a checklist for your next usability review of a .edu site. (if we had wanted the site to be usable, we'd have kept gopher)

For a lot of products, such as alarm clocks, you’re only going to write a review if you have a negative experience. How does Amazon get people to write reviews? Most people don’t leave reviews. About 0.7% of people who buy something leave a review. But because Amazon has such a huge amount of customers, that equates to quite a lot. So the next time someone says, "we should have reviews; that works really well for Amazon," you can respond with "sure, we should have customers too; that works really well for Amazon."

Using recorded sessions, I analyze my techniques and problems. Sighted readers will experience some of the confusions and frustrations of a visually impaired person trying to learn the interaction and structure patterns of these website’s. Visually impaired users may glean some ways to avoid pitfalls and determine the value of these government information resources for their purposes. I complain about absence of headings, careless links, and tricky interactions beyond my capabilities although I appreciate the effort to provide high quality government information.

What would it take to get you out of your car? Usability for public transport. Delivered 13 November 2008 for World Usability Day, UTS, Sydney, Australia (less)

In 2003, however, the Michigan Health and Hospital Association asked Pronovost to try out three of his checklists in Michigan’s I.C.U.s. It would be a huge undertaking. Not only would he have to get the state’s hospitals to use the checklists; he would also have to measure whether doing so made a genuine difference. But at last Pronovost had a chance to establish whether his checklist idea really worked.

It’s a fair question. Sync is trying to be useful, sync is trying to be helpful, but sync is giving you a choice, and while you are generally good at choices, you will screw up. And when you do you will never, ever blame yourself, you will blame sync.

It is always fun helping a friend at another school find information via their library’s website. I guess it would be like visiting England or Australia where they speak the same language, but the accent is just a bit different. Anyway, I discovered a very cool finding aid to help users locate items in the stacks.

Everything was all well and good until I had to figure out how to use OpenID. I've been watching the development of this shit from the sidelines for a while (well, if reading something about OpenID blah blah blah on TechCrunch and saying, aw, that's cute, then getting back to work counts). I understand the problem that OpenID is trying to solve, but the approach is way too, uh, how to put this, San Francisco.

Lou's teaching a whole day on site search analytics? Is there really that much to it?

The five game mechanics discussed were collectiing things, earning points, providing feedback, exchanges, and cusomization.

Good home page design is an art -- like the cover of a magazine, or a quick-reference card. Of course it depends on the readership. The CERN home page has to start with the CERN things to minimise the number of keystokes/clicks for the largest number

a user interface widget for picking a date range, provided by measure map (a piece of google). nicely done, and this deserves to replace a bunch of yucky date pickers.

Smart Experience offers Internet, mobile, and software classes in New York City. (Note to self, steal this idea)

measure how hard your text is to read

This wiki was created following the NISO Usage Data Forum, 1-2 November 2007, in Dallas, TX primarily to provide a place for folks who care about library and scholarly usage data to work together to develop a decision framework to help those organizations

lots about how to slice up library data, nothing about patron privacy in the process

Why do people do what they do before and after they arrive on your web site? By objectively observing target audience members and carefully analyzing their search behavior, web site owners can improve their web sites

Tim interviews Mike Beasley, President of the Usability Professionals Association Michigan chapter, about the upcoming World Usability Day 2007.

security, usability, and privacy issues with openid.

Beyond this, OpenID is pretty much useless. The reasons for this are many: OpenID is highly vulnerable to phishing and other attacks, creates insurmountable privacy problems, is not a trust system, suffers from usability problems, and makes it unappealing

When you advertise through an advertising network, your ads will get fewer fixations than if you contract directly with the publisher for a specific placement and design your creative to fit that spot. As a result, you should bid less for network ads than

Mike Nowak, 42, a software developer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, said he'd been a little worried about the button-free keyboard. But the video's demonstration of a feature that automatically corrects data-entry errors eased his mind.

information smells like garlic fries

The most important rule in our development is always to do the simplest thing that could possibly work. Not the most stupid thing, not something that clearly can’t work. But simplicity is the most important contributor to the ability to make rapid progr

As humans we have the capacity to remember – and to forget. For millennia remembering was hard, and forgetting easy. By default, we would forget. Digital technology has inverted this. Today, with affordable storage, effortless retrieval and global acces

social software uxagons! must dig into this.

browser interface for firefox; adds keyboard interface for all elements. designed for accessability (or lazy bad mouse skills)

A Seattle architect has written a critical review of the Rem Koolhaas-designed Central Library of the Seattle Public Library. The criticism is not that the place isn't an architectural achievement--it is--but that it's not usable.

the web has changed - "web 2.0' and all that - this is a good description of the common design themes in this era.

just out of alpha

note the poor <title> tag on the page. noon-2pm.

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In short, the lower the cognitive load of your interface, the more users will use your interface, and the more often they will use it.

fix your blog checklist

i'm looking for a page to illustrate Stephen Abram's "thermograph" of how users read pages

once retro turbo-encabulation becomes the new craze, watch for shortages of key raw materials

study says you have less than 500 ms to make an impression