December 2010

Designing Displays for Older Adults: Chapter 3 Hearing (excerpt)

December 29, 2010

Below is an excerpt of Chapter 3 from our book.  You can read an excerpt of chapter 1 here. You can also enter to win one of two copies.  The book is available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press.  Until January 31, 2011, you can get 20% off the cover price when you purchase directly from [...]

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Win a copy of Designing Displays for Older Adults

December 18, 2010
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Look what came in the mail! To help celebrate the publication of our book Designing Displays for Older Adults, we are giving away two copies (retail value $69.95 each) to two randomly chosen twitter followers.   If you already follow @hfblog, you’re entered!  If you would like to enter, just follow @hfblog using your twitter account–no purchase necessary.  We’ll announce [...]

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Age-related differences in the use of the Internet

December 16, 2010

One of my major research interests is in how people of all ages, especially older adults (those over age 65) use the Internet (shameless plug for our new book on Designing Displays for Older Adults).  The Pew Internet & American Life Project recent came out with a new survey of Internet usage across the age groups. A counter-intuitive finding is [...]

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The Elusive Moodle!

December 9, 2010

Had to share this funny usability story. Google released the top searches by city today First on the list for Raleigh, NC was “moodle ncsu.” Topping the list for Charlotte, NC was “moodle nccu.” Moodle is the recently adopted open source courseware system we (NCSU: North Carolina State University) use. When I use Moodle to interact with my classes, I [...]

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“Having the Data is not enough” – Visualization Techniques

December 7, 2010

I do love good visualization. I think animations like this, accompanied by a good story, would serve us well from conference presentations to convincing industry clients. It is from the “Joy of Stats,” on the BBC (which I’m apparently not allowed to watch due to my location.)

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Online Map Readability: A Comparison

December 3, 2010

Justin O’Beirne presents an extremely thorough and interesting analysis of why Google Maps appear more readable than its competitors. I’ve noticed this as well. It’s one of the major reasons I still prefer Google Maps despite some very compelling features of Bing and Yahoo maps. One visual trick that Google applies to maps is a localized de-cluttering around major cities. [...]

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Children and Medication Errors – “Thanks, Mom and Dad!”

December 3, 2010
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NPR had a story this morning about the high number of medication errors children experience and some ideas as to why. In short summary: Kitchen spoons are inaccurate for giving “teaspoons” of medicine, and it doesn’t take much to give the little ones an overdose. Dose instructions are in teaspoons, but sometimes the cups that come with the bottle are [...]

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Accidental Activation During Seat Adjustment on Plane

December 1, 2010
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CNN posted this story where a co-pilot accidentally bumped a control while adjusting his seat, sending the plane into a 26 degree dive. Disaster was only averted by the pilot returning from the restroom, as apparently the co-pilot lacked the training to correct the error. From the article: The aviation agency report concluded that the 25-year-old co-pilot had not been [...]

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