Category: Interfaces
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Liveblogging: Charlotte Johnson and William Harroff : End of Books
Charlotte Johnson from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and William Harroff from McKendree College discuss (r)evolutionary (e)book (Presentation here). Haroff’s art is here. The presentation is worth browsing through because it links to several multimedia books. Truthfully I’ll browse more through them later. I’m just too dang tired. They talk more about form factors and…
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Copy Overwrite: No to All?
Have you wanted to copy all the contents of one directory to another without overwriting identical files? Here’s an amazingly useful tip about how to Just Say No to All when copying files/directories: Every time you move or copy files from one folder to another, Windows checks the target folder for files that have the…
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Headfirst/Creating Passionate Users Weblog
Today I discovered two very insightful weblogs by veterans in the technical publishing industry. First Joseph B. Wikert from Wrox has a weblog about publishing trends called Average Joe. I’ll be catching up on his posts over time. Also, a great User Experience group weblog called Creating Passionate Users by some programmers/usability people who wrote…
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Ajax, Etc
I knew about Ajax and heard a lot of buzz about it at sxsw, but only now have I begun to appreciate its significance. Here’s the article that triggered it all . Derek Powazek wrote about its usability implications. For one thing, form validation can be done in real time instead of after clicking submit.…
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Systems Approach v. User Approach
I wanted to follow up on Bruce Eckel’s thought about “thinking in zope” (or thinking in a particular idiom or computer language). Previously he argued that one cause of bad design is a developer’s failure to appreciate customer problems and what they really want. The problem, he argued, boils down to gathering and heeding user…
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Linux for the Desktop Revisited?
From a slashdot forum about why linux fails on the desktop: The truth behind it is “ease of use”. MS Visual Studio comes with a bunch of tools in one package, a graphical XML schema editor, a graphical database management system, click-n-paint GUI creation, and to top it off each of those students gets 4…
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Tech Savvy Survey
Brian Bergstein summarizes the results of a Pew survey on Americans’ comfort level with technology. –Despite being plugged in to the Internet and other sources of data more often, only 13 percent of the tech-savvy crowd feels overwhelmed by information. By contrast, a sense of information overload plagues 25 percent of the rest of the…
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What’s Wrong with Yahoo?
I stopped using yahoo after they removed pop-forwarding, but Atul Chitnis’s criticism of yahoo makes it clear that yahoo is truly clueless. Jeffrey Zeldman, in a piece on obsolete web standards, shows the awful code that yahoo does to maximize compatibility with old browsers. I’m no fan of yahoo (I discontinued my mail account after…
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Resumes Part II: This Resume is Terrible!
The woman looked at resumes mainly to find a person’s job history, so she wanted a “job obituary” format. For a recruiter, it is much more convenient to favor candidates with experience most resembling that of the current assignment. It is much easier to reduce a candidate to simply the sum of his/her previous jobs.…
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Edward Tufte, Resumes and 5 Years Experience
In my previous post, I discussed the excellent ideas from the world?s leading expert on interfaces and design, Edward Tufte. Tufte encourages designers to maximize the use of space as a general rule. The problem is that white space can reduce clutter and highlight certain information on the screen or page. It also can present…
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Myth of Seven, Plus or Minus 2
Edward Tufte and Power Point Saw two extraordinary movies. Jane Campion?s Sweetie and Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire. These are two films that will change your life. Great article by James Kalbachabout about The Myth of “Seven, Plus or Minus 2” (mentioned by Camworld). Also, How to list your site with search engines, cross-browser compatibility, the…
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Jukebox Challenge
For Christmas I burned music CD?s for friends and family. I also was able to experience firsthand the maddening challenges of maintaining an MP3 collection and the usability problems of Music Match Software. Now that I have started to download mp3?s like crazy, I have realized what a bother it can be. Most of these…