June 2002

  • girlwonder

    girlwonder is looking fabulous with her new minimalist boxes-on-white design like, well, like me. Is white the new gray?

  • Jim Kalbach published his case study of the Audi.com and Audi.de sites. Highlights: GoLive for schematics, dynamic layout changing with browser width, and heavy usability testing of the non-conventional navigation.

  • Clicking a Link Most web pages contain links you can click to move to other pages. 1. Move the pointer until it changes to a pointing finger. This happens whenever the pointer is over a link. Most links are underlined text, but buttons and pictures can also be links. 2. Click the link once. While…

  • oh my, Amazon is trying their version of Blue Light Specials (communicating artificial exclusivity to generate demand). But just as with Kmart’s merchandise, it’s all crap. A George Foreman Rotisserie? Ugh.

  • Width

    It’s a portrait design in a landscape world

  • It’s Puerto Rican Day in New York, complete with parade. I’m listening to West Side Story… ROSALIA: When I will go back to San Juan.ANITA: When you will shut up and get gone?ROSALIA: Everyone there will give big cheer!ANITA: Everyone there will have moved here!

  • The current social networks thinking is fascinating, and will only get better once more people dig into web services, and then the semantic web. It’s a little disconcerting, embarrasing even, that no IAs are at the forefront of these discussions. Isn’t that what we do, find interesting patterns in information and present them to people?…

  • I just strolled through my local gigantic Barnes & Noble. I think I saw more computer books in one place than ever before. Some observations: There are a surprising number of books on designing with usability in mind, which is reasuring. There are plenty of general web design books, so many it must be hard…

  • Nils Rydbeck, former Ericsson phone designer and inventor of GSM outlines four different scenarios for the future of the mobile phone: 1. The phone contains everything that you have at home in your computer. 2. The phone becomes an entertainment and gaming device for youth, possibly with a display showing the person you’re talking to.…

  • 1 + 1

    Here’s a Philip Glass composition you can play yourself, as printed in Score: An Anthology of New Music (out of print I assume but probably findable in a university’s library): Any table top is amplified by means of a contact mike, amplifier and speaker. The player perfoms 1 + 1 by tapping the table top…

  • Book Fair

    Wow, so many great books being published. Peter stopped by the other night with an actual hardcopy prototype of his user-centered design book. Owen and other luminaries lay down the CSS goods. Wert and company cough up a tome on Usability. And Rebecca’s Blog book is out. Don’t go crying that you’re bored this summer.

  • PeterV’s story of automated phone system vs. web (why is the phone system, which forces one to navigate a tree, easier to use?) reminded me of a story from Chris Fahey of Behavior. Chris was designing an interface for a mobile screen, I forget whether it was a PDA or a mobile phone. Of course…

  • John Thomas and his colleagues at IBM are working on a design pattern language for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Of it, he emails: My colleagues and I are working on a different but related topic: a socio-technical pattern language…we don’t expect every software developer to familiarize themselves with a couple decades of CSCW and…

  • Mozilla

    Mozilla reaches 1.0. It looks like it was four years in the making. That says something about the speed of open source development, or the project management, or the scope. Maybe scope. I like Bill’s description: The OpenSource version of the NetScape Navigator browser. Or, a RichClient development platform. So far I’ve tried the Windows…