Archive for March 2008

31 Mar 2008 0524H

Going to Toronto

I hear there are some interesting things happening up there and it’s high time I took vacation, so I’m going away for a few days. I’ll post photos. Bises.

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29 Mar 2008 1804H

Earth Hour is nothing, NOTHING

A pause here in the normal flow for this important message.
After all, it is in keeping with Papanek’s imperative that design, being a human activity, serve humanity by helping us survive as a species. You know. Kind of important.
Darren Yates, a contributing editor to Australian PC User magazine, says we should think about all the [...]

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28 Mar 2008 2027H

At last it’s come to this

With nothing more about the candidates to discuss, and, after the Diddy/Tupac fiasco, certainly no capability to discuss, the LA Times is focusing on the typefaces of the candidates’ campaigns. 

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27 Mar 2008 2311H

And more about real world research

“In the beginning, we hired graduate environmental psychology students, but, we found they were sometimes unsuited to the work, and tended to come to the job burdened with textbook theories they wanted to apply. As a result, they often didn’t possess the patience necessary to simply watch what shoppers do. The other problem we had [...]

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27 Mar 2008 2234H

Real-world retail shopping research

Unsurprisingly, a lot of techniques we use in user experience have their roots in social science research. Eyetracking writ large using people with real shopping carts and RFID tags still produces heat maps. And given enough observations, you can even use k-means cluster analysis to come up with your archetypical personas.
Which is basically what a [...]

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24 Mar 2008 1211H

Google Map actions

Interestingly Google Maps supports double-clicking as default center and zoom. You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but, after all this is the web, where people single click everything. . . I wonder what other contexts there are for using double-clicks. . . .There is some support for multi-touch gestures on my Macbook: one can [...]

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22 Mar 2008 1434H

AJAX polling techniques

To sum it up, AJAX is dependent on a kind of client-side data request method called polling. The browser opens a connection and constantly asks the server at a fixed interval, “do you have updates for this data?” To which the server is forced to reply, “yes, here it is” or “no” and closes the [...]

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20 Mar 2008 0541H

Monkey see, monkey do

A few weeks back I did an internal presentation on benchmarking. Isn’t benchmarking just shorthand for plagiarism? No. It shouldn’t be a kneejerk apeing of what someone else is doing just because they seem successful for it. In this article from Harvard Business School, the authors warn against the dangers of casual benchmarking. In the [...]

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18 Mar 2008 2024H

Users strongly prefer ‘View All’

They want to see everything. They don’t mind scrolling; they prefer to scroll than to see pagination. They want it all.

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18 Mar 2008 1945H

A season of usability!

Every season is usability season, we might protest. True, though frankly I can’t find a better way for a budding interactionist to get into the discipline than by providing usability services for open source software. Ellen Reitmayr is running the show: 9 students will get to participate on some very sexy high visibility projects. Check it out. 

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