Rebecca sent an email to a list we're on revealing "the most evil spam I've ever received" it's out and out fraud, andI post it to warn others. (with her blessing, of course)
Dear eBay Customer, Your order has been completed and will be mailed within 24-48 hours.Your credit card has been charged $460.50 for the following
purchase...- Microsoft X Box ( $399.00 )
- NFL Fever ( $50.00 )Plus shipping and handling. If you feel that your credit card has been
billed wrongly, please visit http://cancelorder.n2v.net and fill out
all the needed information to cancel the following order.Again that site is <a href="Http://cancelorder.n2v.net"> eBay Services: Cancel Order
Thank you,
eBay Services.
Don't click.
Someone was kind enough to scan a 1971 Sears Catalog. Now that's fashion!
If you ever thought the project manager was just the guy who kept coming up to you to say "Are ya done yet", read Role of project management in design . Good stuff. and reminds us that usability and IA is often practiced by non-specialists, and that is not neccessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite.... as long as *somebody* is doing it products will keep getting better.
lately i've noticed a trend-- many of my "innie" friends are adding usability testing to their job descriptions, and calling me up for tips. "Usability - Out-sourced or In-house?" is a pretty good article on the pluses and perils of this, though I smell a wiff of fear for their jobs in the essay...
Last night while my friend Tracy and I were walking to the local brewery, she asked me what I thought the difference between intuition and instinct was. I blurted out a half-baked idea, we went back and forth and came up with:
Instinctive: built into the body, from our animal brain
Intuitive: understood by the brain's subconscious, informed by past experience.
They look the same when you see them in play: a sudden and swift apparently thought-free action. Yet intuitive action is not thought free, it is based on experience.
I bring this up because "Intuitive" is a an objective of many pieces of software and websites. And it's important to realize the best way to achieve intuitable interfaces is to pull from design principles and previous design standards. Because these are what your users have in their experience.
Something I've done in the past is replacing a competitive review with a best-practices review, in which one looks at other bits of software/websites the projected userbase is familiar with to harvest patterns and best solutions.
So let's say I was designing a bookstore for accountants. I might look at Amazon, but I might also look at excel and quicken.
And because the universe is every obliging, I found this article, INTUITIVE EQUALS FAMILIAR, in my inbox this a.m. from a list I'm on.
So this brings me to another cool thing we talked about-- the unlearnable interface. Have you ever used a program where you kept making the same damn mistake over and over again? Take a closer look. You'll probably discover that the designer of the program has gone contrary to principles or standards...