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This week:
Permalink for this week's stuff
Web and 'net
Usability:
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Jakob Nielsen's 'usability
heuristics' have become a standard tool for assessing
the usability of a web site. Information
& Design's web evaluation heuristics are even better (in my
opinion). In a similar vein of thought, Louis Rosenfeld now offers
heuristics
for assessing an information architecture and web
search heuristics.
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Also at Information & Design, here's a slightly more
sophisticated version of card-sorting that you can use early in
a site development project to assess a proposed site structure.
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What,
actually, *is* information architecture?
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Usability testing isn't just for software and web sites. Testing
documentation (eg manuals, policies, training notes, 'help' files
for a computer system) can ensure that it includes, and accurately
conveys, all the information users expect and need.
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Five tips for
successful usability testing.
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The art of usability
benchmarking.
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Think looking at spam is annoying or offensive? Try
listening to it.
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How to make
web sites usable for older people.
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Eye-tracking
studies show how real web users look at your site. The Poynter
Institute's third such study provides tips for page design: where
to put high-priority content, when to use small type, what kinds of
ads and graphics attract attention, whether text should be in one
or more columns...
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How white
space and margins affect online readability.
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When smart thinking is applied to the design
of forms and logos it can have a huge impact: reducing costs,
improving business processes and making clients happier.
Programming:
The scholarly web:
Management:
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The size of an organisation's user-centred design (UCD) investment
is inversely proportional to the web site's actual usability. The
best, most highly-usable
products emerge from small, multidisciplinary teams that are allowed
to practise user-centred design (UCD) and work across the whole organisation.
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Using
IT to create business value usually involves three steps: reassessing
the information technology plan and approaches; investing carefully
to support the IT plan; and mastering the capabilities needed to realise
that plan.
Intranets:
9 September 2004 | top of page
How NASA dropped a Clanger
Photos purport to prove
that the moon landings never happened. Says Flipsock friend Paul:
"If there was an atmosphere you could hear the werid whisting sound..."
That Clanger reference above is to the lunar photos: I'm deliberately
not mentioning how NASA
dropped a spacecraft this week. Whoopsie. Instead of Genesis,
they should've called it Icarus
(though that may have caused confusion with the Icarus
asteroid).
thanks, Paul | 9 September 2004 | top of
page
Reverse-engineering the scientific method
Gordon Rugg cracked the 400-year-old mystery of the Voynich manuscript
by reverse-engineering it: instead of trying to crack its code, he tried
to produce an encoded text that would look equally mystifying. Along the
way, he may
have created a new scientific method, the verifier approach.
thanks to Truckle the Uncivil, via science-matters | 9
September 2004 | top of page
Viral aesthetic
"Don't you love art? Personally, I want to play the first person
shooter/flight sim that lets you spread a virus across the globe,"
says Flipsock friend Jonathan.
A German exhibition, currently touring to USA and Denmark, examines the
nature, culture, politics and meaning of computer viruses. At I
love you [rev.eng], visitors can:
- Force computers to crash with "Sasser“ or "Suicide“
- Experience a global virus outbreak in real time via a 3D world
- View security concepts and methods for preventing global network attacks
- Witness computer viruses as works of art like ”biennale.py“
and "The Lovers“
- See films by hackers on their subculture
- Learn about programming languages as the material for contemporary
poetry
- Juxtapose experimental literature and code poetry
thanks Jonathan | 9 September 2004 | top
of page
Understanding health (a shameless plug)
My fabulous sister Helen
co-edited "Understanding
health: a determinants approach," an OUP book that just got a
rave review in the emJA, the Electronic Medical Journal Australia:
"Gone is the stuffy epidemiology of defined disease, to be replaced
by discussion (and analysis) of the social and health issues that trouble
our community and give angst to politicians... The authors have done
an excellent job of encapsulating these issues and more within contemporary
Australian and international data... If
this is the “new public health”, it makes a lot of sense
to me."
Nice one, Hels
:-)
8 September 2004 | top of page
Decidedly fishy
My desktop tropical aquarium is looking pretty good at the moment: lots
of shrubbery (fake) and active fish (real). The guppies have been breeding
like... um... guppies, and one of the 30-odd fry is now big enough to
capture with a slowish digital camera.
Here's a full-frontal view of the tank (right). It's a 33 litre
tank, about 40 cm high and 36 cm wide.
Below left, you can see (from left to right) a male guppy with
fancy black tail; a black widow tetra with two vertical stripes
on its body; a glolite tetra, at the bottom of the frame; and, towards
the top, in front of the red foliage, a black neon tetra.
Below right are the three female guppies (with larger white/yellow
bodies), a couple of the male guppies (with fancy tails), two black
widow tetras, four black neon tetras and two green neon tetras. |
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The male guppy (right) is named Barry White: he's a very keen
lad! (You can probably tell this yourself, by looking at the "Sheesh,
not again!" expression on the female guppy--she's the one with
the creamy yellow body, much larger than Barry.) The other three
fish here are black neon tetras. |
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And finally, ta dah! Our first teenager! This young guppy is
hard to see because she's only just reached 2 cm in length, and
she moves very quickly--too fast for the digital camera to catch
clearly. Her nose is pointing down to the left, and her tail is
a yellow-orange color with two vertical black marks.
We named her Ooh Baby, because we're pretty sure Barry White must
be her father. |
8 September 2004 | top of page
Slow art
Some kinds of art can't be hurried: to appreciate a piece of music, a
dance, a play or a walk-through gallery installation, you must spend time
on it. Marko
Ahtisaari gives examples of slow art works and explains how it's completely
unrelated to slow food. (via 3
Quarks Daily)
8 September 2004 | top of page
Assaults on free thinking
Novelist Ngugi wa’ Thiongo and his wife NjeEri returned to Kenya
recently, after 20 years in exile. They were violently assaulted and NjeEri
was raped. "The fact that it happened is not so much an indicator
of how crime-ridden Nairobi is, but how much the political
problems and economic deprivations of the past two decades have destroyed
social order... Societies where someone like Ngugi is attacked in
the way that he and Njeeri were, begin to rot by tearing a page out of
his book in the library - or not reading him altogether."
Scholarship
and critical thinking are also under attack in India.
8 September 2004 | top of page
Brainspace
Listen online to BBC radio documentaries about five
great scientific squabbles: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz;
Joseph Priestley and Antoine Laurent Lavoisier; Henry Thomas De La Beche
and Roderick Impey Murchison; Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko and Nikolai Ivanovitch
Vavilov; Arthur Stanley Eddington and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (Requires
Real Player)
Neuromarketing:
could brain-scanning technology provide an accurate way to assess the
appeal of new products and the effectiveness of advertising?
From the cusp between Gen X and Gen Y, Troy surveys the generation gap
as revealed in our technological toys:
"Today's 'millennial' teens have a world of rapidly evolving technology
at their disposal -- technology that we could only dream of as kids...
They also have a generation of parents who grew up with MTV... and at
least half a chance of understanding the technology that their kids
are using...
"Next time you see a gaggle of teens swarming on to public transport,
don't hide in your newspaper... [H]ave a look at how they interact...
Both boys and girls happily engage with technology such as phone cams,
laptops and other media devices. They seem more comfortable communicating
via these devices than we do, and have built language and conventions
around using these tools, where we tend to attempt mapping their use
back to the 'older' way of doing things. Today's
youth are not so different to us, but you can sense the subtle shift
in culture and values afforded by access to news ways of organising
themselves, communicating and playing."
8 September 2004 | top of page
Omphalos
"Most people think that our self -knowledge exists only through
the memories we have amassed of our selves. Am I a kind person? Am I gloomy?"
In fact, your
brain has two different systems for understanding your Self: the way
you think about yourself in unfamiliar contexts is different from the
way you understand more familiar concepts of self.
Near Melbourne's Victoria Markets there's a pub that hosts weekly Socratic
dialogues over dinner. It's part of a new wave: pop
philosophy.
7 September 2004 | top of page
Fire destroys lots of books
A fire in Weimar's Duchess
Anna Amalia Library must have reached Fahrenheit
451 this week, because it destroyed lots of books. How many books,
exactly, depends on which media outlet you trust: the BBC
says up to 13,000 while the New
York Times reckons up to 30,000. (username for the NYT link = flipsock,
password = sneedle)
7 September 2004 | top of page
Oh, aaarrr, me hearties
Sunday 19 September is Talk
Like A Pirate Day.
7 September 2004 | top of page
Human clock
The Human Clock tells you the
time in digital or analogue format. It's awesome. Don't miss the descriptions
of the Atari and Tandy webservers used to manage the site.
thanks, Trevor | 7 September 2004 | top
of page
Name that feeling!
The email
version of Sneedle Flipsock is now delivered via Gmail,
Google's web-based email service.
To get a Gmail account, you have to be invited by someone else who's
already using Gmail. (The lovely Janice
Fraser from Adaptive Path
invited me. Thanks, Janice!)
Once you have a Gmail account, you get to invite others to join. It's
like being Santa.
It's all free, and it's been going on for quite a while now (in Internet
terms, at least), so the Gmail network is today far from the exclusive
little club that some people think it is.
For good reasons, some
people get excited at the prospect of opening a Gmail account. (thanks
to Peter Tonoli for this link)
Flipsock friend Paul remarked last week:
"There should be a word for the particular angst which is only
experienced when thinking about setting up a new email identity. Not
something which is readily sloughed off once it's been put out there."
Some other flipsock friends came up with several suggestions:
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an e-dentity crisis as you handle a non-e-plume (thanks to Andrew
Harris)
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mailstrom: the particular angst which is only experienced when thinking
about setting up a new email identity. (thanks to Max Sylvester and
Andrew Scarlett)
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e-piffany: coming up with an email name that is relevant, cool, funny,
witty and not already taken. (thanks to Max Sylvester and Andrew Scarlett)
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emailetic: vague email-related nausea (thanks to Teresa)
7 September 2004 | top of page
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2004 flipsocks:
17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
10 Dec: anything anywhere any time
3 Dec: instant
flattery
26 Nov: the steamroller
of branding
19 Nov: fried
v rice
5 Nov: the page
with no name
29 Oct: and then
there were none
22 Oct: filled
with naughty laughter
15 Oct: get
souls and disconcert the public
8 Oct: ooh,
aah, ooh
1 Oct: pinch
and a punch
24 Sep: design
is the new art
17 Sep: footsteps
of Aeneas
10 Sep: slow
art, viral aesthetic
3 Sep: I
can see your house from here
27 Aug: forever
blowing bubbles
20 Aug: jargon
for the digital age
13 Aug: beautiful
plumage, the Norwegian blue
6 Aug: brokenated
terribility
23 Jul: Alice
underground
16 Jul: color-coded
2 Jul: for
so long treated as nouns
25 Jun: looking
for love, echidna-style
18 Jun: joy-to-stuff
ratio
11 Jun: fun's
fun but a girl can't dance all night
4 Jun: pink dinosaur
28 May: two
people every minute
21 May: incompitnce [sic]
14 May: zygomatic smile
5 May: mailbox
30 Apr: bananaguard
23 Apr: mmmmmWAH!
15 Apr: playtime
8 Apr: googlewhack
2 Apr: we
wish to inform you...
18 Mar: daffy dills
12 Mar: echo
chamber
9 Jan: refund profologies
Also on this site:
about this site
home page
articles:
who
is geoffrey ebert?
testing
for the fun factor
chicken
at the (higher education) crossroads
crawford's theory of interactivity
froghunting
home-page
real-estate wars
the eagle
has landed
listmania:
must-reads
for web people
recent reads
pop-culture
quotes
neology:
they shoulda been words
recipe:
lemon and
rosemary risotto
reviews:
Written
In Blood by Chris Lawson
The
Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams
Without whom (web):
frankenstein
journal (Chris)
tbn97 (Troy)
webster's encyclopedia [sic]
science playwiths
(Peter)
neroliwesley.com.au (Neroli)
Fraser
Jonathan
Maverick IT network consultants
(Rick)
Look! There's a castle!
(Brent)
Cairns Corporation (Gerald)
Homosapien Books (Julie and
Bruce)
Southern Sky Watch
(Ian)
Panda's Thumb (Ian again)
ABC Science-Matters
(official)
science-matters (unofficial)
chisig
Bovios
Disinfo.com (Alex Burns)
Lee Battersby
Little Malop Gallery
Digest of Usability Resources and
News (Dey)
WooWooWoo (Andrew)
Without whom (also):
Ramona P Lovechild
Dombardo
Katherine with a K
Katherine (no relation)
Catherine
Teresa
Corey
Claire
Claire (no relation)
Helsbels
Iain
Toby and Jann
Andrew
Paul, Warren, Dr K and The New Reality
Stephen
Tania
Trevor
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