A few weeks ago, I bought a new Kensington Expert Mouse to use at home. A friend helped me out, by having it shipped to her address in Washington to take advantage of a really good deal Amazon.com was offering to US-based customers. I ended up saving something like $60. Sweet. Deal. So, my first […]
Posts Categorized: Usability
Trackballs: A part of our heritage
In the summer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI problem when a can of Coke I was holding suddenly slipped from my grasp and plummeted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pressure with my thumb and fingers to hold it in my hand. One short diagnosis of tennis and golfer’s […]
Adventures in self-checkout UI
Part of being me is that basically every possible task I decide to undertake in my day-to-day life is completely unaccounted for by city planners, architects, designers, doctors, software engineers, and so on. Sometimes, this is simply due to the fact that I am tall[1], as in the case of the face-level wall sconce mounted […]
They are also forging new CASUAL SEX DATING VANCOUVERS
Google Alerts are a wondrous thing — provided you remember to create them. For me, my “Second Life” + “Vancouver” alert resulted in this spam site masquerading as a blog: Teenagers, in particular, increasingly keep in touch with friends and acquaintances every time they log on but they are also forging new casual sex dating vancouvers […]
OpenMoko: like the iPhone, only Linuxier!
Like most Mac-owning, right-thinking individuals, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the Apple iPhone, despite living in Canada, where mobile data rates are unfortunate, to say the least. Also, the whole “closed platform” thing. That and the “how do you dial this with gloves on?” bit. And the fact that there’s no word of any Canadian release […]
One Laptop Per Child UI
This is really fascinating. Design studio Pentagram has developed the look and feel of the UI for the One Laptop Per Child project. (“Pfft, poor people… right?”) They’ve abandoned the “desktop” metaphor, in favour of the “zoom metaphor”. This echoes OLPC’s overall design goals in sticking to the basic Children can quickly switch between different […]
Interactivity != better
This may be the least effective use of an interactive map infographic ever. It attempts to present information on an important subject, but it’s very difficult to take in due to poor UI and ineffective use of the map itself. Why on earth does this tool use the same icon for identifying a target country […]
Emotional cues in virtual spaces
While frequently used to great effect in prose, text is a notoriously poor medium for conveying the emotional metadata humans rely on for face-to-face conversation. How do we know exactly how to interpret someone else’s words, stripped of their emotional context? What was intended as a simple request for information may be taken by one […]