“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…
“The exchange of love letters was central to the courtship of my grandparents (who were separated by the First World War) and of my parents (who were separated by my father’s service after the Second World War). By the time that my wife and I were courting, we handed our love letters back and forth…
“Better-written technical documents enable people to work with greater speed, recall, accuracy, and comfort. These qualities, when taken together, make up the usability factor. Caution: simply gathering opinions is not usability testing — you must arrange an experiment that measures a subject’s ability to use your document.” Dennis G. Jerz —Usability Testing: What is It?UWEC)…
“But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they’re not just a handy way to address network resources. They’re also valuable communication tools. They help orient users in your architecture, and can suggest whether other options are available.” Jesse James Garrett —User-Centered URL DesignAdaptivePath.com) Ironic… the URL of this article is needlessly long:…
“On June 27, 2002, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued guidelines that recommended that any ranking results influenced by payment, rather than by impartial and objective relevance criteria, ought to be clearly labeled as such in the interests of consumer protection. It appears, then, that any algorithm such as PageRank, that can reasonably pretend to…
“Florida found itself in another voting debacle during last week’s primary election: Tens of millions of dollars spent to abolish hanging chads and they still can’t get it right.” Lauren Weinstein —A Vote for Touch and Go Away [Florida Ballots]Wired) Similar:Quick visit to see my mother and siblings.Couples in successful relationships always use these 6…
Whiteboards vs. Blackboard: “So, on the one hand, we’ve got a classroom board that can be written on only with special pens. You can never tell when the pens will run out before they actually do so, and there’s no good way to extend the life of a pen once it finally expires. On the…
“If all you have is a hammer then everything is a nail. How else can you explain why web sites are so incredibly painful to use? If I were paranoid I’d assume there was a conspiracy to assure that the Internet is kept lame. But perhaps it is a combination of ignorance and laziness.” Bob…