1. 27 December 2005

    Don't Make Me Think!

    Steve Krug

    1108 days ago

    A good look at usability in web design. Quick read with nice illustration. I got the second edition, all nice and glossy, and had I been going anywhere on an airplane, likely could have finished reading it while up in the air.

    Not too much to say about it, but that it will be a nice one to have on the shelf to peek at.

    The overall idea is that of common sense – make things easy for the people using your website. Test the site against actual people to see what needs improvement. Test early in the development cycle, so that feedback can quickly be integrated into the site.

    Applies more to static web sites. There isn’t lots directly applying to web apps, which is more what I’m interested in, but most of it rubs off in some applicable fashion.

  2. 22 October 2005

    iPhoto needs to be able to reduce photo size in place

    1175 days ago

    I can’t tell you how much I want iPhoto to be able to scale a set of my pictures so that they are all under 5MB so I can upload them to flickr. I imported, titled, and tagged them, and I don’t want to have to export them and cut their dimensions in half to get them under flickr’s limit. Plus, how hard can it be to just tell iPhoto to make this photo under 5MB? There’s a lot of guesswork in just whittling away pixels.

  3. 28 April 2005

    1352 days ago

    cityofsound: How devices learn

    I believe we need to find more interesting and useful ways of providing usable, enlgihtening, enjoyable interfaces which provide real people with real insight and real agency when it comes to sorting through an increasingly large music collection.

    Either way, learning from listeners’ personal context is one way of providing agency and ease-of-use, and it would be worth thinking about the basic technical aggregators of that contextual information (to infer meaning from time, location, mood, backgrounded/foregrounded etc).

    Devices and services which learn from user behaviour could provide a richly variegated middle-ground between the very different models of how most people listen to music and how digital music service users listen to music.

    via Kjell Olsen1352 days ago

  4. 05 January 2005

    1464 days ago

    GUUUI - Navigation blindness

    Static category/section navigation could be very wrong, not at all embracing the user and allowing him to accomplish his goals.

    The findings suggest that navigation should be a prominent part of a website. Instead of being discrete appendices separated from the rest of the site, navigation should be integrated into the site and make sure that users stay in the flow.

    ...why should we place this burden on people if we can design navigation schemes based on how people actually navigate.

    via Kjell Olsen1464 days ago

  5. 11 November 2004

    Visual Explanation

    1519 days ago

    Great book, I finished it a few days ago and it’s still around keeping my attention from other things. Dry in places, but absolutely stuffed with great bits.

  6. Also somewhat recently

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