Update – some links:
Pauls deck/audio (needs a bit of time to buffer)
slide deck
Standard live blogging alert
I’m here at GumTree offices in Gumtree, thanks kindly to @cyberdees++ letting me know about this lunchtime talk. Paul Annett (@nicepaul) just gave a fun talk about “oooh that’s clever” design, which contains lots of fascintating ideas and examples around [...]
Tags: Design
This is how the official olympics medal tally looks:
It’s not only the official tally, but the one linked from google each time you type “olympics” and terms like “australia olympics”. Thus making it an absurdly popular page at this time. As you can see, the design is reedeeeculous. The thing you want to see the [...]
“The novel’s success brought the term “pollyanna” (along with the adjective “pollyannaish” and the noun “Pollyannaism”) into the language to describe someone who is cheerfully optimistic and who always maintains a generous attitude toward the motives of other people. It also became, by extension – and contrary to the spirit of the book – a [...]
Poking fun at hollywood depictions of computing is an old favourite on the net – compilations of dumb computing scenes outshadow even mentions of anomalies in the star trek universe. Meet The Hollywood Operating System (AKA the Movie Operating System, Movie OS). You know it well:
The Hollywood operating system, or Hollywood OS, refers to any [...]
Tags: Design·HCI·HollywoodOS·Movies·Usability
Someone sent Don Norman a critique implying that a machine was more usable because it contained only one button. His response is interesting:
Nice story, but wrong. Fewer buttons do not necessarily mean easier use … When assessing simplicity, don’t get all hung up on the number of buttons. Look at the whole picture: more is [...]
Tags: Complexity·Design·HCI·Usability
‘Tis Goud reports from Mix ‘06, Microsoft’s web bash currently happening in Vegas. One of the presentations focused on the most important thing about Ajax: Usability.
The session started with referencing two sites with information on:
Usabillity Patterns, Michael Mahemoff Usabillity Guidelines, Thomas Baekdal
Thomas’s guidelines were the first [...]
Tags: AjaxPatterns·Design·Links·Mix06·Patterns·Usability·Web·Web2.0
Uh, thanks for the heads-up.
Reminds me of a presentation at Interact 2001, where the laptop suddenly interrupted proceedings with that legendary message, “Your computer is now fully charged”. The presentation was about user attention, I kid you not.
And, by way of contrast, how to write good error messages: tell the user what happened, explain [...]
Agile is a big theme these days. Not surprising that it should be a big part of “Web 2.0″, since Web 1.0 is often attributed as an inspiration. Paul Scrivens reminds us of [37Signals' association with agile principles](http://9rules.com/whitespace/fear_is_a_good_thing.php] and that’s evident, for example, in this talk by Jason Fried. Similarly, the agile manifesto was mentioned [...]
Tags: 37Signals·Agile·Design·Extreme Programming·Software·User-Centered Design
Dave Crane looks into some Scriptaculous code. The main point is that Scriptaculous is easy for novice JS programmers to use, but the source code would be difficult, for novices at least, to understand. Which raises these questions:
So, going back to the bigger picture, here’s something for the authors of JavaScript libraries to [...]
Tags: Design·Java·JavaEE·Javascript·Links·Object-Oriented·Scriptaculous·Software
