Is this an ugly page, or what? The grey shading makes the text all but unreadable, on both my laptop’s LCD and my desktop’s CRT. (Not that I would actually register for Salon… just wanted to clear that up.) —Salon Registration: Ugly Text Similar:Vanessa Otero's Complex vs. Clickbait, Liberal vs. Conservative Media ChartUpdate, June 2020:…
“Can no clock chip designer figure out that no one needs to get up at exactly 6:03? If they just allowed the alarm sequence to go forward in five minute increments, instead of one minute increments, they would improve our lives immeasurably….The complexity of other people’s screens, particularly that of new users, who leave everything…
“Writing for the Web requires careful planning. Your content needs to fit well within the context of your website. When a reader finds your content, they need to be able to scan it quickly. That’s what metadata is about. In order for your website to be found, you need to write for how people search.”…
“If you know where each truck and driver is, you can use your assets more efficiently–not just the trucks, but the warehouses that are waiting for them to pick up or the recipients that are waiting for them to deliver. In retail, if you can track products more carefully you can dramatically reduce shrinkage, or…
“Online advertising software vendor Unicast is introducing a new kind of Internet ad that doesn’t just pop up over a portion of the browser but rather fills the entire screen of the computer user.|The New York-based company described the new unit as a ‘full-screen, 15-second, 300k online ad.’ Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format…
“Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently on the Web. They scan read?jumping quickly from one piece of content to the next. People are much more action-orientated on the Web. They get online to get something done. Words should always be driving actions.” Know your reader Take…
“Mosaic wasn’t the Web’s first browser. It wasn’t even, as it’s so often been described, the first browser to sport a graphical user interface. Tim Berners-Lee’s “WorldWideWeb” was the first graphical point-and-click browser, followed by Pei Wei’s Viola browser.|But for most people, Mosaic was the easiest browser to use. It installed easily, and allowed people…
That’s a good one. Via Microdoc News. —What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves) Similar:A week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbotsChatbots are designed to give conversati…Cyberculture20 Things 20-Year-Olds Don't GetI expect my English majors not to balk w…Academia"Only You" — 11yo Carolyn Sings a Power Ballad from "Starlight Express"The observation car Pearl…
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:Closing the Door on the Video Store Era…
“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.”…