Cool New E-book May 6, 2011
Posted by norm in Uncategorized.Tags: iPad, iPhone, UI, warnings
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David Pogue, NY Times tech columnist, recommends a cool new e-book with very interesting features from…Al Gore. Yes, that Al Gore. Don’t be too surprised; he did invent the Internet after all (sort of).
Usability (well, UX Really) Resources April 20, 2011
Posted by norm in Uncategorized.Tags: UI, useful, UX
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Interesting sites with resources, such as templates and step-by-step guides.
http://www.usability.gov/index.html Geared to websites, but still applicable to almost anything else. Very good for usability experts and neophytes as well.
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/guidelines_and_methods/index.html. Good too, but requires a little digging around because some content is on the site itself and some is on other sites whose links are provided.
Credit Card Chips Bad for Business? February 16, 2011
Posted by norm in Uncategorized.Tags: dumb, security, UI
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I just got one of those new credit cards with a chip on it. It came with a PIN that I have to remember to be able to use the card. Well, I already have a PIN for my Interac card. (A PIN that I chose myself, BTW, unlike the PIN for my credit card.)
Now I’m going to have to remember a PIN for each credit card I have? I can’t do that! It’s not like I have a dozen credit cards, but still, I’m not Watson.
So what’s going to happen? I suspect that in the near future, people will each primarily use one or two PIN-required credit cards only. Some credit cards are going to see a change in their business. The less popular cards are going to see a drop-off in transactions and the more popular ones an increase. Moreover, any credit card company smart enough to avoid requiring PINs should see an increase in business.
Stupider Than the Stupidist? February 14, 2011
Posted by norm in Uncategorized.Tags: UI
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A while back I made a post entitled “possibly the stupidest design ever” about a mouse with more buttons than some other kind of thing with too many buttons.
However, my wife came across a web page with an even stupider design. It was a webpage to activate your cell phone. On this webapge, you had to type an ID number for the phone into a text input field. The problem was that the text input field background colour was the SAME as the page background colour (white) AND the text input field had no border. The consequence was that the text input field was invisible! It seems unlikely that this was problem that was specific to my wife’s system or browser since since bordercolor is a pretty standard HTML and CSS attribute, so it shouldn’t have been a problem.(Since then they’ve fixed the page.)
So my wife (and probably everyone else) ended up calling customer support. How many tens of thousands of dollars in uselessly wasted customer support time do you think this cost? One usability test with one usability test subject (who could have been the page designer him or herself!) would have revealed the flaw and saved the company all that money. And if it was a browser problem, why didn’t they test that and find out before making the page live?
In my next post I will make “stupid” into a verb.
Syndromic Surveillance Based on Web Searches March 11, 2010
Posted by norm in Uncategorized.Tags: health informatics, Public Health, syndromic surveillance, UI
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In 2006, Eysenbach* showed that internet searches correlated to (and even predicted) influenza rates. Recently, Google.org established the Google Flu web service that graphs the incidence of flu-related Google searches for a variety of countries at the national and state/provincial levels.
I recently developed a website called ISIC: Illness Search Incidence Counts (pretty clever, eh?) that’s similar to Google Flu in that ISIC is also based on Google searches. In addition to flu, I show the incidence of GI and respiratory-related searches. However, I only cover data from Canada, and for some provinces there’s not enough search data to display all the graphs.
*Eysenbach , G. (2006). Infodemiology: Tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance. AIMA Annual Symposium, (pp. 244-248).
