David Leston's Software Development Blog » Usability

Phishing and other scams.

David — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:42:12 +0000

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A new human interface

David — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 07:40:10 +0000

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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, Phil Cowans, Tim Hospedales, Iain Murray, Hanna Wallach, Matthew Garrett, Chris Ball, Keith Vertanen, Tadashi Kaburagi, Brian Williams, Chris Hack, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Frederik Eaton, and Piotr Zielinski.

Faster sites mean more money.

David — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 07:36:31 +0000

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 and takes about 3 minutes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also, Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales and Wikia found that faster pages reduces exit rate.

Apple Store sessions time out.

David — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 08:07:55 +0000

You have to re-enter the store if you’ve been idle.

That’s bad.

Consider restoring view state from the previous sessions.

David — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:48:51 +0000

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 from the last time I was watching that specific video.