Usability: July 2008 Archive Page

I remember when I was deeply involved in working on my dissertation, I would have dreams in which I was reading an academic article, and I grew frustrated because the text on the page would keep changing -- apparently my dreaming mind didn't have a buffer big enough to store that much text all at once, but I was able to note that it kept changing.  But this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes how a teenager managed to send text messages while sleeping:

Castillo's multimedia message to her boyfriend on her Pantech C300 phone involved 11 different steps, not including the typing. First, she had to select "Menu," then "Messaging," type "New," then select "Multimedia message," then punch the "Add" button and the "add text," before entering her garbled message. Afterward, she had to press "OK" twice, scroll to "contacts," find the e-mail address on that contact, select it, and press "Send."

"Not an easy process but once you get used to it, it becomes very easy," Castillo said.

This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there.  I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. 

The Phillips screw and screwdriver were patented this day in 1936.
Courtesy U.S Patent and Trademark Office

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)

Other, screw-related blog entries:

• Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
• What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
• The standardization of screws

It's been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven't touched in years. I've been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people's computer monitors have fairly high resolution, and the growing number of widescreen monitors is opening up some space on the right-hand side of my web pages, which I hadn't previously been using.  I've already put a "recent related entries" feature on the individual blog entry pages (the system selects those automatically based on category... it's not perfect, becuase it doesn't weight more heavily an entry that shares three cateogries as more similar to an entry that just shares one category with the current entry, but it's better than nouthing). 

I was reading a Washington Times article on the press coverage of Obama's doings, when I noticed this widget.

As one would guess from the triangle over on the right, when you click on the headline, a box opens up.  But if you see an open box, and you want to visit the article on the other side of the link, if you do what comes naturally -- clicking the title -- what happens is the window closes up. You have to click it again to open it, then click on the tiny word "view >".  (I don't want to "view" it... I want to "read" it! But that's beside the point.)

To my mind, the collapsing menu thing is done better at the Evening Standard, where the panels will glide open when you hover the mouse pointer over the title. (Horrors! I just checked, and the mouse-over menu at the Evening Standard doesn't appear to be working anymore.)