On 10/24/07, Kivi Shapiro [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Jeff makes a good point about how easy it is to send email
under someone else's name. I think people don't really
think about it: after all, a username and password are
needed to *receive* email, so it doesn't occur to them that
the ability
Hi Oliver,
one well-known technique used for analysing qualitative data is called
Grounded Theory. You can find a good summary of the method here:
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arp/grounded.html
(it may also be covered in your book).
Don't be scared by all the terminology that goes with
On Nov 22, 2007 1:24 PM, Nicolai Bentsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Imagine how much easier applications and games could be to use, if all of
them could change the layout of the keyboard, to reflect the available
options as keys with different icons or text, in any given
application-context.
I
If only all human beings made purely rational decisions...
Working in the mobile industry, I have seen a lot of studies focusing
on that population segment. Something that comes up in every study is
that many people find the idea of dumb-looking phone with large
buttons very patronising and
What looks really silly is what they mention on this page:
http://www.usertesting.com/WhoAreUserTesters.aspx
Just by looking at the phrase People who are especially good at
usability testing you can imagine that the results can be quite
skewed.
[...] user testers are filtered out [...] because
Yes, at least in the UK there is a quite well-defined format that
includes both digits and numbers, e.g. SW1A 1AA.
Cheers,
Alex
On Jan 9, 2008 4:38 PM, Bryan Minihan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Very timely thread, as we're revamping our site to allow for international
postal codes in the zip code
One argument that you can use is that there are big differences in the
way healthcare is being dispensed between most of the countries that
you have mentioned, therefore a user journey related to same
healthcare issue may be quite different in of all these countries. It
may or may not include
On Jan 10, 2008 8:38 PM, Matt Nolker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'll certainly be interested in the general answer to this question, as I've
only looked into Facebook in any detail. Starting last July, I was involved
in project to build and launch a fairly sophisticated (by Facebook Vampire
I recall there was a quite large thread on ATMs a while ago in the
list. Not sure if it's been mentioned there, but I think one major
impeding factor is that cash machines (and basically anything that
handles money) has to go through a lot of certification procedures to
prove that it is secure
Hi Dan,
something that was not really mentioned so far is that there are still
two major problems associated with the deployment of the Semantic Web.
First of all, there is the issue of trust. Not all information can be
equally trusted, so your traditional Semantic Web shopping scenario
would
Hi Michele,
my first idea was to use some small LCD video monitor, like the ones
that are sometimes installed to watch TV in cars etc. But the smallest
dimension I can find is about 6-7, which is still much larger than a
mobile.
A better alternative is to keep your prototype running on the PC,
Hi Marianne,
I don't think that replicating a printed product catalogue is the best
way of presenting a collection of products online. If this is the
primary interface of your website, I think that you will alienate a
large percentage of online shoppers who are used to searching for
products,
Article seems to be online here:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-02/su_science
On Jan 25, 2008 2:49 AM, Rob Nero [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Equallythere is a nice short little article on how the iPhone came to be
in the same issue of Wired. Though the article is only
Hi Gil,
thanks a lot for the reference to the ETSI standard, I hope that all
phone manufacturers are using it for text entry. Haven't bought a
phone with Greek localisation for ages, but the Greek mapping that
they give is definitely the most sensible one (following the order of
the Greek
. But now that I am thinking about
that more, it makes me wonder about how a keypad in one language would enter
information into a phone system that is another language ...
Grady Kelly
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.gradykelly.com
On Jan 28, 2008 9:15 AM, Alexander Baxevanis [EMAIL PROTECTED
Hi Miranda,
just bought the Bamboo as a Christmas gift for a friend. He is very
good at sketching in pen and papers, and judging from the designs he's
now making, it shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks for somebody
to familiarise themselves with such an input method. The tablet driver
How about the iPhone approach, which is used for example in the mail
client: when you reach the bottom of what's already loaded, you need
to click in order to load more items, and you get an indication of how
many items there are.
I think in some applications it's important to be able to load
On Feb 6, 2008 12:42 PM, W Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
For modal (and modeless) windows, pop-ups, and lightbox ajaxed pop-ups,
after a person has performed certain tasks, there are two options - commit
those changes or cancel the dialog window. What order is best? Mac OS X
orders them as
Hi Luis,
Wiktionary (as well as Wikipedia all related sites) is based on
MediaWiki (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki). It is open source
and its appearance is not hardcoded anywhere, if you have the
necessary skills in HTML/CSS you can probably re-skin just about
everything.
Good luck,
Hi Oleg,
somebody recently asked the same question about using tablets (with a
stylus), take a look at the following link for this and other relevant
threads:
http://ixda.org/search.php?tag=tablet
Cheers,
Alex
On Thu, Feb 14, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Oleg Krupnov [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I wonder
I guess most people who have entered text on a mobile phone using a
multi-tap or predictive text method would feel at ease doing the same
on a mobile phone. Potential issues:
1) Keys on remotes usually having much different feel from those on a
mobile phone keypad, so it may be difficult to
From the same article:
Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out
considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100
command (Accept Change) and the #400 command (Reset Picture) is
about the same in difference between #1 and #11 (Change Font Size),
according
On Feb 20, 2008 6:16 AM, Murli Nagasundaram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Alexander mentioned the problem of organizing 500+ commands. The answer is,
you don't organize it. Not in the conventional way, anyway.
Well, that was mostly a rhetoric question :) I agree that search is a
good idea in many
Hi there,
I live and work close to London as well, I'd be happy to participate
in organising any meetups. I think I'm in this list for a year or so
now, and I haven't seen any meetup in London.
With respect to other groups, UK Usability Professionals' Association
seem to have some regular
Hi all,
just stumbled upon this website (getsatisfaction.com), which seems to
be a platform for facilitating user feedback discussion about any
sort products services. In many cases the people officially
responsible for the product/service participate in the discussions,
see for example:
Hi Andrea,
not sure if you're responsible for the web check-in as well, but last
time I tried to use it I ended up with this:
http://flickr.com/photos/futureshape/2176369704/
(miscalculation of flight time by not taking into account timezone
differences next-day arrival)
More of a programming
Dear IxDA Nanny Bot,
if you had been lurking around in this list for a while now, you would
have probably known that users (of all things, including mailing
lists), are very complicated creatures that will usually ignore any
advice or instructions unless they can see how it contributes to the
I guess a less dramatic example comes from the design of paper rolls
for receipt/barcode printers etc. In the last meter or so of the roll,
there is a red line printed on one side of the paper, to alert the
printer users that paper is running out and that they should probably
find a convenient
Hi David,
audio is definitely not enough in my experience. You will have
environments where ambient noise will mask audio feedback, and then in
a silent environment it may be undesirable to make clicking noises.
Haptic feedback doesn't suffer from that issue.
I had the chance to try a product
Appartently there's an entire genre called Nerdcore Hip Hop, rapping
about all sorts of geeky stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerdcore
See also this funny song about encryption:
http://frontalot.com/index.php/?page=lyricslyricid=41
-- Alex
On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Alan Wexelblat
Unfortunately it's already a common practice in the travel industry,
which has (quite predictably) not been very popular with consumers:
http://www.smartertravel.com/travel-advice/opt-out-is-still-another-scam.html?id=2360303
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2006/mar/11/travelinsurance.insurance
I would highlight the field that fails validation and I'd put the
following message next to it:
This doesn't look like a [first name|last name|city]. Maybe you made
a spelling mistake?
This should be OK for users that just accidentally pressed a number
key when they were typing. Of course in
In most consumer-facing applications that I've seen (e.g. online
checkout/payment systems etc.) negative numbers have been shown just
with a minus sign, and in most cases in red colour.
On the other hand, I've seen the parentheses notation being used
quite extensively in accounting, e.g. when
Hi Tiago,
if you look at:
http://www.ixda.org/local.php
you'll see that a lot of IxDA members (at least those who've bothered
to declare their location) come from Europe. There's also (on the
right sidebar) a list of local group coordinators that you can perhaps
contact for more info about the
Take a look at the freesound website: http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
Most of their samples are quite short but you can also find longer
ones like this:
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/samplesViewSingle.php?id=18021
Unfortunately the browsing/search experience is pretty horrendous -
and they require
Hi Nicolas,
I suppose that Discos in your native language is the equivalent term
for what is called Albums in English.
Album is somehow more disconnected from the notion of physical media
(e.g. Compact Disc, LP record etc.) and has continued to be used in
the digital world for a collection of
A couple of days ago somebody wrote something very wise:
http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/04/the_earth_will_be_just_fine_th.html
The grand myth of environmentalism is that it's all about saving the Earth.
It's not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving
ourselves.
Hi all,
I've just managed to wrap the list of videos in some RSS/Podcast magic
that should hopefully make this easier to download the videos to an
iPod/iPhone via iTunes, or any other device that supports podcasting
for that matter.
On iTunes, you can click on Advanced - Subscribe to Podcast and
Nothing to do with your connection - I think some videos are missing
in general - there is simply no flash video player or download links
on the page - because of technical issues with the original recordings
Cheers,
Alex
Sent from my iPhone
On 2 May 2008, at 06:05, Kristopher Kinlen [EMAIL
As promised, I made a second version of the podcast for those who
prefer to download just the audio of the talks. Both links
subscription instructions are at:
http://futureshape.net/2008/05/ixda-podcasts/
Hope everything works fine, let me know if anything goes wrong.
Cheers,
Alex
Couldn't find the original tv spot either, but I found one video on
their website where they show off their testing with driving
simulators - they even mention the term human-machine interaction :)
It's the last video on that page:
http://www.fordvehicles.com/forddriveone/
-- Alex
On Thu, May
to sort
out these issues!
-- Alex
On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Alexander Baxevanis
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Couldn't find the original tv spot either, but I found one video on
their website where they show off their testing with driving
simulators - they even mention the term human-machine
Hi Josh,
welcome to the list many thanks for putting together this collection
of links - I was always wondering who does all the screen graphics
for movies!
Cheers,
Alex
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 3:51 AM, Josh Santangelo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi -- new guy here. I was referred to this
That's more of a general branding issue that I'm not sure I'm
qualified to answer. But I've seen lots of cases online where some
organisation changed their identity or, more frequently, got bought by
some other company. Usually this is accompanied by a lot of publicity,
so there's almost always
More importantly, the question you that should always be asked if you
want to get any insights that will help you improve your product is
WHY they think your product is (un)usable.
On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 11:21 AM, Steve Baty [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Chiwah,
It's preferable to ask the question
Hi John,
take a look at the following samples from Google Analytics:
http://screencast.com/t/pXAfJOhOM
http://screencast.com/t/akMiESehxi
I think it's a good example of different FAQs (they call them common
questions) offered directly from the relevant pages of a website.
Cheers,
Alex
On Fri,
Hi all,
many of you may have read or just come across the book Designing
Visual Interfaces by Mullet Sano
(http://www.librarything.com/work/5737/book/29957655). I think it's a
very interesting book and many of the principles described in the book
still hold today. However, most of the examples
Verified by Visa (and other similar schemes) are in no way limited to
opening a new browser window. Actually I've never seen this in any
website that I visited.
The official Visa website for merchants has got lots of information
about the scheme and the best practice that they advocate is
Actually there is a way to stop pasting in the 2nd field: all you need
to do is write something like:
input type=text name=email_2 onpaste=return false
But it's hardly ever used because I guess it would frustrate lots of
people. I think I found out about this option from a blog article that
was
Here is the patent in question:
http://tinyurl.com/3mvrls
and an earlier patent that they also own:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=hrmAEBAJdq=7,174,286
I think those patents were filed around 2004, and I really wonder if
such tools never existed in some form before that time. Maybe some
So let me see if I understand things properly:
Let's say I work for Foobar Corp. and I absolutely hate my competitor,
Acme Corp.
Then I become aware of a patent that is highly relevant to the
business of Acme. (Foobar may not even own this patent)
All I have to do is find some e-mail
Just sat (on the observation side of the mirror) on a couple of user
tests for the quoting flow in an insurance website. There were quite a
few issues with the forms: validation messages being missed,
incomprehensible questions, help not immediately available etc. Yet
all the users who struggled,
Hi Mark,
I don't have a specific recommendation but you can do your friends a
favour and forward them some of the excellent articles out there on
good shopping cart design. Out of curiosity - why don't they want to
build their shop on the etsy platform?
Cheers,
Alex
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at
I think you may have some luck if you search online for 10-foot
interface (10 feet being the typical distance between the viewer and
a TV screen)
Cheers,
Alex
On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Yunus Tunak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi all, I'm looking for sources about TV OSDs (on-screen display).
I'm curious how many people will actually land on this page.
I'd think that lots of people nowadays would just type 'bmw' on
Google, and from the UK version of Google this leads me to the UK
version of the BMW website. And if you're looking for a specific car
and you type something like 'bmw x5'
Hi Cindy,
there's an good study posted online recently, it's titled How
Children Interact With Online Environment and includes some
enlightening videos of children trying to do things online.
http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/dynamic/families-reports-kidsonline.cfm
Cheers,
Alex
On Sun, Jun 29,
http://konigi.com/
It's a great site with a tagging system so you can look for specific
examples e.g.
http://konigi.com/interface/tags/faceted-navigation
Enjoy,
Alex
On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 4:18 PM, Brett Lutchman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Hey gang, does anybody know of any good sites that
Hi Jenny,
some of my colleagues at work have recently summarised the best
practice for text resizing on website - see the Top Tip section in
the link below:
http://www.webcredible.co.uk/about-us/news/aug-2008.shtml
Cheers,
Alex
On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Jenny Wallace [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hi Sheri,
If the data is already in Excel, and assuming they're not too
complicated, you can ask your users to export them in CSV format (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values) and upload the
result to the website.
Google uses this method in their GMail for your domain product,
of a good
way to design something like that.
Every technology has got its pros and cons - the question is how to
balance them. And in this case, whether Apple did their balancing
right.
Cheers,
Alexander Baxevanis
User Experience Consultant
Webcredible
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