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| Stop the next war before it starts End the Occupation |
| last updated:15 Jul 2003 07: 28 Webword time, or 15 Jul 2003 12:28 UK time |
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| Webword Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 13 Jul 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| WebWord Comment | Sun 13 Jul |
| Greg dancing. Excellent! |
| Sun 13 Jul 22:34 | daniel szuc | When you are finished watching Greg on this great little number, head down to Japan to watch this creative piece on table tennis. Wonderful - http://www.ntv.co.jp/channel/kasoh/kin10.html |
| We love technology — until it refuses to cooperate | Sun 13 Jul |
| (USA Today) The instruction manual was incomprehensible, she says, and the customer-service phone number was like a black hole. She shelved the camera. A few months later, she broke the camera trying to use it. Her photos were never downloaded. Shes shopping for another camera. |
| Sun 13 Jul 14:42 | Comic Book Guy | I have a relative who has purchased three computers in two years. He doesn't understand much about how Windows works or how file management works. Every now and then he loses the photos he has scanned, or his zip disk gets full, and he buys a new computer. I helped him a little (long-distance calls), but it became too much of a hassle. Now I'm thinking about all the computers I'll inherit some day. He already gave me his first scanner. Works great. |
| WebWord Comment | Sun 13 Jul |
| How you define something is critical. If I call Jakob Nielsen a liar and a fool that establishes a certain position in a debate. If I call him a hero and role model, well, that generates still another context. The best way to get people to hate something is to give it a bad name. Politicians and the military do this kind of demonizing all of the time. Name the enemy. Indeed, creating an evil name is a top priority. People rely on such names all the time. For example, if I say Nazi most people instantly think evil. How convenient! Now, in light of this posting on naming and definitions, why on Earth did Daniel C. Dennett and his pals decide use the term bright to define atheists? (OK, maybe they arent the same thing, but close enough.) First of all, does Dennet think atheist is a bad term? What does bright add to the story that atheist does not? Does he like it because it is fresh and new? (My guess is yes.) Second, the term bright really is a folly because it slants people to think, not open and enlightened, but closed and elitist. I cant help but think that bright is just plain stupid. If someone told me they were a bright, Id just laugh. Id think they werent smart enough to know about atheism. Bright = same old atheism story. If I am wrong, tell me. Otherwise, let us just walk away from the term bright. It adds no value, provides no new context, and seems to be new just for the sake of being new. |
| Sun 13 Jul 11:38 | MICK | I'm an atheist, and the only thing I hate more than religious fanatics are other atheists. |
| Sun 13 Jul 12:35 | MadMan | I'm an atheist, and that's fine with me. However, John, to some religious people, the term 'atheist' does evoke images or immoral, unethical evil people. Have you visited The Raving Atheist yet? ;) |
| Sun 13 Jul 14:37 | Anonymous | I'm an atheist. I hate any god that appears to us in the form of hospital window condensation. Boy, god is dumb. |
| WebWord Comment | Sun 13 Jul |
| A while back Metafilter uncovered the Kaycee hoax. Perhaps that isnt exactly the way to explain what happened, but the core idea is that the several people came together through the web to uncover a hoax. So, here is an idea. Why cant we come together to track down Saddam Hussein? Why cant we come together to track down Osama bin Laden? These are just some examples of things people could do collectively via the web. The larger question is this: Why dont these investigations happen more often? Why dont more people come together (spontaneously?) to solve problems? What made the Metafilter mob come together to hunt down the details of the hoax? What is the tipping point for this activity and how do we even get people started in that direction? Heres what I propose. Lets create a web site dedicated to hunting down information, ideas, hoaxes, and so forth. The whole idea is to work together to figure stuff out just for the sake of doing it. I think it might be possible to really make a difference. The web site would pose questions (e.g., Has George W. Bush had anything to drink while in office?) and then have people hunt down answers. I believe that such a web site could operate on simple Darwinian principles. Any registered user could pose a question yet only the most interesting and invigorating questions would draw answers. Does this sound interesting enough to put together? (Is it already being done? If yes, where?) Talk about it. |
| Sun 13 Jul 14:32 | Anonymous | > Let's create a web site dedicated to hunting down information We have web sites like that already. They're run by conspiracy theorists. >Why can't we come together to track down Saddam Hussein? Yeah, let's all lock arms and sweep the city streets. |
| Hi-tech babble baffles many | Tue 08 Jul |
| (BBC) Terms such as MP3 and Bluetooth are only understood by a small number of people, a report by a consumer research group found. The findings are bad news for the industry, as it suggests that the baffling terms are putting people off buying the latest gadget. |
| Tue 08 Jul 23:48 | daniel szuc | Avoid acronyms. Good article. |
| Wed 09 Jul 08:13 | Wolf | Also, much to the point, their Jargon Quiz doesn't fail when you deliberately work your correct answers down to zero, though I did believe their assessment of: 'You should be able to just about to see through the babble spouted by a gadget salesperson' should have stopped long before 2 correct. |
| Thu 10 Jul 15:39 | Ron Zeno | Can you imagine what the researchers are thinking when they initially talked to the AMD personnel who commissioned the work? 'Don't these guys have any interaction with non-technical people?' 'This is going to be an easy job. We already know the results and the client will completely surprised by them.' 'And they want a large-scale, international survey! This is like taking candy from a baby.' Summary report here: http://www.amd.com/us-en/Weblets/0,,7832_8524,00.html Registration required for full report |
| Sun 13 Jul 03:29 | Josh | 'Avoid acronyms.' MP3 is an initialism. :) |
| The Technology Terminology and Complexity Test | Sat 12 Jul |
| (www.amd.com) The AMD GCAB invites the public to take the Terminology and Complexity Test. Test your knowledge of technology terms against others from around the world! (Daniels Comments: Should everyday consumers know these terms anyway?) |
| Sat 12 Jul 22:32 | Anonymous | I was never any good at taking tests. I make a mean PB & J though. |
| WebWord Comment | Sat 05 Jul |
| There is no user experience but the user experience of the moment. Furthermore, the scent of information is merely the context of the moment, it is not the moment itself. |
| Mon 07 Jul 00:04 | Anonymous | 'Kaiṛs is the power to observe the fullness of temporality at the moment it opens itself onto the void of being, and of seizing this opening as innovation. The common name is situated in the passage (kaiṛs) from fullness to the void: it is a common and imaginative act of production.' --Toni Negri |
| Fri 11 Jul 17:29 | Derek R | 'There is no user experience but the user experience of the moment.' This is a good comment. Things are contemporaneous and correspond -- they do not connect. |
| The Myths as a Defining Narrative | Thu 10 Jul |
| (UsabilityNews.com) Because usability can be easily monetized the larger development companies see it as guaranteeing success. However, usability as they know it is dying or thriving but is held in low esteem. They work doing usability or HCI research which means dying in anonymity. |
| Thu 10 Jul 13:16 | Ron Zeno | Any thought about the more important narratives, those of the development manager, business executive, marketing manager, or the client of usability services? |
| Thu 10 Jul 20:53 | daniel szuc | Companies here are starting to take more notice of usability as they aim to get more value from their web sites or products and attempt to move away from a 'company/product/marketing' view of the world to a 'customer' view of the world. |
| Fri 11 Jul 09:17 | Richard Lehoux | Easy to use doesn't mean ugly. I see many great design that only few modification would make much more easier to use with out sacrifying the concept. |
| Fri 11 Jul 11:47 | Ron Zeno | Business executive's narrative: 'Usability'? Isn't that something that the web designers for our corporate website talk about? |
| Copycat waitresses get bigger tips | Wed 09 Jul |
| (Nature) But this is just one of a battery of ploys that waiting staff can use to increase customers generosity. Other studies have shown that smiling, greeting and touching the customer, and crouching down beside them while taking orders also lead to bigger tips. (Comments: Waiters and waitresses dont realize that they are constantly doing sales. Making money for these folks is more about selling than serving.) |
| Thu 10 Jul 15:25 | Ron Zeno | How about the ones that are actors? ;) 'The experiment is the first to show that mimicry has concrete benefits, van Baaren claims, although many understand its benefits implicitly.' That's got to be mistake by the article's author. No one with van Baaren's credentials would make such an obvious error. Don't they still teach it in Intro to Psychology? |
| Tips on New Media Branding: Behavior and Color | Thu 10 Jul |
| (cooper.com) Search for appropriate branding opportunities such as the splash screen that appears when launching your application or the login screen where the user does not need to perform a lot of work. |
| Thu 10 Jul 13:21 | Ron Zeno | I guess Cooper's getting hit by the bad economy. Why else would they post something that just more of the pre-dot-bomb branding propaganda? Some people never learn, and Cooper's counting on it. |
| Thoughtwander - Product Research, Hypertext Cycles, and Decision Making | Mon 07 Jul |
| (peterme) Websites tend to be designed rather rigidly and hierarchically, assuming visitors will be good little shoppers, and get a sense of all the basic concepts first (learn about megapixels, memory cards, battery life), then figure out their specific needs (I need a camera with 3 megapixels, using CompactFlash, that can take 50 pictures on a single charge), then find the products that meet those needs, and then choose one and be done. My observations suggest that the process is in fact much messier, and requires constant re-orientation on the part of the shopper to remember which variables are important and which qualities they want. (Comments: Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions? and Personas and the customer decision-making process) |
| Mon 07 Jul 22:52 | Ron Zeno | Thunk, thunk, thunk! - That's the sound of me pounding my head against the wall in disbelief ;) OK. I'm having a bit of fun at Peter's expense, since he deleted my comment with any communication to me. Me bad. Seriously though, I'm not sure what to say that will be helpful. If you want to understand decision making to the point where you can assist it by design, get a descent education in psychology and sociology. Luckily, design can be done iteratively, and with some good testing, can lead to fairly good designs. A few guidelines to start when trying to assist decision-making: Decision-making is inherently satisficing. People rush to a solution with the available information they have at hand (often no more than hunches or intuitions) and unless they are very careful or are working in a domain where it is readily apparent that a solution is wrong, they will stick with their solution. There's a large and well-developed body of literature on how to influence decision-making. I recommend Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, ISBN 0716731088. There's another that MadMan has recommended a few times that I need to get. He's mentioned it on WebWord but I'm not finding it... More later... |
| Tue 08 Jul 03:23 | Mac | Ron, the book that MadMan has recommended is Influence : The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B Cialdini. This was referenced in the My Eight Favorite Usability Books Thread from November 2002. I have spent the past 10 years building software that helps people feel comfortable about buying a financial product, be it a mortgage, unsecured loan, savings account or insurance product. We have found that if you give the user something 'solid' like a personalised illustration to start with, they will then play around with the quote to see the effect of changing different parameters of the product. |
| Tue 08 Jul 14:55 | MadMan | Hola champs. Sorry for not posting or commenting of late, but I've been unbelievably busy with my new business venture. Checking email and surfing is restricted to an hour or two at late night. Thanks Mac. Yes, that is indeed the book I recommended. I'm very interested in the topic of influencing and persuading people (in both good and bad ways.) Since Ron mentioned satisficing, you might also be interested in checking out Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein. Another useful book based on a lot of research. |
| Tue 08 Jul 23:46 | Ron Zeno | Thanks Mac and Madman! More guidelines: Educate people on what they need to know to make a good decision, and how they can assess their decision (and the trustworthiness of the information they use). Provide people with the information they need to make the decision. (As Mac points out) Provide them with a means to assess their decision. Finally, decision-making is extremely complicated and extremely varied depending upon context. Looking for simple patterns that model decision making is absurd without focusing on a specific context. |
| IT does so matter! | Mon 07 Jul |
| (Computer World) The view that IT doesnt matter is equivalent to the view that the printing press has had its run. But the printing press wasnt about printing enough Bibles for all the people. It was about creating a man whose knowledge is bigger than what lies in his head, and the impact of that has never peaked. I think that will be true of IT as well. Man is an information animal, and IT lies as close as anything to the core of his endeavors. (Comments: Be sure to read Get Over Yourself.) |
| Tue 08 Jul 08:57 | Anonymous | The infancy of IT, and any easy gains (if you can call that easy), are over. IT has to move on, get over the T, and get on with the I. |
| The far horizon | Mon 30 Jun |
| The key question: If you reach age 65, what are the chances youll live to 85? Barely one in three realized the odds are 50-50 today that youll live another 20 years if you reach your 65th birthday. Only 23 percent correctly identified longevity risk the likelihood youll outlive your savings as the biggest financial risk that retirees face. (Comments: It is all about perspective, no?) |
| Tue 08 Jul 03:14 | Bibhutiranjan swain | |
| Using the 5Es to Understand Users | Wed 02 Jul |
| (Whitney Quesenbery) Usability starts with a philosophy - a belief in designing to meet user needs and to focus on creating an excellent user experience - but it is the specific process and methodology that produce the real goal of usability. |
| Mon 07 Jul 02:00 | Anonymous | So which comment of yours got deleted, Ron? Post it here. I don't think the Webword dude will delete it. |
| Mon 07 Jul 08:59 | Joshua Kaufman | Ron, I *thought* I had read a different comment of yours on PeterMe than the one that currently appears there. I remember it having an offensive tone, but I'm really disappointed that Peter deleted it without any warning. Offensive or not, comments don't deserve to be deleted unless there's an appropriate comment policy. |
| Mon 07 Jul 10:22 | Ron Zeno | Well, it may have had an offensive tone, none was intended. Here are some new comments: Pure and empty propaganda. Specifically, a granfalloon. By discussing the attributes of an out group, Peter hopes to make the in group more appealing, and hence himself, his company, his services. Peter's support of his article is to look up a word in a dictionary. Peter asserts since people are calling themselves 'usability engineers', they must limit their services to those that are consistent with a definition from a dictionary. Basically, it's just an argument of how 'user experience' is a better phrase than 'usability engineering' without discussing anything of substance. In my response that Peter deleted, I urged him to say something of substance. Summary of Peter's article with meaningless propaganda removed: Usability engineers' shouldn't concern themselves with how engaging a product is because that concern belongs to user experience people (because Peter desires it to be that way). Peter puts down one fairly meaningless label to support another. I care little for what people call themselves (hence, I refer to both as 'human factors' in my weblog). It's what people do that matters. |
| Start measuring the cost and value of your content | Mon 07 Jul |
| (Gerry McGovern) Frederick Taylor lived in a society where scarcity was a key issue. Our society must deal with glut. Our society is becoming physically and intellectually overweight. We are eating too much and writing too much. |
| Mon 07 Jul 10:22 | (the other) JS | Output productivity has outpaced input productivity. When we say 'productivity tool,' what are we talking about, really. It is the ability to output more, faster. It is not about the ability to handle what is coming in, to absorb more, nor is it to consider something more fully or more deeply. |