Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Phishing and other scams.

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

I always find these security talks entertaining. In his talk, Searching for Evil, Professor Ross Anderson discusses research done by himself, Dr. Richard Clayton, Tyler Moore, Steven Murdoch, and Shishir Nagaraja. [googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1380463341028815296[/googlevideo] Related links: Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems by Ross J. Anderson - book on Amazon

A new human interface

Monday, August 6th, 2007

In his talk, Dasher: information-efficient text entry, David MacKay introduces a unique human input mechanism, Dasher. I've used Dasher and quite like it. [googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5078334075080674416[/googlevideo] There's a Java applet version of Dasher, but I encourage you to try a native version. Contributions to Dasher have been made by David MacKay, David Ward, Alan Blackwell, ...

Faster sites mean more money.

Monday, August 6th, 2007

Google found that when pages took only half a second longer to appear, usage of their site dropped 25%.  In her talk, Scaling Google for Every User at the Seattle Conference on Scalability, Marissa Mayer communicated these results. The explanation of the statistic starts around 9 minutes into the video ...

Apple Store sessions time out.

Saturday, April 1st, 2006

You have to re-enter the store if you've been idle. That's bad.

Consider restoring view state from the previous sessions.

Monday, February 20th, 2006

Many Integrated Development Environments do this.  Stickies on Mac does this.  Email clients retain sort preferences.  Why not save sort preferences in a web application? Why doesn’t my Instant Messaging client bring up the conversation windows I didn’t explicitly close?  My DVD player asks me if I want to continue ...