Web Application Usability
Sun Apr 24 04:27:03 EDT 2011
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The root of software industries problems: - Unlike film or automobiles, where there is a significant cost of goods, software (while hard to write) was relatively fast to create. With less upfront expenses, the rush to market was coupled with relatively less risk, thereby further fueling the rush to start coding with out thinking twice. Also, the reality of Moore’s Law meant [...]

More info on Skype: - Niklas Zennstrom co-author of Kazaa talks about Skype. “You should not try to do things that are artificially viral like an “Invite a friend to use this service” feature. Those don’t really work. We’ve had that feature on Skype but it doesn’t really bring in the users. The product has to be fundamentally viral in [...]

Quips from NYTimes magazine on Design: - Inspiration: Where Does It Come From?: “The most impressive designs are those that seem naturally right, unimprovable, inevitable.” The Guts of a New Machine: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. The starting point for IPod wasn’t a chip or a design; the starting point was [...]

Yahoo introduces RIA style shopping interface: - Yahoo! shopping released a shopping interface on October 16 for its most popular holiday products. This interface called smartsort does client side product sorting using sliders for user input. Heavily relies on javascript and is not responsive enough for me. Has a long way to go. The nice thing about it is, it lets users [...]

Earthlink’s cool flash panoramas: - Sarah Allen put up screenshots of the new Earthlink’s new Personal Start Page made with Laszlo Presentation Server. The highlight is clearly the panoramas which visualize the incoming data in an unobtrusive, calm way. Sparcely populated text displays, with ambient information in the environment reduce the clutter and complexity in an interface. The Lawrence weather [...]

Largest hosting provider gives free webhosting: - UK based 1and1 is giving free webhosting for 3 years for anyone in the US or Canada who register before Jan 15. Kevin is setting up free MT installations using this offer. This is a part of the ad campaign before 1and1 enters the US market. According to Netcraft, “1&1 is the largest hoster in [...]

Search engine decoder in Flash: - A neat visualization of the give and take relations between the popular search engines. Via Seb’s open research.

Royale released as Flex: - Macromedia released more details on Flex, previously Royale, a presentation server that developers use to build a Rich Internet Applications without the flash IDE. “Flex is a presentation server installed on top of a J2EE application server or servlet container, a rich library of user interface components, an XML-based markup language used to declaratively lay [...]

The right question: - “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.” Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize Winner). Denham Grey quotes this while explaining why the right questions matter. Via Emergic. Very true, answers can be obtained through deductions. Looking at all the current developments, deductive [...]

Web site VS Web Application usability: - Jean Tillman has an article on Digital Web, which compares UI design decisions of content based websites to that of web applications. Via CentralMX.