Win 5 Copies of “Fluid Web Typography” (by WebdesignerDepot) – leave a comment with your favorite typography link for the chance to win a copy of Jason Cranford Teague’s book (I hope this trackback counts as a comment .
There are always more than two options (by Derek Sivers) – couldn’t agree more. Counting choices means limiting yourself, like “all flights to Europe are too expensive therefore I cannot go to Europe” – how about taking a cruise?
Does usability exist? How Usability is like Intelligence (by Jeff Sauro) – very interesting analogy to intelligence and a first approach to relating the three usability areas Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction and how (and how much) they contribute to Usability ‘u’.
The Case Against Vertical Navigation (by Louis Lazaris) – While I think the argumentation in this blog article is mislead by current design trends and biased in some way, I find ’shaking our world’ good from time to time so we can re-think the way we’re used to doing things.
Bad Usability Calendar 2010 – What would be the New Year without another one of their great Usability Calendars – Enjoy!
Curating Comments Threads (by Chris Coyier) – interesting discussion and good points about how to make comments more meaningful.
Live, Free webcast: Confessions of a Public Speaker – Probably you’ve heard already, Scott Berkun has his book out, and he’s offering a free, 90 min. webcast about it, don’t miss, sign up now.
The future of UI will be boring (by Scott Berkun) – Scott seems to be on mushrooms lately judging by the level of activity. Here another really good read about the future of UI design, love the ‘rookie trap’.
jQuery 1.4 has been released (by John Resig) – right in time for jQuery’s birthday, big news for a great JavaScript library, better iframe support, flexible events. My tip: get it!!
Happy New Year everybody! Hope you are healthy and fully motivated for a new decade of great things to happen. It’s going to be great!
If the last decade gave us wikipedia, digg, facebook and all the other fascinating apps based on web 2.0, collaboration and connection then we can truly be excited of what lies ahead of us – I am!
Myths & Misconceptions About Grid Systems – I’m a big believer in grid systems, but is it a one fits all? Do grid systems benefit each and every development? Is a website less valuable when not based on a grid system?
More Like This: A Design Pattern (by Greg Nudelman) – Design Patterns like ‘More like this’ help to speed up development, define a common language and should be part of everybody’s toolkit
Seth Godin was kind enough to share his book What Matters Now as a free download. You’ll find more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about. Good Xmas read, thanks!
LinkedIn announced its faceted search feature which is based on eight facets: company, past company, location, relationship, location, industry, school and profile languages. It really comes in handy when searching for people by location or friendship degree, something that Facebook is badly lacking still.
URL shortening is big not only since Twitter hit the 140 character message limit. This week Facebook and Google announced their very own services, goo.gl and fb.me with bit.ly announcing its plans for Bit.ly Pro, a service that lets publishers create their own custom short URLs that use the Bit.ly platform.
Menu Mind Games, really funny and quick read about the marketing tricks built into menus, for example, how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.
Every day I run into fantastic articles and stumble across hilarious and must-see web sites. I’m amazed how much great content is created and maintained hour by hour, day by day. I wish I had more time to read and learn more, not to mention synthesize and write about it.
That’s why I start this weekly thread that will summarize all the goodies & greats – in short: Highlights – of the week so you can skim through them during a spare minute on the weekend or first thing Monday morning.
I try to cover all my basic interests (UCD, Usability, Accessibility, Web development, Code samples, Business, Marketing, Social web, Technical news, Philosophy and whatever else I run into Feel free to share interesting links and bring special content to my attention – I’d love hearing from you.
So here we go,
Highlights for week 50 of the year 2009
Hilarious illustration how a web design goes straight to hell (by Matthew Inman). According to my colleague Neal “that’s why you document strategy and scope of work and hire an account manager. The manager keeps the client in line, translates client needs into directions designer understand, and bills a change request every time the client demands something other than what was agreed to in writing. ”
Ok, this one is already two weeks ‘old’ but a goodie I wanted to share. Derek Sivers shows in the example of Let pedestrians define the walkways that business decisions are smartest taken as late as possible, when you have the most information.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? Picture by Gjon Mili, 1953, Dublin, Ireland - (c) Time Inc.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty?
I want you to think about this age-old question for a sec (yes, once more).
The point
Ok, here is the point: the answer does NOT show YOU who you are, it shows ME (the person who asks the question) who you are. And I’m not talking about personality, optimist or pessimist, mental state or whatever else. No, in simple terms, it shows me whether you are the bartender or the beer drinker, the producer or the consumer, it depends on the perspective, your answer depends on the role you are in and therefore how I need to interpret it.
It’s too easy to interpret interview results or client observations by the pure nature of the answer. What really needs to be looked at is what the role of the person was that answered the question which in many cases might be the real purpose of the question in the first place.
Alternative answers
If you answered that the glass cannot be half-empty because half (1/2) of empty (0) is impossible and doesn’t make sense, then you are as much of a freaky scientist as if your answer were full because I didn’t specify the type of filling, water (beer) plus oxygen.
Your answer
What was YOUR response? Don’t worry, I’m not going to analyze you… not.
I will tell you MY answer later…
“World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 200 events are organized in over 43 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice.”
“It’s about making our world work better. It’s about “Making Life Easy” and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use.”
A word about Usability
Usability is well-defined but often simply summarized in three key questions:
Who are your users?
What are their goals?
How can you help them achieve those goals?
Another Key Question to Ask
Today and here I want add another key question that businesses need to ask themselves:
What is the business reason for supporting this goal (=task)?
Without asking this question it’s really hard to generate revenue and being successful in both, terms of business and metrics to evaluate success. As a side-note: It also gets more difficult to sell the benefits of Usability and it’s methodologies to stakeholders.
On my last trip to Europe I discovered a fly in my urinal (sorry ladies, no offense). I was surprised and a little amazed and ended up aiming for this little critter. Yes, according to Urinalfly these things “keep bathrooms up to 85% cleaner [...] by locating the fly correctly in the urinal, splashback is significantly reduced”. I guess it worked, at least for my.
Fly in the urinal (Munich Airport)
Smart, huh? Now take this:
Questions above the urinal (SeaWorld, San Diego)
Sea World in San Diego, CA took a different approach in keeping their ‘customers’ distracted: they installed little frames with question about animal conservation above the urinals. Yes, after I was done with ‘my’ question my eyes wondered off to my ‘neighbors’ question. Do NOT picture any possible implications for the cleaning personal, it wasn’t like that…
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”![Is the glass half-full or half-empty? [Picture by Gjon Mili, 1953, Dublin, Ireland - <a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=12e1734295709b34&q=glass%20source:life%20half%20empty&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dglass%2Bsource:life%2Bhalf%2Bempty%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26newwindow%3D1">(c) Time Inc.</a>]](http://www.mgitsolutions.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/glass-half-empty.jpg "Is the glass half-full or half-empty?")
