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| Stop the next war before it starts End the Occupation |
| last updated:13 May 2003 09: 31 Webword time, or 13 May 2003 14:31 UK time |
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| Webword Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 11 May 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Is There Any Reason To Buy Microsoft Anymore? | Sun 11 May |
| Almost everything enterprises once found unique to Microsoft they can now find somewhere else without some of the baggage that comes with Microsoft purchases, like ongoing security concerns and mystifying licensing practices. |
| Sun 11 May 23:14 | Anonymous | You need to create a software monoculture as a platform for ease of virus infection. http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/8129/1.html |
| Why IT won't let you customize your PC | Thu 08 May |
| The reason any self-respecting companys IT department will not let employees install any old software on their machines, he explained, is because the IT people need to know exactly what that software does before they can let you expose the corporate network to its peculiarities. But a seemingly innocuous thing such as a routine Microsoft maintenance patch should be a no-brainer, right? Wrong, as I had found out. |
| Sun 11 May 13:36 | mcw | Interesting factoid - according to Microsoft's CIO, Microsoft does not enforce standards on their desktops. People are free to run the version of OS and apps they want. Desktops are not 'locked down'. This may have to do with the need to have developers and testers have multiple machines and multiple configurations, plus the culture of the company. |
| Google to fix blog noise problem | Sat 10 May |
| (Register) Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab. (Comments: Thanks MadMan.) |
| Sun 11 May 12:23 | Anonymous | What? Google is not perfect? STFU and sit down. |
| Keep it simple--by design | Sun 04 May |
| (ZDNet) I always hate to admit that digital controls and displays add a level of complexity and confusion to electronics products that seems pretty unnecessary. Their original purpose is to simplify things; but product designers, product managers and product engineers push too much functionality into the controls and demand that the displays exhibit more information than they can reasonably show. |
| Fri 09 May 01:39 | keith knutsson | simplicity = hard work and experience. |
| Sat 10 May 23:58 | daniel szuc | http://www.simplerwork.com/ |
| Manifesto: para quê este site? | Thu 08 May |
| Quantas vezes se enganou com o sentido de abertura das portas da sua empresa? pragueja, e murmura #%$@$%, nunca hei-de conseguir memorizar isto? Mesmo correndo o risco de parecer um daqueles livros de self-help, posso aliviá-lo: a culpa não é sua, mas geralmente de um design defeituoso. |
| Fri 09 May 00:20 | Anonymous | Que tipo do clown do burro afixa um sumário no português? Oh yeah, um clown do burro. |
| Fri 09 May 09:42 | Wolf | Maybe the non-english-speakers were feeling left out. Embrace new things; expand your world view. Everyone would like to think his country were the center of the universe. Vive la difference! |
| Fri 09 May 09:55 | Joshua Kaufman | Translation via Google. |
| Fri 09 May 19:56 | Anonymous | The last time I checked, this was an english-language web site. If John is going to post in another languages now, I'll move to another blog where I don't have to use babelfish to understand everything. It's a cheap gimmick that primarily serves to annoy. Cya. |
| Fri 09 May 21:17 | Anonymous | You say: ''The last time I checked, this was an english-language web site. If John is going to post in another languages now, I'll move to another blog where I don't have to use babelfish to understand everything.'' Chimpy speak: Why not hozirzon expand, worth you for it? C'mon, brace for language, que! Anglish / Enghlish not never ways of speak, brain and eyes could be bigger? Please, que? |
| Sat 10 May 01:28 | Randy | The standard of comments these days on Webword has really gone down the toilet. It's the invasion of the Doofus Brigade. What a pity. |
| Sat 10 May 01:35 | Anonymous | 'Doofus' is a derivative of 'doof.' Babelfish doesn't do Scottish, so please stick to Latin roots thankyouverymuch. |
| Usability Testing: Learning from the Work of Others | Thu 08 May |
| How can we construct tests that find the important usability problems as quickly as possible? And how can we improve our practices so different teams will consistently find the same problems? |
| Thu 08 May 23:52 | Ron Zeno | What I find most interesting about CUE1 and CUE2 (as opposed to Kessner's follow-up study) is how naive all the participants were about what would be required to produce comparable results. Everyone involved assumed that the test results would be similar, rather than almost completely different. The only real result (so far) is the work that's gone into the Common Industry Format for test reports. I'm not sure what Rolf is teaching in his class, but I like the irony of how it will 'fine-tune' your testing skills, when his own research indicates that much more than fine-tuning is required. Anyone take his class via NNGroup that would like to report on it? |
| Fri 09 May 06:17 | Anonymous | If the usability camp did manage to get that level of result, it would be the first itty bit of computerdom to do so http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030508.html |
| What do you know about the story of ZooWorks? | Thu 08 May |
| Whats amazing to me is that a piece of software that I need now, was produced six years ago and is totally gone. (Comments: I wonder how often software evaporates like this.) |
| Fri 09 May 03:19 | Philip Chalmers | I searched the web and found this list of URL organisers. Most of the entries date between 1995 and 1997. My guess is that browsers' bookmarking facilities became just good enough to reduce the potential market for these products to a non-viable size. It's happened before, e.g. there used to be a lot of extended memory managers for MS-DOS but Microsoft eventually incorporated good enough memory management into the OS and 3rd-part memory managers died. |
| Fri 09 May 05:58 | Anonymous | What interests me is how little 'good enough' eventually learns from 'better' products. |
| Fri 09 May 06:05 | Hanan Cohen | A tip I got from one of the readers of the first article was that IE6 has this functionality. I have upgraded and tested on Windows 2000. It works! Slow, whole strings only (searched for 'muffin', found 'muffin' but not 'muffin?') and I haven't tested yet if it displayed multiple accurances of the same page in the cache. |
| Usability No Longer Differentiates | Thu 08 May |
| People used to be willing to put up with frustrating usability experiences, convinced that it was their fault technology products took so much time to learn. No more. Today people are as sophisticated as they are ruthless. (Comments: Thanks Joshua Kaufman.) |
| Thu 08 May 09:44 | Ron Zeno | Nice generalizations, nothing to back it up. Lots of assumptions, any of them shared? |
| Thu 08 May 12:21 | Ralph | I don't agree that we have cracked the usability nut as implied in the article. I see plenty of products and web sites that are getting worse and worse. To me the problem is that for most electronics, which are usually the worst offenders, because you can't really tell how bad something is until after the purchase. I read somewhere here about how price usually overrides usability concerns, mainly because it is much easier to see and compare. I agree with that. All I can do is plan to be a more educated (i.e., pain in the butt to the salesperson) customer by at least taking a cursory look at usability before any purchases. |
| Thu 08 May 17:41 | JGT | I agree with Ralph, the usability nut is far from cracked, especially where electronic devices are concerned. But that doesn't mean I won't send this article to a marketing person or two... |
| Fri 09 May 03:36 | Philip Chalmers | It's ironical that the article is hard to read - small grey text on white bg. Cheer up, usability people - there's scope for you as long as sites make usabilty mistakes like this. |
| Why Does the American Constitution Lack Social and Economic Guarantees? | Thu 08 May |
| This essay explores four possible answers: chronological, cultural, institutional, and realist. (Comments: PDF file, approximately 400K.) |
| Fri 09 May 03:28 | Philip Chalmers | What's this got to do with usability? |
| The Ideal Web Team | Sat 03 May |
| (Digital Web) So the ideal Web team consists of a maximum of seven people, all specialists in their own field, who are willing to listen to each other, to defer to each other’s judgment, and to communicate important or even not so important information immediately upon receiving it. Of course, having an ideal Web team is no guarantee that you will create an ideal site. For that you’ll need a few more things, like an ideal client. |
| Wed 07 May 18:08 | Jason Fried | Seven? Doesn't this depend on the size of the project? Seven can easily get in the way. Plus, asking seven people 'to defer to each other’s judgment' requires an eighth person -- a referee. |
| Wed 07 May 18:09 | Jason Fried | Seven? Doesn't this depend on the size of the project? Seven can easily get in the way. Plus, asking seven people 'to defer to each other’s judgment' requires an eighth person -- a referee. |
| Fri 09 May 01:40 | keith knutsson | I didn't see any qa, project management, or strategy team members.. all of which add significant value to a project. |
| IA Classics: Tools of the Trade in Comic Book Form | Sun 04 May |
| (Boxes & Arrows) What I need are highly condensed overviews, I thought, like those comic books that convert great literary works into a few illustrated pages. They condense Moby Dick down to 12 pages and provide a version of Great Expectations that can be read in 15 minutes. |
| Fri 09 May 01:39 | keith knutsson | an amazingly effective job of communicating complex and often misunderstood concepts. a nice breath of fresh air |
| 10 Most Dangerous Food to Eat While Driving | Sun 04 May |
| So what is the most hazardous food drivers can consume? The offender is one of the worlds most popular beverages and the one with which most Americans start their mornings... |
| Mon 05 May 01:24 | Morris Cox | It turns out that coffee is the most dangerous, followed by hot soups (what idiot tries to eat hot soup behind the wheel? Sheesh! Death penality!). Chocolate came in as 10th worst. Coffee, hot soups, tacos, chili, juicy hamburgers (take that, Carl Jrs!), any barbecued food (what were they thinking?), fried chicken, jelly and cream-filled donuts (mmmm....donuts....), soft drinks, and chocolate. Mornings were worse, especially with cell phones. It already turns out that talking on a cell phone is worse than being drunk (your reaction times are longer). So food, driving, and a cell phone.... Now if you were also drunk, take a sudden turn into a pole, will ya? |
| Mon 05 May 01:26 | Morris Cox | Just wanted to add that the above is what I posted on my blog. How about the usability issues of not fully explaining things? |
| Fri 09 May 01:38 | keith knutsson | I have spilled hot coffee on my lap many times when driving |
| America's Broadband Dream Is Alive in Korea | Mon 05 May |
| (NY Times) The killer application of the Internet is speed. |
| Tue 06 May 23:49 | Anonymous | That's it, I'm backing my bags for Seoul tonight! |
| Fri 09 May 01:37 | keith knutsson | speed is addictive and I will never go back to dialup. I can't wait until dsl become obsolete and analagous to dialup |
| Designjerk Quotes | Thu 08 May |
| Not being of the type to come up with pithy maxims of my own, I instead collect design, science, art, and creativity-related quotes for inspiration. Here, I happily share them with you, kind reader, in the form of this handily alphabetized list. Enjoy! |
| Thu 08 May 09:45 | Frank Lynch | Nice collection. But he could use a mailto link where he says he'll take suggestions. |
| Advice to (audio | video) bloggers | Thu 08 May |
| You will never make it accessible. Seriously. Prove me wrong. (Comments: Thanks Anil.) |
| Thu 08 May 09:38 | Anonymous | You will never deposit five hundred thousand dollars in my bank account. PROVE ME WRONG! Hey guy, try spacing your paragraphs or indenting them. I'm not reading a wall of text. |
| Thu 08 May 09:41 | Anonymous | Oh, I see... this guy has bulleted his wall of text, but the bullets are not visible in IE with the text size set at its default 'medium' setting. But if I increase the text size so the bullets show up, the wall of text collides with the navigation column. Smooth. Real smooth. |
| Crutches for short term memory | Mon 05 May |
| What I need is a software tool that will record everything I read, and when I need to find it again, enable me to enter a word or two in a search box and get a list of places I have been to that contain those words. |
| Mon 05 May 11:01 | keith knutsson | try these: netsnippets content saver |
| Mon 05 May 11:10 | Anonymous | Functional links: Net Snippets Macropool Content Saver |
| Mon 05 May 12:28 | Eric Scheid | On the mac you could use iRemember 'Forget to bookmark that great web page and now you can't find it? Do you use Netscape Navigator and wish it kept your browsing history? Use more than one browser and wish there was one place you could go to find any page you visited?' |
| Mon 05 May 13:34 | Anonymous | With Internet Explorer - click History, then Search... I only just discovered this myself, but it looks like it does the trick. |
| Mon 05 May 18:09 | Lyle Kantrovich | Powermarks is my collective memory tool for tracking good content and research I come across. Netsnippets sounds a bit familiar to something I saw at CHI 2001 or 2002...I was thinking recently that I'd like to try it out, but couldn't figure out what it was called or how to look it up. Gotta check it out...but too much to do right now. UGH. If anyone gives these tools a test run I'd appreciate hearing your reviews here...hint, hint. :-) |
| Mon 05 May 19:36 | Kent | I use SurfSaver to archive Web pages that I might be interested in later. I cannot compare it against the other tools mentioned here since I have not used them. SurfSaver does most of what I want. It stores web pages, along with associated objects (images, …) in an easy to use database. Stored pages can be retrieved by search for text in a page, page title, URL, notes entered when page is saved, or keywords(also manually entered). What SurfSaver does not do that I sometimes want is to save all pages viewed in a session. I have to remember to press the save button on each page I want preserved. (This limitation applies to Netsnippets and ContentSaver also). SurfSaver will save all pages that the current page links to or entire sites. |
| Mon 05 May 21:06 | Eric Scheid | Sounds like iRemember is the winner then ... it saves *every* page you ever visit in any browser, whether you remember to do so or not. |
| Mon 05 May 21:53 | Lyle Kantrovich | Eric, I think that depends on what you're looking for. I personally like Powermarks because it function as the editor of what goes into it. I also classify things by keywords (e.g. guidelines, cardsorting, roi, etc.) If something stored *everything* I looked at it wouldn't really be much better than Google for my purposes. A tool that would do both, and allow me to search either way might have some additional value. |
| Wed 07 May 00:00 | Anonymous | I use Polly. When I visit a web site worth returning to, I repeat the URL to Polly 50 times over the period of one hour. She usually retains it and repeats it for a good month. I recommend every get a Polly, unless you're married and covertly visit porn sites. |
| Thu 08 May 03:15 | Hanan Cohen | Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, andline and off. I have checked them all and abswered some of them at the bottom of the original page. |
| Writing for the Web: Part 2 | Mon 05 May |
| (Gerry McGovern) When a reader finds your content, they need to be able to scan it quickly. Thats what metadata is about. In order for your website to be found, you need to write for how people search. |
| Mon 05 May 08:30 | Anonymous | In the old days we had the dicipline to stick with something for a full 30 seconds - whether we liked it or not. Dagnabbit. |
| Tue 06 May 08:49 | Anonymous | You are a tool of the system, Old Man. |
| Tue 06 May 23:52 | Anonymous | I mostly appreciate well written summaries. |
| Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? | Mon 05 May |
| (Jared Diamond) What Im going to suggest is a road map of factors in failures of group decision making. Ill divide the answers into a sequence of four somewhat fuzzily delineated categories. First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Secondly, when the problem arrives, the group may fail to perceive the problem. Then, after they perceive the problem, they may fail even to try to solve the problem. Finally, they may try to solve it but may fail in their attempts to do so. While all this talking about reasons for failure and collapses of society may seem pessimistic, the flip side is optimistic: namely, successful decision-making. (Comments: Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which really kicked ass.) |
| Tue 06 May 13:12 | Philip Chalmers | Thanks for posting this! The article Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? isn't one of Diamond's best pieces, but the links on the page are excellent. Bill Gates gives an excellent summary of Diamond's great book Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond's How to Get Rich is not personal financial / business advice but a well-argued essay on the benefits of competition and disadvantages of monopolies (principally stagnation), especially at the level of governments - it's a very strong argument against Euro-federalism, world government, etc. |
| Tue 06 May 23:51 | Anonymous | Individuals can't even choose the right mating partners, and we think a whole country is going to have its act together? Please. I thank Gumby that my garbage is picked up at the curb every Wednesday morning. |
| Discount Usability: Time to push back the pendulum? | Sat 03 May |
| Discount usability techniques are a great way to eradicate usability problems. But they can never answer the question, How usable is this system? We blow the dust off some techniques commonly used in the early days of usability testing to see if they can provide an answer. (Comments: Thanks David Travis.) |
| Mon 05 May 13:32 | Anonymous | For the record, thinking aloud testing is indeed listed in Nielsen's book 'Usability Engineering' as a discount method. |
| Mon 05 May 19:19 | Ron Zeno | And Nielsen is correct? The think-aloud protocol is used in lab-based testing as well. Don't have my copy of Nielsen's book on hand to check why he categorizes it so and in what context. |
| Practical Web Design: Speed Up Your Site | Sat 03 May |
| Even if you dont depend on your site to pay the rent, you should think very hard about your pages load time. For the vast majority of us, the whole reason we put our sites on the Web is for people to use them. You want, or you ought to want, your visitors to have an easy and pleasurable experience on your site. The first and foremost criterion for a good Web experience is fast and easy page loading. (Comments: (1) Im suprised that so many negative comments were expressed on the comments page for this article. (2) Is it true that speed is the first and foremost criterion for a good web experience or not? (3) I found this site via Letem svìtem.) |
| Mon 05 May 01:23 | Lyle Kantrovich | Let me say first off that I spent a lot of time in the 'early days' of the web (circa '96/'97) optimizing pages and graphics and preaching to the unwashed masses of careless developers about the merits of 'skinny' web pages. My problem with this article (and the premise of King's book) is that it acts as though optimization (or load time) is everything. And it isn't. I'd like to think everyone knows this, but I've seen people with many kinds of web design myopia (usability, IA, branding, graphic design, technology, etc.). Having said all that, the article has a number of errors: 1. It asks 'Ever wonder why Yahoo! is the best-known and most-used search engine/directory on the Web?' - the answer is that Yahoo! isn't the best-known (Google is the web's strongest brand these days), and Google is the most-used search engine on the web by almost any measure. These are simple facts that should be checked by the author and editor alike. 2. The article also says 'the more we optimize our sites for quick loading and ease of use, the more we'll attract and keep visitors'... - By that rationale, Webword should chop all but 1Kb from it's home page to maximize traffic... Not! The real conclusion to draw is that slow-loading of pages is a barrier to use, and a facilitator of user frustration. Optimizing pages will eliminate THAT PARTICULAR barrier. BUT if that FAST site is still unusable, poorly designed, or has low-quality content, users will go away fast and fewer will come in the future. This is hinted at when the article says 'if your page hasn't loaded (at least enough to be used) in 8 seconds or less, the average visitor will bail out and go elsewhere.' What is the opportunity cost of optimizing pages 100%? Or should I just shoot for pages that load under 30K on average and then focus on other areas (like server uptime or branding or usability)? I recently did a competitive analysis for a business and quickly found a number of very large companies with home pages over 220K...clearly they have room for optimization. But, I also found some of their competitors with home pages under 20K...should they optimize further? I don't think so. They needed to work on their content - which was skimpy and poorly organized. (Note post #9 on the comments page clears up a few key points...) |
| WebWord Comment | Sun 04 May |
| The Ghost is coming, the Ghost is coming... |
| Mon 05 May 00:07 | John S. Rhodes | My 'summary' is terrible. It isn't a summary at all. You are correct. What a waste. |