Category: Web
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I Would Prefer Not to Set Preferences
I would prefer not to. Everybody likes preferences, right? Maybe not. Maybe some people would prefer not to have to deal with it. Apple users, for example, are given a fraction of the number of preference-setting options that Windows users get. In OSX, for example, you can choose several different ways for the dock to…
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The Holy Grail of Information Architecture
In a recent blog post, Garret Dimon claims to be hot on the trail of something fabulous: I don’t have the details worked out yet, but I’m slowly putting together a vision of how we can really document web applications in a pragmatic way. The primary driver is to create something that people can understand,…
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Usability Foxes Guarding the Henhouse
On the NYC-CHI mailing list today, someone from a big web shop wrote this: My company is dismantling its focus group and usability testing lab, due to a chronic lack of space and clients’ growing reluctance to allow our agency to do testing on our own work. Behavior‘s thinking has always been that it takes…
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HR Block’s Software Strategy: “You got people”
Soylent Green? The new formula for software success? People. H&R Block‘s new slogan, “You got people”, coincides with their apparent transformation into a hybrid of their old business as a tax preparation service company and their new business as a tax preparation software company. They’re positioning themselves within the software market as a different kind…
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Other People’s ‘Puters
Christmas tree photo by Peggy During the holidays, as many Americans visit and spend time with their extended families, those of us in the web design industry get a chance to do a little user research — with our own loved ones as test subjects. Sure, most of us have watched other people use computers…
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The Best Voting Technology
It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even…
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I Like to Crash
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by
I am an extreme multitasker. I usually have at least fifteen windows open on my desktop at any given time, often as many as thirty. I usually have several Firefox windows open at once, too, each with a dozen or more active tabs with pages I either intend to read or need to use as…