So I went looking for a better content inventory template than the one I use currently, and was reminded how great the IA Institute’s tools and downloads page is.
You should check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.
Since I’m still UPA President till tomorrow (and will be on the board till the end of next year), I think it’s fitting and appropriate that I mention UPA’s software and services discounts for current members.
Trent Mankelow, UPA’s Director of Member Services, did a great job negotiating a bundle of discounts on products and services [...]
I’m always in search of the easiest, most dependable and redundant backup solution. A while back I wrote about my backup script solution for Windows XP (and how it broke in Vista…sigh). It involved using XCOPY32 and Windows Scheduler, as well as a few backup drives for redundancy.
Since I’ve now moved over to the Mac [...]
Twitter is so very addictive. Now I get it.
I think it’s lacking in the discoverability department though. I don’t find it very easy to find new people – or topics – to follow.
Follow me at http://twitter.com/pjsherman.
A little behind the curve, that’s me. John Rhodes of Webword and IMSimple sent along this link to a USN&WR article calling (sic) “Usability Experience Specialist” a best career for 2009.
So for those of you who – like me – got RIF‘ed this holiday season, this might bring you a bit of holiday cheer during [...]
So I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that my latest column in Uxmatters is getting good notices.
The title is “Why Enterprise Software Usability Matters” and in it I talk about why enterprise application usability lags behind consumer software and web site usability.
To summarize and quote myself:
Over the past twenty years, the field of [...]
I’m in Dallas watching a game usability test. I figured it’d be fun to liveblog it.
4:18PM
The first set of participants – there are two for each session – have been brought in. The facilitator (my friend, de-identified) is pre-briefing them. It’s a type of head-to-head game where players can also play the AI.
4:22
Of [...]
Either have I. But that’s exactly what I’m going to do tonight. I’m driving up to Dallas to observe a full day of utesting with one of my Dallas friends who works for a game publisher.
I will blog – in fact, I may even liveblog – my experience tonight.
Stay tuned.
I’m not sure exactly how but I ended up at uselog.com, which bills itself as “The Product Usability Weblog.” It’s run by a guy named Jasper van Kuijk, whose posts I think I’ve read on the UX-related lists.
I was in Windows at the time working on a redesign of an enterprise web app that only [...]
An article on Digg caught my eye this morning. Seems some non-profit foundation has given the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization responsible for Wikipedia, almost 900K USD to make Wikipedia “easier to use”.
OK. No problem so far. (Well, I’m a bit shocked that they think it’ll take 900K to fix the entry edit interaction…I [...]
Say what you will about Wil Wright’s Spore. One thing he and the team got right: the creator interaction. Ever since I downloaded Creature Creator, my 5- and 9-year old have been building ships, buildings, and creatures endlessly. And more importantly, they’ve discovered how to do this with minimal intervention from me.
Video of Hattie’s creature [...]
This week I went to Washington DC to attend the U.S. National Design Policy Summit, a gathering of academics, government employees and representatives of professional associations who were focused on raising the profile of design in the United States. The gathering was organized by Dr. Elizabeth Tunstall of the University of Illinois – Chicago, a [...]
Long time no post. Sorry. Been too busy obsessively following the U.S. election at www.FiveThirtyEight.com. If you’re a hardcore stats junkie, this is – or was, after Tuesday – the site for you.
Anyway, since my last post I traveled to Hong Kong and Shenzhen to take part in the User Friendly 2008 conference, put on [...]
I have kept politics off the table during my 3+ years of running this blog. I just think it’s a private thing, and not germaine to the topics I cover here. Suffice it to say I’m a something like a rabidly capitalistic social-liberal-fiscal-conservative-with-a-libertarian-streak. Or a Second Amendment-supporting Democrat (befitting my Texas residency) who believes in [...]
File this post under “more signs of the USPTO apocalypse.” In a story reminiscent of The Onion’s parody news article “Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros“, iTWire reports on Microsoft’s patent “Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments“… which is a fancy way of describing the Page Up and Page Down buttons.
The iTWire [...]
This article has been making the rounds today. Thought I’d do my part to keep the meme alive. OK, this isn’t really a meme. But it’s an interesting little compilation of UI concepts. Of course the author cites Adaptive Path’s Mozilla Labs effort called Aurora.
My last article for UXmatters also touched on the topic of [...]
A few colleagues have pointed me to the article by movie director-sounding blogger Matthew Paul Thomas entitled “Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It.”
I’ve given you the link to the original Thomas article, but I’m more interested in discussing Johnathan Gruber’s take on it. Says Gruber in this post:
I posit that [...]
