once you start thinking about usability, the world looks different
From: Gleanings
To: Boxes and Arrows
Subject: Gleanings: Hitting the Right Note(ation)
OPENING THANG
Jesse James Garrett, owner of the best name in the IA biz, has matched his earlier brilliance of this
http://www.jjg.net/ia/elements.pdf
with this
http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/
the beginnings of a standardized language for IA notation.
thank you Jesse.
USABILITY MATTERS
Found on CHI-WEB
ACM research paper:
Readability of Fonts in the Windows Environment.
(http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/proceedings/intpost/tst_bdy.htm)
"There were significant differences between the
various font/size combinations in terms of reading
speed, accuracy, and subjective preferences."
Small fonts proved significantly slower to read
Speaking on invisible things, I dug up a bunch of links on banner blindness recently for an argument I was having about Adobe's font page (don't ask). I've done the research, I might as well share. ;-)
Benway, J. P. (1998). Banner blindness: The irony of attention grabbing on
the World Wide Web. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society42nd Annual Meeting, 1, 463-467.
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~jan/BannerBlindness.pdf
Webreference's placement study:
http://www.webreference.com/dev/banners/
The banner blindness study:
http://www.sandia.gov/itg/newsletter/dec98/banner_blindness.html
NEWS
Internet World: Deconstructing OpenTable.com. Terry Swack and Mark Hurst. business was founded on the concept of "allowing people to book tables the way they book airline tickets." Now I understand why I was asked to register and give credit card information! When was the last time you called a restaurant that required your personal info to hold a table?
http://www.internetworldnews.com/article_bot.asp?inc=101500/10.15.00Decon&issue=10.15.00
Business 2.0: Darwin, Linux, and Radiation. Clay Shirky. So it is with Linux–after a decade of computers acting as either clients or servers, new classes of devices are now being invented almost weekly–phones, consoles, PDAs–and only Linux is adaptable enough to work on most of them.
http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/breakthrough/2000/10/16/20785
APROPOS OF NOTHING
20 ways the world could end.
http://www.discover.com/oct_00/gthere.html?article=featworld.html
betty again
http://www.bettybowers.com/bashpaulk.html