That’s a good one. Via Microdoc News. —What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves) Similar:The Ascent #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 9) Odo and Quark bicker their way up …Things Past #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 8) Odo confronts his reputation as a…Trials and Tribble-ations #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 6) Trivial…
WebCT, like Blackboard and Jenzabar, is a content-management tool for online education. It sets up a password-protected space where students and teachers can present their materials. Laura Gibbs writes: “[O]ne of the major themes of the WebCT presentation was that ‘you don’t need a website anymore – not like you used to!’. Hmmmmm….. since when…
“Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users’ feeling of control and thus support the Web’s mission as an instant gratification environment.” Jakob Nielsen —Low-End Media for User EmpowermentAlertBox) There’s nothing stunning in this post, but it’s presented in the…
“It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems that men’s much-debated ability to navigate slightly better than women applies in virtual environments as well as the real world. And on average, says Microsoft computer scientist Mary Czerwinski, men are quicker to create a mental map of an environment and orient themselves within it.” —Women…
“The most common password was ‘password’ (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent).” John Leyden —Office Workers Give Away Passwords for a Cheap PenRegister) Similar:Students are trusting software like this to do…
“Usability has two roles: to set the direction for the design and to check that the design works. The second has gotten the most attention since it is the simplest: just run a user test of any Web site and you will quickly have a long list of things that must be changed to make…
“American troops in Saudi Arabia have been listening with amusement to Baghdad Betty, Iraq’s version of Tokyo Rose, who tries to demoralize them with her radio broadcasts. In one monologue, she warned them that their wives back home were sleeping with ‘famous movie stars,’ including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and even Bart Simpson….” David Ellis…
Perhaps it was the sight of Captain James T Kirk scribbling away on his executive starship tablet. Maybe it’s the recurring dream of reducing computing to its simplest, starkest elements — a screen, an input device, perhaps some sound. It could even be the thought that with the technology now just about able to do…
“Usability insights also help later in the project, and there is value in fine-tuning user interface details, but late-stage changes impact the final user experience less than fundamental changes early in the design. It’s a rough estimate, but I would say that the benefits from early usability data are at least ten times greater than…
Last week, Elwyn Jenkins provided a good rebuttal to Orloswki’s “second superpower” complaint. When I recently noticed that the good microdoc resorted to an ad hominem argument against Orloswki, I was a bit put off. Can’t we all get along without name-calling? But then I read Orlowski’s rant against the PageRank of his “googlewashing” article.…
“The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it’s GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a ‘better’ customer, it…
“Today’s web sites, particularly e-commerce sites, can be more complex than standard software products that often confine users to a very limited set of activities. Web tasks are also vastly more complex than those users have with most software applications. For example, our tests asked users to complete shopping tasks. No two users looked for…
“[A] growing group of military thinkers is questioning the U.S. military’s reliance on gadgetry.|U.S. precision weapons, Predator drones, and the like were less responsible for recent victories in Afghanistan and in the first Gulf War than is generally assumed, they argue. And increasing American dependence on technology leaves U.S. troops dangerously vulnerable to low-tech attacks.”…
“I sometimes wonder whether I am really being effective in my job spending half the time in e-mail, half the time on the phone, and the other half doing real work. | It’s no surprise that entrepreneurs have seen that there’s money to be made in taming this e-mail mess. The most innovative products I…
Ron Zeno has posted a summary of and a few comments on Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (Justin Kruger and David Dunning – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). People are generally pretty bad at estimating their own performances (the people who are worst…
Silly title for a news summary of a University of Pittsburgh study. The study found students who used spell- and grammar-check made more errors than students who just used their head. Of students who were asked to revise a passage without the spell checker, those with higher SAT’s did a much better job (5 errors)…
“The Web is only limited by the hard drive(s) your site is stored on, print is strictly limited by story inches. Have you noticed a tendency to ramble on a bit online? If you want to retain your readership you’ve got to curb that urge, at least on your front page. The way around that…
My book, Technology in American Drama, will be published shortly. I have no intention of flogging it endlessly on my blog, but as I was doing some final (I hope) paperwork and checking the page my publisher devoted to the book, I spotted the “printer friendly book flyer” link. When you click it, the browser…
“Nobody expects Google, or any index, to be perfect, since the Web is growing and changing so fast and many parts of it are generated from databases and therefore essentially impossible for a search engine to find or classify. | However, researchers at the highly-respected Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University have…
“We struggle with what we own today. Our fingers are already too thick and clumsy to stab the buttons on our gadgets, and, as our eyes age, we squint even harder to see the shrinking screens on our stuff.” Jefferson Graham —Hello, Tech Designers? This Stuff is Too Small.USA Today) Maybe by the time today’s…