers are less likely to be web literate than younger people (who grew up with computers) or older people (such as retirees, who have the time to learn about those parts of the web that interest them)... thus, the parents of teenagers feel that their teens are web geniuses, because teens can do certain things that they are motivated to do. Teens may not have social needs and interests that drive them to learn the professional web skills that are the kinds of things that Jakob Nielsen and other web design professionals are interested in studying.

Just a thought.

This Yahoo! Search service finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license. While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors that want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions. --Yahoo! Creative Commons Search (Yahoo!)

Slashdot is aflutter with suggestions that Yahoo! is giving Google a run for its money. The CC search is great news for those who wish to share their intellectual property.

I simply can't explain the concept of the creative commons to my wife... when I mentioned that Lawrence Lessig seemed vaguely interested in a particular idea that I mentioned to him after he gave a speech at the 4Cs, my wife urged me to write it down quickly so that he doesn't steal credit for it.

An international study of about 100,000 15-year-olds in 32 different developed and developing countries suggests that the drive to equip an increasing number of schoolchildren in the UK with computers may be misplaced.

In a report to be given at the conference of the Royal Economic Society in Nottingham this week, Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann of Munich University say the research shows diminished performance in students with computers. --Robert Booth --Pupils 'do worse with computers'  (Guardian)

Since computers and the internet are part of the subject matter I teach, not just the tools I use to teach, I can't imagine teaching without computers. Occasionally I ask students in my lit classes to read from their blog entries, and occasionally I click through web pages devoted to complex upcoming assignments. But my freshman comp class meets in a room that doesn't have a teacher's station. Most of my contact time with students is spent doing traditional discussion and workshops -- though I like to prime the pump, so to speak, by having students blog their initial responses to readings, and read their peer's responses.

A bit of hope: "students with more than 500 books in their homes performed better in maths and science than those with none."

Of course, I doubt the researchers went to these students' houses and counted the number of books. In addition: the study gathered data in 2000.

I have many questions... was it having a computer that caused the drop in achievement, or having broadband/unsupervised access to the internet? I've known several students who've come close to dropping out, or who have in fact dropped out, because they spent too much time playing computer games and couldn't get their act together when it comes to studying.

The article says the paper has not yet been presented at a conference, and doesn't offer a link to the full version.

About 36 million Americans—or 27% of internet users—say they download either music or video files and about half of them have found ways outside of traditional peer-to-peer networks or paid online services to swap their files, according to the most recent survey of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

[...]

Current file downloaders are now more likely to say they use online music services like iTunes than they are to report using p2p services. The percentage of music downloaders who have tried paid services has grown from 24% in 2004 to 43% in our most recent survey. However, respondents may now be less likely to report peer-to-peer usage due to the stigma associated with the networks. --Music and Video Downloading Moves Beyond P2P (Pew Interent & American Life Project)

Readers are using aggregation services like Google News to save time and find news they're interested in from one location. But the digital melting pot of news has raised questions about the need for standards that go beyond technology. --Stefanie Olsen --Tough week prompts closer look at how Google gathers its news  (SFGate.com)

What's a namber? A namber is a word that acts as a mnemonic for a number. For example, 65 is drum, and 181 is push.

A namber address uses an arbitrarily-chosen list of nambers to represent each of the numbers from 0 to 255 in order to assemble four words to represent any IP address. Metafilter.com's namber is earth.frog.brown.tooth, and mysteryrobot.com conveniently provides translation and forwarding to the real IP address. --What's a namber? (Metafilter)

--Personalized Google News (Google)

A great little addition to Google's incredibly useful news aggregator. I deleted the "sports" section, and added sections containing keywords that I always find myself googling. The search I created for "weblog" isn't very useful, but I'll play with the interface later.

There doesn't seem to be a way for me to access this from a different computer -- it seems to be driven by cookies. Still, it's a nifty addition.

Update, 15 Mar: I see now that there is a permalink available at the bottom of the page. Even better than a login procedure.

The demand is such that the niche has grown from text-based games coded by hobbyists to between 30 and 50 professional audio-game developers who sell 3,000 games a year, experts estimate.

Most of these games run on ordinary PCs and are often joystick- or keyboard-controlled. The player dons a pair of headphones, and elements of the game are delivered in stereo to help players shoot aliens on the left or avoid a tank on the right. --David Cohn --The Blind Fragging the Blind  (Wired)

They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it's the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it's the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be (apparently) easily assembled into something new. Maybe it's the appearance of neutrality in the list, its lack of point of view. Or maybe, hatred of reading, hatred of learning, fear of librarians, fear of looking stupid, the absence of a teacher's or a librarian's interference. Or, a recognition of the limits of print sources; hurriedness; desire for anonymity or for "interactivity." Or maybe it's the joy of accumulation, the reassurance of hoarding. In the end, probably, the glut of information itself is a reward. --Donny Smith --Search Engine Interfaces (Kairos)