Putting a Bad Interface on Things

“But here’s the dirty little secret that may go farther in explaining why usability stinks: Most developers and designers don’t give a rat’s ass about it. The developers want the thing to have lots of features, so usability is the designers’ problem. The designers want the project to look great, so how it works is…

Bar Code Tech Drives Nurses Nuts

“Nurses quickly learned how to hack the system to save time. For example, if a patient’s bar code didn’t scan correctly on the first try, nurses often entered the seven-digit bar code number manually rather than rescanning it. “Nurses also felt that the computer system’s demands forced them to focus on pill-pushing. If meds weren’t…

Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Reaches its 100,000th Article

“Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org ), a community-built multilingual encyclopedia, is announcing that the English edition of the project has reached a milestone of 100,000 articles in development…. Wikipedia is a public WikiWikiWeb, a website where anyone can edit any article at any time. Users build upon each other’s edits, and vandalized articles are quickly repaired by…

The Year the Music Died

“Rightly or wrongly, record companies are detested by politicians (for corrupting youth), by webcasters (for demanding royalties), and by their customers (for inflating prices). Musicians and songwriters are famous for loathing the labels… Radio and MTV aren’t in the industry’s corner… And the electronics industry’s attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple…

DMCA: Ma Bell Would Be Proud

“Not so many decades ago, you couldn’t buy or legitimately connect your own phone or other telecom equipment to the public telephone network in the United States…. Virtually everything related to telephone communications had to be leased from the local monopoly phone company, which also performed all installations and maintenance. Remarkably, it was even prohibited…

Someone Writing about Their Reading of Google

“An act of reading electronic language involves: Setting up an electronic language environment; Selecting particular input into the electronic text; Receiving the output; Analyzing what the electronic text does.” —Someone Writing about Their Reading of GoogleTechnacy Weblog) I’m reminded of Espen Aarseth’s definition of Cybertext — a system that includes not only the array of…

MetroCard Mess

“The MetroCard Vending Machines in New York’s subways are a classical case of programmer-directed hierarchical menu hell, forcing the user to make choices without knowing the consequences, and throwing the user off altogether at the smallest problem. With a little careful thought, we are able to improve the interaction considerably, while at the same time…

The Psychology of Navigation

“In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal.”…

Conducting Research Surveys by E-Mail and the Web

“Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims.” Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker,…

Usability Review of a VCR

A series of pictures describing how usability professionals would handle the “blinking 12:00” VCR problem. Quite amusing. —Usability Review of a VCRUsabilityMustDie.com) Similar:More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent the…Stapler jam during a midterm exam.The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)Is AI making us less…

Userati Connections

I admit it… once I started stumbling across my own name on the Internet, I began using Google to find out who has linked to me and how my visibility compares to that of other people whose names I come across. Now Userati automates all that pesky ego-surfing, and even quantifies the result. Userati uses…