by deCadmus | Feb 19, 2002 | Usability
UBWAThe New York Times recently offered an amusing glimpse of commercial ethnography — Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe. Its author aimed a soft-focus lens on field studies of typical American consumers… and even found a wizened ethnographer to...
by deCadmus | Feb 7, 2002 | Meta, Usability, Web/Tech
Like a great many web sites, I’ve got some difficult decisions ahead. New HTML specifications offer promising glimpses of compatibility and extensibility — XHTML, in particular — while at the same time widening the gap between current standards, and...
by deCadmus | Feb 5, 2002 | Usability
Last Friday, Talk of the Nation Science Friday’s Ira Flatow spoke at some length with Don Norman, the user friendly half of the Nielsen-Norman group. I’ve been tremendously influenced by Don over the years. My copy of Don’s Psychology of Everyday...
by deCadmus | Jan 29, 2002 | Usability, Web/Tech
Pundits have for some time suggested a least common denominator approach to the convergence of mobile phones, PDAs and increasingly feature-laden devices. “If you can talk into it,” they say, “it’s a phone.” A new generation of products,...
by deCadmus | Jan 24, 2002 | Meta, Usability
Peter Morville offers a thoughtful perspective on the battling twins of control and creativity that shape information architecture. He lists a number of complex adaptive systems: examples that include collaborative filtering, reputation management, and cooperative...
by deCadmus | Jan 2, 2002 | Usability
“On Jan. 1, 300 million people in 12 countries will start using some funny-looking money they have never seen before. Months later their old familiar bills and coins will buy them nothing. Many of these people will have only a vague idea of what is going on....