The enchanted office
The enchanted office Microsoft using a comic to sell the benefits of the new Office UI brought home to me what a big event this is. This is going to affect more people than any other piece of interface design
The OLPC has had no user testing!
According to this article on Yahoo! news, the OLPC “Sugar” UI has had absolutely no user testing carried out on it yet. Shameful stuff! I’ve also heard rumours that the UI design has taken place predominantly behind closed doors at
New years resolutions for mobile operators: “Be nice”
Imagine how wonderful it would be if mobile operators wrote these new years resolutions and promised to keep them. (It’s a complete fantasy of course, but there’s no harm in dreaming) Stop making our customers choose their tariffs in advance
“It’s not a website – it’s an application”
Proponents of various abuses of Flash and Ajax cleverness have a frequent defence of their sins: “I’m allowed to break the back button, bookmarking and ‘open in new window’ and all that other stuff people take for granted because that
Photoshop CS3 – usability is more than just UI
Adobe have uncharacteristically released a public beta of the new version of Photoshop – mainly so those people with shiny new Intel Macs don’t have to put up with running Photoshop under emulation any longer. Everyone’s very excited. There’s a
why splitpane views suck… (but they suck less than other stuff)
SitePen Blog » Blog Archive » why splitpane views suck.. He’s got a point and Gmail is a marvel in it’s range of subtle usability tweaks. But on the desktop splitpane views are pretty much becoming the norm. And as
The new Photoshop will be limited to producing compelling content only
I’ve read several pieces from Adobe listing the new features due in Photoshop CS3. One of the new features is the ability to “design, preview, and test compelling mobile content”. Whilst I understand the need to cater to those who
Good Alertbox this month!
It’s almost like the old curmudgeon is getting whimsical in his old age. I especially like number 3. Of course he has to go and spoil it at the end by tacking on a moral. But in British pub discussions
Accessibility Field Testing
When people normally think about accessibility they normally think about standards compliance, automated tests, and box ticking. This is really important stuff, but it isn’t user-facing. In other words, you don’t get to find out what it is really like
Why Three aren’t scared of offering unlimited Skype
Craig Barrack had a great article in the NMA last week explaining why Three aren’t scared of offering unlimited Skype and Instant Messenger … on their top end “X-Series” contracts, for now. Conventional wisdom on the future of mobile operators
OLPC gets discussed on Diggnation
Note: if you follow diggnation you will have seen this before (its two weeks old).
Interesting IA on samsungtechwin.com
Is the UbiComp conference getting a bit too in-turned?
“Using an “eating your own dog’s food” approach, the UbiComp2007 Challenge is seeking for submissions of how to implement an audience voting system to finally determine the winner of the “Best Presentation Award” [Read more here] I’ve seen so much
The difference between ‘feature’ and ‘usage’ simplicity
There has been a sudden mushroom of posts in response to Donald Norman’s recent essay about simplicity entitled “simplicity is overrated”. (Joel Spolsky, Nick Bradbury and many other bloggers). I have a feeling that this discussion is getting confusing because
Simplicity is highly overrated?
This could get interesting. The Guardian blog pulls in Don Norman and Joel Spolsky. On the other side of the ring we have 37signals’s entire business model and possibly even Google if you squint enough. My hunch is that 37signals
Why does Windows need so much micromanagement?
I sometimes feel like Windows is a bit like a junior employee who looked great on paper, but asks you way too many questions about trivial stuff, and can’t make a decision on their own. In other words, they rely
How to present site mock-ups on paper
Woah there! You’ve found yourself on an old article. Take note of the date before reading. I’ve noticed that when pitching an idea, some web design firms still print their designs off as posters and stick them on mounting board.
Gap in the market for a decent “live transcription A/V recorder” tool
Microsoft Onenote is an odd beast. It has some potentially great features that don’t seem to be properly executed yet. One of these features is the way it allows you to record audio or video (e.g. via a mike or
Mturk.com: outsource your monotonous tasks using an API
Want your podcast audio transcribed each week automatically? Got a big image database that needs meta tagging? Well the future’s here, and you only need to pay a few cents per item. Enter the mechanical turk, which everybody seems to
Office 12 and the Forthcoming UI Cargo Cults
In a recent post on Office 12, IanG speculates on how other Windows software developers will respond to the new Office ribbon. He predicts that developers will try to copy the superficial features of the new MS Office Ribbon, on