Competing on features is the road to feature bloat, poor usability and increased frustration for users, developers and project stakeholders. I’ve been taking an increased interest in the “tech startup” trend that has been occurring over the past few years and this concept is especially pertinent for anyone trying to make a success of a [...]
Continue readingOkay so it’s a link bait, sensationalist title, but that fact I’ve recognised that fact makes it okay yeah? Anyway like I said you’re doing handlers wrong… or rather, to stop with the hype-generating, FUD-like statements; If you’re waiting for RPC/Async handlers to return in order to update your application’s interface then allow me to [...]
Continue readingRIAs are an amazing platform upon which to deliver data to users. Data for reading, editing, deleting, organising, digesting and processing. We have the opportunity to present data in a vast array of new, exiting and visually appealing ways, offering faster and more fun methods of interacting with it. However, getting this data can be [...]
Continue readingAdobe’s Ethan, Ted and Ryan recently gave a big thumbs up to Firebrand an RIA for watching adverts. Niels Bruin responded with what I think is a very good wake-up call to the starry eyed approach to reviewing web apps with lots of transitions, reflections and other shiny bits. Niels highlights some real basic usability [...]
Continue readingI’ve been tasked with planning a real (as in get a load of people together) forum focus group (edit: I think focus group is a better term than forum) for assessing the usability of a website. I’ve always wanted to do such an excercise but to date none of the projects i’ve worked on have [...]
Continue readingLarry Constantine writes about an alternative to User Centred Product Development (a development approach focusing on users). The discussed alternative is Activity Centred Development which moves focus towards the job in hand that is to be done by the users. Some interesting points that stand out to me: Designing for use rather than for users [...]
Continue readingLast month myself and Colin travelled up to London to attend the LFPUG and saw two excellent presentations from Rob Bateman and Tink. During Rob’s presentation on Optimising visual interfaces for the human brain something was brought up that I hadn’t considered previously; the difference between “Intuition” and “Conditioning”. This wasn’t a major part of [...]
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