I just ran across a really nice project: We feel fine. It collects ‘feelings’ from the internet (defined as phrases containing ‘I feel’ or ‘I am feeling’). These data are coupled with other statistics, such as gender, age, location and even the local weather at the time the item was posted. Nice to know: although …
Author Archives: admin
Social bookmarking
Robin Good wrote a mini-guide to social bookmarking, addressing underlying issues and comparing the advantages and disadvantages of some main social bookmarking services: del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Blue Dot, Ma.gnolia, Digg, Simpy, BlogMarks, Reddit, Furl, BlinkList, Spurl, de.lirio.us, Linkroll, Shadows en Yahoo-MyWeb. As we are moving towards a semantic web, with more dynamic, user-generated content, social …
In the news: tv-channels and medical errors
In the Calgary Herald: confusion about cable channels among TV users. Cable company Shaw keeps shuffling, adding and removing channels and viewers start to complain they can’t find their favorite programs anymore. Interesting numbers: according to Yankee’s research group more than 50 percent of TV viewers find out what’s on by simply flipping channels. With …
A case of affordance
Earlier this week I went to an ATM to deposit a check. The procedure on the new Green Machines is pretty straight-forward. Select ‘deposit’, enter the amounts, choose account to deposit to, put your deposit items (checks or cash) in envelopes and feed those envelopes to the machine.In this procedure I found two minor problems, …
Skype 3.0 beta
Skype 3.0 has just been released in beta. Featuring skypecasts, clickable links in mood messages, a button for calling non-skype phones, and of course the changelog lists “change: UI redesigned”. According to Skype, it is an “Easier to use, more powerful and personal interface.” I’m usually not a fast upgrader, and I’m still using Skype …
Click testing
GMI, a company in market research, offers a product for click testing, which according to their claims can be used to ‘[accurately measure] what consumers notice on the [web] page’. Test subjects are shown a couple of pages and are asked for each page to click on the 5 elements that first grab their attention. …
Balancing cognitive load
Your brains like to work, else you get bored, lose attention and start making mistakes. Not too much at a time, though. When cognitive load is too high, you get stressed and start making mistakes as well. Fortunately, we do a pretty good job at giving ourselves just the right amount of brain activity: a …
November 14: World usability day
Just one more week to go, November 14 will be World usability day. There will be events in 35 countries all around the world, ranging from meetings to demonstrations to the world’s largest card sort. This year’s theme is “Making life easy!”, with a focus on inclusion and accessibility. Making life easy, that’s what usability …
Apple and Microsoft interface guidelines
Today I found some time to look at the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X. Microsoft’s latest guidelines are the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (still “preliminary documentation” though). A few thoughts: The Vista guidelines are quite technology-driven sometimes, top rule number one is “Use the Aero Theme and System Font (Segoe UI)” …