Sunday, November 24, 2002
The BBC's new take on personalisation
The BBC's website gets more sophisticated by the minute. A recent change described by Matt Jones is the way the background colour of the boxes change shades in response to your own visiting patterns. The BBC home page has been coded in a way that whatever you click most gets reinforced over time, signalled to you through shades of colour. As Matt points out, this is quite a gentle form of personalisation, far from the shouty 'Hello Louise!!! Welcome back!!' that we see in too many places.
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Friday, November 22, 2002
Usability: Everyone is for it
This week's Computer Weekly: According to Phil Crosby - reported in 'Downtime' - software is like sex because "Everyone is for it", "Everyone feels they understand it" and so on.
OK, let's apply this to usability:
Usability is like sex because:
Everyone is for it. (Under certain conditions, of course.) Like democracy.
Everyone feels they understand it. (Even thought they wouldn't want to explain it.) Like teaching.
Everyone thinks execution is only a matter of following natural inclinations. (After all, we do get along somehow.) Usability is just common sense, right?
Most people feel that all problems in these areas is caused by other people. (If only they would take time to do things right.) And they would never commit the errors made by others, not in a million years.
Yeah, I think that's a fairly accurate representation of how things are ;-)
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Wednesday, November 20, 2002
The Elements of User Experience
Subtitled 'User-Centred Design for the Web', this new book from Jesse James Garrett is designed to give the big picture, addressing ideas rather than techniques. At less than 200 pages and with many graphics, it's a book you can read in an afternoon, but at the same time it manages to cover a remarkable number of ideas. Strategy, controlled vocabularies, business goals, wireframes, ROI, typography - these and many more issues are threaded together to provide a complete but succinct account of the whys and hows of user experience development.
But the most powerful idea in the book is the Garrett's 'elements' referred to in the title, which he defines as five planes or layers of experience - surface, skeleton, structure, scope and strategy. Garrett explains clearly and elegantly how user needs, content requirements, navigation design, visual design and other components fit into this 5-plane scheme. He makes it look so simple, you wonder how nobody had thought of this before.
Why is this important? Traditionally, IA and UX people have had a hard time explaining to others what exactly it is they do, why it's important and - maybe most important - why they should be paid good money for doing it. And why it's not marketing and why you can't do it with focus groups. Now even marketeers are passing themselves off as UX experts, leading to further erosion of the profession.
I can see Garrett's graphics become standard tools for UX professionals needing to explain to clients what they do, why it's important, and how it fits in with what others do. In terms of this material alone, Garrett has made a contribution to equipping UX professionals with some simple but powerful tools for promoting the fundamentals of UX. Time to start working on those PowerPoint slides.
This is a good book to put into the hands of senior and middle managers who know little about Web development, and specialists in other disciplines - such as graphic designers - who need an appreciation of how all the elements from different professionals slot together. Let's hope they get some copies in their Xmas stockings.
You can find several book extracts - Table of Contents, the Introduction and Chapter 2 - as well as some links to other resources, on Garrett's website.
11:18 PM|
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Life changing
We are all used to mobile phones now, right? Not quite. Read mobile phone newbie Gwyn Topham's article about mobile phone hell. Compare and contrast with Dan Rookwood's diary about surviving without his favourite accessory for a week and then check out a whole lot more articles in this Guardian special about how mobile phones have changed out lives, if you have time.
10:07 PM|
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Argentina goes wireless
The latest scam for making money in crisis-hit Argentina is stealing telephone cables, according to a report in Wired News. Around 1,715 miles of cables have been stolen over the last year, says one local phone company. Another telephone operator estimates half-a-million customers have been left without a telephone service.
9:29 PM|
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Fun with filters
Matt Jones and Yoz Grahame have been having fun with filters. They've put together a bit of code that takes a URL to a page and replaces all occurences of a given string with another string. The target for their wit? The 25 Theses about Information Architecture on the Asilomar Institute website. Check out the filtered version here. And here's the original 25 Theses.
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Tuesday, November 19, 2002
E-democracy no panacea
Here's an article I wrote that's just been published in Usability News, reporting on the Spike debate 'E-democracy: Political solutions at the touch of a button?' that took place in London a few days ago. Debaters included Charles Leadbeater - adviser to the Downing Street Policy Unit and author of 'Up the Down Escalator' - and James Woudhuysen - forecaster and amusing-controversialist-about-town. (Hi James!)
3:20 PM|
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Smart Mobs
Howard Rheingold has launched a new blog to accompany his latest book, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.
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Crackdown on workplace snooping?
Internet users look set to regain some of the ground lost to employers over email privacy in the last year or two. The Information Commissioner is producing codes of practice governing how much scrutiny companies can carry out monitoring employees' email messages and Web use. Companies that do not follow the letter of these rules risk prosecution under the Data Protection Act. Read more in this BBC story.
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Monday, November 18, 2002
Communities good and bad
I've been taking a big interest in online communities over the last couple of years. With a major project out of the way and networking back on the agenda, I signed up with Ryze a few weeks ago, a site that bills itself as a business networking community. Ryze uses 'pivots' defined by community members themselves in order to build the connections that make community. It's thus very bottom-up and offers plenty of potential for knowledge generation (which a top-down model would not). As Lou Rosenfeld said at the Design Council meeting last week, Ryze could make a good model of 'organisation directory' for companies seeking to add real value through their Intranet.
Today, I joined yet another community, and what a difference. The NHS Informatics Learning Network ecommunity has a forum that is run on what looks like prehistoric WebBoard software. It looks poor and behaves worse (frames, duplicate messages....). I, like many other users, stumbled upon it by accident - no word of mouth here. Apparently there's no way unsubscribe from it either - most of the few messages seem to be from people trying to get unhooked - and no differentiation between admin messages and real messages. All categories are pre-defined by the organisers, so I can't define which professional institutions I'm a member of, or what my specific interest areas are. There's no opportunity for those interested in particular areas to easily find others, and forums are defined by geographic area rather than professional interest. A prime example of how not to run a community.
3:07 PM|
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Denim
I've just come across Denim, a free tool for early stage website and UI design. It supports sketching input and runs on Windows and on Mac OS X. Keyboard input is feasible but Denim works best with a tablet input device. Version 1.0 is available for download from the Berkeley University website.
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Sunday, November 17, 2002
Some awards!
A ranking table of websites from Europe's largest 500 companies published earlier this month in European newspapers owned by the FT Group places the Spanish construction company Grupo Dragados at the top of the Spanish web tree (but only in 192nd place in Europe, it has to be said). The table, apparently compiled by 'financial analysts' and 'Internet specialists' on the basis of 'technology, functionality and content', gave the other top-500 Spanish companies - Terra, Telefonica and Union Fenosa - lowlier website rankings.
It has to be said that the Dragados site is fairly dire, with frames, slow and tedious loading, irritating dancing graphics and no information about the size of many pdfs (quite a few larger than 2Mb) among its numerous original sins.
But then what European web awards or ranking have merited usability, information architecture or accessibility above 'art' or business connections of the 'you scratch my back...' variety? BAFTA's recent award to the Habitat website - slated not just by usability people but by designers too - is indicative of the level of site clients are still all too willing to spend money on. Pointless music slows down interaction, images continuously load, and it's almost impossible to find out how to buy anything. Or in fact whether it's possible to buy anything at all.
11:40 AM|
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Saturday, November 16, 2002
Bed-bound surfing
Bedside terminals on retractable arms, giving access to telephone, radio and TV, have been a feature of many UK hospitals in recent years. Now the original Patientline 1.0 terminals are giving way to a new generation of devices that include Internet and e-mail access. Version 2.0 has just been installed in seven hospital trusts across the UK. Patients or their visitors can purchase cards giving a certain amount of access time to TV and Internet.
Considering that the average age of patients in many acute wards can be quite high - implying less familiarity with computer applications - and that in-patients can often be suffering from a variety of conditions that limit their movement or precision, for example, it would be interesting to know what if any usability studies had been done on the terminals in question, or similar terminals elsewhere. And will get patients take longer to get better when they're spending more and more time in bed, surfing the Internet?
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Friday, November 15, 2002
Saints alive!
Even Billy Graham's on to good ol' usability these days it seems.
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User Experience - User-Centered Design for the Web
I've just received The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett, from New Riders in Indianapolis. It looks good - and short (the later is important for an introductory text). I'll dive in and hope to have a review up this weekend.
3:50 PM|
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Rosenfeld on Nielsen
Information architecture author Lou Rosenfeld was in London this week as part of the Nielsen Norman Group tour, but he also dropped in to the Design Council to speak at the monthly AIGA event organised by Nico Macdonald, and later adjourned to the pub too. I'll see if later this week I can put together a sensible piece about what he had to say on all matters IA, but the inevitable question for some attendees was Jakob (Nielsen, that is): Is he helping or hurting?
Lou's take is that Nielsen is both helping and hurting. By giving usability and user experience a high profile, he's generally raising awareness out there, which is good for everyone. "But on the other hand he's also trading on the expectation that there are rules that can be delivered by gurus," he said, while Rosenfeld's own view is of a landscape without rules: "It all depends!" should be the user experience motto, reckons Rosenfeld. "Eventually, he [Nielsen] will become one voice of many, and that will be good for everyone".
Check out Lou's own site.
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Mobile technostalgia
'Mobile', a new exhibition that has just opened at The Glass Gallery in London, tracks the development of mobile phones or as the organisers put it "international mobile phone culture". Sponsored by Motorola (manufacturer of what are probably the most unusable mobile phones in the world), the exhibition only contains examples of devices from the sponsor company, but thankfully Motorola have been making sets since the 1950s, so there's plenty on show. But how can a static display of products demonstrate how mobile phones have affected our daily lives?
Location: The Glass Gallery, Old Truman Brewery, 15 Hanbury Street, London E1
Dates: 7 - 23 November
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
AltaVista briefly resurfaces
Search engine AltaVista has just relaunched. Gone are the portal features, the stock quotes and the pop-ups. The site is now looking remarkably Spartan. In fact if we ignore the credit card ad, it's not a million miles from Google. Except for the search results, that is.
10:58 PM|
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Desks on parade
This week the BBC Online spot Dot.life is taking a look at people's desks. Are you a minimalist or a showcaser? Cookie jars or fluffy toys? What does your workstation say about you? Check out the examples posted on site - it has to be said while all of them are busy, none of them host real junk - and send in a snap of your own.
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Monday, November 11, 2002
The naming of parts
Some people have enquired about the name of this blog. Here goes.
Sunny Brighton - I use the adjective advisedly, though we do see the sun more than most others on this gloomy isle - has of course recently become an official 'city', so declared by the Queen of England - conjoined at the waist with its near but different neighbour, Hove Actually. So we now live in a double-barrelled city with the moniker 'Brighton-n-Hove': the building in which I'm sitting looks out to Brighton to the front and to Hove to the rear. City of two bits.
City of Bits was of course the title of William Mitchell's 1998 book subtitled 'Space, Place and the Infobahn', addressing the idea of a new type of city based on virtual spaces. Do we have that here in Brighton yet? Although Hove and Brighton still occupy distinct virtual spaces as well as physical ones, at least there's Wi-Fi on the beach these days. City of potential bits. Or potential city of bits.
Down in the town - Brighton, actually - hovers an agglomeration of new media firms, mostly offshoots of the digital explosion and of the great exodus from London at the height of the .com boom. It's a sector that's fragmented, populated by micro-firms now struggling to survive in the downturn, furiously networking though the local bitsphere. A city of a million underemployed bits.
And all the foregoing is fed in human terms by the local digital intellectual furnace, the School of Cognitive and Computer Sciences (COGS) at the University of Sussex, where neural networks people fraternise with philosophers of artificial intelligence, natural language processing types, experimental psychologists and those Laura Ashleys of the computing world (according to AI types), the human-computer interaction mob, all seemingly bent on avoiding interaction despite their collocation. Academic bits.
3:03 PM|
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Computers cause lethargy, sap motivation
Dilbert may have got there first, but a new study from Japan, published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, apparently confirms the noxious effect of prolonged computer use. Read a little more on ZDNet.
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Sunday, November 10, 2002
Hot off the Press
That's the MIT Press. First, a new book from Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber addresses aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability. But Lovink doesn't lose sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control content and infrastructure. He's also a little cynical about the faith placed by cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized communication system.
Then there's Ben Shneiderman's Leonardo's Laptop, subtitled Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies. Ben is perhaps best known for early work on straightforward user interface issues. These days he's very much the user champion, encouraging users to demand what is rightfully theirs - usable computers built around their needs - and challenging developers to build products that better support human needs in areas such as government, education and health. This month Ben was in London, speaking at a debate organised by Spiked at Gresham College. I hope to get around to posting a proper review when I manage to finish the book (too many on the go right now).
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Saturday, November 09, 2002
Multikulti
This is the kind of thing that the Net can do so well. Multikulti offers community language versions of a basic set of citizen rights type material put together by voluntary organisations, for the UK. No printing costs for multiple language sets, so much cheaper that doing the same on paper. I've only checked out a couple of language versions, but it looks good in terms of both language and content.
7:58 PM|
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Surprise, surprise!
"The Wi-Fi standard, also known as Wireless Fidelity or 802.11, is on its way to becoming the primary way devices connect to the Internet wirelessly. Equipment is cheap, transmission speeds are reasonably fast, and it is based on an unlicensed portion of spectrum open to everyone. As a measure of its promise, technology venture capitalists are investing relatively large amounts of new money into Wi-Fi startups, despite the beaten down state of the IT sector."
So says the ACM news service. Having spent a long hot summer studying a Wi-Fi system in situ, I can vouch for Wi-Fi - or its successor - being the future of local area wireless comms. And it's free (unlike those chunky 3G licences).
7:54 PM|
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E-government: Unusable and still digitally divided
Three-quarters of a selection of 20 government websites surveyed in a recent report are sub-standard and in need of attention.
The research commissioned by Interactive Bureau and carried out by Portman Research, reveals websites loaded down by masses of unexplained jargon an wholesale reproduction of official documents, and suffering from poor navigation and and slow loading. The Prime Minister's site fared particularly badly, managing only 19th place among the twenty selected.
Interactive Bureau point to user-centred and accessible design, technology and communication strategy as three essential elements in any government website, and laments the lack of understanding of these issues among government staff. "The private sector has already started to learn the lesson. Few sites are built for our major companies now without proper planning and analysis of audiences and expectations - without an expert in usability casting an eye over them, without all content being re-examined and re-purposed for the Web. [...] It is time the Government began to do the same." Quite. Read more on Interactive Bureau's website.
Meanwhile a UK Department of Work and Pensions survey just published highlighted potential problems with demand for online services. The survey of public attitudes toward the use of electronic benefit services found that while around 50% of clients have some technology knowledge, around 30% have never used a computer. When informed of the possibilities for online services, around half said they would be likely to use the Internet to contact the Department.
For more information, see "Electronic government at the Department for Work and Pensions: Attitudes to electronic methods of conducting benefit business"
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Wednesday, November 06, 2002
E-Voting second time around in the US
Few problems emerged yesterday in voting with touch screen and other voting machines that made their debut across the US, according to the Washington Post. But problems did emerge in Georgia, where officials said there could be contested elections and lawsuits.
A couple of weeks ago, Rebecca was in London as the guest of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, to talk about e-voting. Check out Rebecca Mercuri's statement on electronic voting and bunch of material on e-voting.
5:58 PM|
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Bonnie Nardie interview
The November edition of the newsletter from the Human Oriented Technology Lab at Carlton (California) focuses on activity theory. There's an interview with Bonnie Nardi, while Christine O 'Corner discusses the uses of activity theory as a framework in user needs analysis.
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Physics hoaxers discover Quantum Bogosity
"The physics establishment appears to be unable to decide whether papers submitted by two former French TV presenters are a scientific breakthrough or an elaborate hoax," reports The Register. "The debunking to date has been done on Usenet groups and informally, over the Internet." Is this the revenge of cultural theorists for the Sokal affair?
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The Tablet PC
"Microsoft thinks it will revolutionize the world. No, it's not the latest version of Windows, it's a new type of computer-the Tablet PC. Imagine a notebook computer combined with a pad of paper. Take notes in a meeting with a pen, and then type on its stow-away keyboard in your office. Use it to read journals, email and newspapers. Use it to stay connected everywhere, including the executive washroom. Sound too good to be true? Will Tablet PC revolutionize business, or is it just another passing fad, like the GridPad, Eo and Momenta pen computers of the twentieth century?" So says Ziff Davis Media about an upcoming seminar on the self-same subject, sponsored by Fujitsu (57% of the world's tablet PC market).
Hmmm. Having spent several months this summer doing an ethnographic study of a Tablet PC system at a UK hospital, and having had discussions recently with various manufacturers and 'solution providers' (as they love to dub themselves) about vertical markets for held devices, I'm not convinced that any of these people know what they're talking about. These people have a buch of devices but don't know the markets, who might use them or how. Hence the demand for user studies from people like me. Back to the 'technology-driven' view of development? (cf. Manuel Castells, Harold Wilson and others)
4:14 PM|
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How do we evaluate design effectiveness?
Here's an article I wrote for Usability News, reporting on the AIGA Evaluating Design Effectiveness event organised by Nico Macdonald at the Design Council in London.
4:14 PM|
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E-voting
With the US mid-term elections upon us, the subject of e-voting returns to the fore.
Following the 'butterfly ballot' and 'chad scandal' in the 2000 presidential elections, Florida experimented with a system of voting directly into a computer, with 15 of the state's 67 counties opting to buy touch-screen machines. But, reports Simons, problems with these systems have been widespread in the US. Software has proved hard to use and there are no recount options. More people had come in to vote than had been recorded by the machine, but copyright protection legislation made it impossible to check the mechanisms to see if bugs had caused votes to be swallowed. Others have criticised the way the systems 'average' between selected candidates (perhaps choosing a third unselected one), and their lack of audit trail. According to a report in USA Today, the touch-screen equipment had a rocky debut in Palm Beach County, as problems in two municipal elections led losing candidates to file lawsuits.
To compound these drawbacks, Internet voting introduced the opportunity for sabotage, such as viruses altering votes and 'spoof' sites to draw votes away from genuine ones, as well as myriad computer problems.
What's more, Western governments seem convinced that by making the voting process electronic, they will somehow uplift the recent poor turnouts in elections, among young people in particular. Have joystick, will vote? Methinks not.
Last month, Dr Rebecca Mercuri was a guest of the UK Foundation for Information Policy Research and spoke in London about the potential problems of these systems. See her website.
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Technology versus Policy Making
Oxford University has just established a new Internet Institute (OII), but should HCI and usability practitioners care, asked Usability News recently. Does research into behaviour, interaction with technology and user-centred design even enter the policy-making vision?
The signs do not augur well. At the launch event for the Institute held at the end of September, BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen considered the need to educate the population about the uses of broadband in order to stimulate demand, while e-commerce minister Stephen Timms discussed using public procurement to drive broadband rollout.
All too often, what passes for policy seems little more than a confluence of economics and marketing, with a paternalistic state excluding any consideration of how we can more accurately determine user (read voter) needs and better cater for them. Once again, we are in the sphere of technology-driven policy: if we build it, they will come! Harold Wilson's "white heat of technology" rhetoric (1963) lives on to confound us almost thirty years later, with more recent support in the shape of technology illiterates such as Manuel Castells, all amply informed by the hardware manufacturers (See the blog on the Tablet PC).
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Appliance Design
A new UK quarterly publication on...appliance design. The first - current - issue focuses on workplace appliances, with further themed issues to follow later in the year on wearable appliances, mobile internet and home appliances. Appliance Design website
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Etienne Wenger & Communities of Practice
"Knowledge management will never work [...] until corporations realize it's not about how you capture knowledge but how you create and leverage it". So says Etienne Wenger in the May 2002 edition of CIO Insight.
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Spanish music websites don't make the grade
A new study from Spanish consumer site consumer.es reveals that the country's websites are falling down on customer service and compliance with the law. (June 2002)
Summary from Nua (English)
Original report (in Spanish)
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Usability not up to much in Brazil either
Software that doesn't function, poor interaction. A plea for usable systems and software - in Portuguese. Webinsider
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The Iceberg Secret, Revealed
Hells bells! Managment can't tell the difference between interface and system. Great article from Joel Spolksy for system builders needing strategy for dealing with senior management.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000356.html
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Lawsuit over airlines' websites
"When Robert Gumson logs on to the Internet, he uses a software program that converts Web site content into speech. But when he logged on to Southwest Airlines' Web site to make a reservation, Gumson, who is blind, found that the site was incompatible with his screen-reader program." In the UK, we have the Disability Discrimination Act. In the US, there's the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The question is, do the ADA provisions on the accessibility of public facilities to the disabled apply to Internet websites in the same way as they do to brick-and-mortar facilities like cinemas and department stores? Gumson and a Florida-based disability right group aim to find out, by filing suits against American Airlines. Read the full story in this Law.com report.
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Can Information Technology Save Lives?
A worthwhile interview from Forbes.com about why the IT revolution still hasn't hit healthcare.
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Dilbertiana
Dilbert has sensibly turned his attention to the user interface this week. Click below to see the strips:
23 September strip
24 September strip
25 September strip
3:03 PM|
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Handheld Usability by Scott Weiss
Here's my review of Scott Weiss's useful new book, Handheld Usability. Weiss's approach might be dry, but he addresses all the handheld parts that other usability writers don't reach.
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Spain's government ignores 'not invented here' usability advice
The Spanish government's main Internet portal, administracion.es, still suffers from innumerable usability and accessibility problems a year after its launch raised protests from politicians and usability practitioners alike. An article this month from Spanish national newspaper El Mundo takes a look back over developments since the site - which cost €2 million for the initial development and has a total budget of €6 million, according to industry sources - first hit the headlines.
Administracion.es, launched in September 2001, was designed to be the main interface between Spanish citizens and the country's immensely complex, paper-based and queue-driven administration - an alternative strategy to re-engineering the government's administrative processes, or so it seemed. At the site's launch, Spanish newspaper El País (Ciberpaís supplement) reported - as per press release - that some 49 administrative procedures could now be performed online.
But instead of abolishing or bypassing bureaucratic complexity, the portal became a national laughing stock, leading to letters of protest from usability and information architecture professionals in national newspapers and questions to ministers in the Spanish Senate. Statements of protest from usability and information architecture professionals appeared on Spanish websites Terremoto, Think Tank and BarraPunto, as well as in the national press, severely criticising site usability and accessibility.
Spanish web designers were quick to offer their advice on improving the usability and accessibility aspects of the site. One widely-publicised proposal for a two-stage development path to improve the site was put forward by local usability duo Think Tank, who supported their redesign with an outline rationale, available on the same site. Think Tank's input has been ignored to date by an administration seemingly suffering from the 'not invented here' syndrome, and one year on El Mundo reports no discernible improvement to the site, a fact confirmed by a visit to the site.
"I've asked for the minister to appear and answer questions on this issue," said Félix Lavilla, Spanish senator and spokesman for the Socialist group on the Spanish Senate's Information Society Committee, to El Mundo ealier this month. "To spend all this money for a site with such poor design, poor functionality, poor accessibility and which is never updated, is quite frankly shameful". In an interview for the Spanish Internaut Association, Lavilla had previously been critical of the delays in putting the site together - it was reportedly already on the drawing board in 1999, as part of what Lavilla refers to as the "non-existent" but nevertheless costly "Info XXI Action Plan".
Since the site's laumch, it has proved exceedingly difficult to discover who was responsible for the site design - nobody appears willing to claim this baby as their own. The source code reveals little, while the Spanish usability rumour mill suggests some surprisingly large and mainstream outfits may were responsible for the original design. However, the same sources suggest that that the design may have suffered 'institutional interference' at some point prior to launch, which may explain the reticence of the various parties to step forward.
According to a government press release, the site received a total of around 800,000 visitors over its first two months of operation. (In Spanish)
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Nokia 7650 versus SonyEricsson T68i
The first usability tests of camera phones available on the UK market reveal that initial appearances can be deceptive. The Nokia proved to be a more usable product, but was not the device initially preferred by test subjects. Press release.
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Abandon the GUI?
Yale professor of computer science Dave Gelernter is back on his "get rid of the graphical interface" mission, this time courtesy of CIO Insight. Gelernter's issue is with the way that information is usually organised - he argues that a 'narrative structure' better addresses the way people actually arrange their lives. Read about it in CIO Insight. Wired gave extensive coverage to Gelernter and his Lifestreams ideas a few years back...
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Spy (on) Kids
Proposed pager-sized devices fitted with global positioning system (GPS) technology to fix to your relatives - young and old - raise many privacy concerns. Read about it in this Wired report.
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New Architect review
This article from the November edition of New Architect magazine argues that while usability testing may these days take place prior to site launch, little testing takes place in real time within a realistic context, while user experience considerations should include such issues. The magazine looks at translation software that allows testing of multi-page site transactions. (UK readers: Perhaps the Nectar card operator could have done with this last month, prior to their site launch).
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Wired Makeover
The Wired News site has just undergone a makeover, and it's not just cosmetic, says the bible of the Internet age. Yes, there's a distinct change in 'look and feel', with cooler colours than before - although we're told these will be changing 'almost daily' - and a more conventional look, with less trendy typefaces than in previous incarnations. More importantly, the site's chief designer, Douglas Bowman, reports that the redesign brings the site into line with W3C standards, provide greater accessibility, while the new coding (XHTML has been adopted) makes the site more easily available to handheld devices. Check out the new site for yourself.
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Internet Society gets .org domain
Domain name owners around the world will be breathing a sigh of relief that the not-for-profit Internet Society has been appointed the new overseer of the .org domain from January. The decision was announced today by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The future of the .org domain was put in doubt when VeriSign - once holder of the US government-granted monopoly over domain names such as .com and .org - gave up the rights to .org in exchange for keeping the lucrative .com address. At one time it was thought that .org domain owners would have to prove voluntary or charitable status to retain their domain names. Read the full story in The Register and ZDNet.
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Dutch government website informs instantly
Within minutes of the resignation of the Dutch centre-right coalition government on 16 October, the government's website was already carrying news of the event. Just a quarter of an hour later, copies of the outgoing prime minister's statement had been posted on the site...in Word, html and pdf formats. It's clear that the Dutch administration sees the Internet as an integral part of government machinery. This brief news posting is in English - you'll need to understand Dutch to read the rest. By the way, 'regering' means government in Dutch.
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Bringing Home the Bits
A limiting factor on content delivered to homes and businesses around the world is broadband availablility. The US Computer Science and Telecommunications Board has recently published "Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits" (2002). We've seen the introduction of first generation broadband (ADSL), slow growth in subscriptions and telecom business failures - this report looks at these and other issues. Full text available free at The National Academices Press website, here.
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Net Identity
How do we look for people on the Net? Are domain names as important as they used to be? The latest fallout from the dot.bomb is cleaned-out entrepreneurs losing their Net identities. Read more in this Wired article.
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