You may have heard that an early version of computer translation software took the input “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and changed it to “The whisky is strong, but the meat is foul.” Or maybe it was “Out of sight, out of mind” translated to “Invisible idiot.” Or maybe the mistranlsated…
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:Boston Herald Guild Members Boycotting Twitter After Reporter SuspendedMembers of the Herald’s editorial guild …Current_EventsFor some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a "make-your-own-Trump-e… This sort of…
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…
“I’m not so nerdy as to suggest that you read Harry Potter as an idea manual for next-generation product development. But the books are filled with examples of products that we’ll soon be able to build, and they do provide some idea of what it might mean to embody awareness in the physical world. ”…
Why would anyone want to consult Allied Computing (“Due to our unique location in Kalispell Montana, Allied Computing is able to offer zero sales tax on all purchases. We also consider trade-ins and trade ups on most new and some used computer systems.”) while researching religious aspects of birth control? And if Allied Computing has…
“The link is the basic element of hypertext, and researchers have long recognized that links provide semantic relationships for users. Yet little work has been done to understand the nature of these relationships, particularly in conjunction with the purposes of organizational/informational Web sites. This paper explores the semantic and rhetorical principles underlying link development and…
“Would I open a huge document-say a PDF book chapter from Amazon? I don’t know. What do I want on my computer versus what do I want bookmarked access to? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know: I need help in managing my attachments and getting more value from the megabytes of media material…
“A Tablet PC is about the size of a legal pad and includes a digital pen for handwritten data entry and navigation. Its advocates say it will be just the thing for the most mobile workers, including those who work standing up and those who just don’t like to type. But naysayers point out that…
“The overriding principles were of simplicity and speed, oft-expressed in the maxim ”the story is the star.’ Anything that would distract from that, either in terms of the attention a member of editorial staff would be able to give it, or the attention a user would give it, was pretty ruthlessly discarded. The other thing…
“So far, however, I have not seen a book that explains how to build crummy, dysfunctional Web sites that chase away customers and produce no useful results. Of course, there is no shortage of sites of this kind out there, but until now there has never been a systematic, comprehensive guide to how to create…
Bob Bailey traces the spread of the popular “7 plus or minus 2” meme: “I have had people tell that [Miller’s] ‘Magic 7’ paper is the reason why the local telephone number has seven numbers. This is not true. I have had others tell me that the ‘Magic 7’ paper is the reason they: place…
“If we improved all the intranets in the world to the usability level achieved by the best 25% in our study, the world economy would save $311,294,070,513 per year for the sixteen test tasks alone. Adding the likely savings from company-specific tasks leads us to an estimated $600 billion in total annual productivity improvements.” Jakob…
A recent marketing research poll suggests that marketing research polls are a waste of time, since “people don’t know and can’t know how and why they do things.” —Marketing Polls a Waste of Time?Marketing Research News) Note: There’s a huge difference between a poll (in which you simply ask people’s opinions) and usability testing (in…
“[A]udience members exposed to slow-downloading pages and then given the opportunity to freely browse the Web were more active in their investigations. They tried more hyperlinks and visited more sites than audience members who viewed pages with faster initial download speeds. In the past, such behavioral and physiological impacts were understood only as a result…
From reason 5:”I’ve heard of teams using all their planning time doing research (typically resulting in a panic attack when specs are due), when instead they should be using at least half of their planning time generating ideas and prototypes and applying the research to actual new decisions.” From reason 13: “There is a difference…
A small Swedish company posted its quarterly earnings on its website, without any password protection, but without publicizing the URL. A Reuters reporter guessed the URL and found the report before it was supposed to be released. Now the reporter is being sued for Hacking a URL, which is a fundamental navigation technique that many…
“Techniques for managing information are the new critical ‘meta-skills’ needed to stay current (and hopefully sane). Gurus urging ‘simplicity’ and ‘turn off technology’ (while very sage advice) miss an important point: nothing is slowing down. What we need is simplicity in how we manage information, not simplicity by ignoring or turning off information.” gsiemens —The…
“Now you hear a low hum, and over the horizon appears a flying machine. You press the button of a box near by and a radio signal flashes to the machine. The aircraft, looking oddly like a horizontal electric fan, drones toward you. When the pilot is directly overhead, all forward movement of the machine…
“Any data that’s public, and that Google can see, is hardly worth storing and organizing. We simply search for what we need, when we need it: just-in-time information management. But since we don’t admit Google to our private data stores — Intranets [1] and mailboxes, for example — we’re still like the shoemaker’s barefoot children.…
“Technology pioneers typically get steamrollered, then look on helplessly from the sidelines as a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies make billions. First movers, the theory goes, are too smart for their own good, churning out gizmos that are too expensive or too complex for the average consumer’s taste.” Brendan I. Koerner —TiVo, We Hardly Knew Ye: Sorry…