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Two New HF Blogs

May 14, 2012

Just a short note about two new HF-oriented blogs.  First, Arathi Sethumadhavan Ph.D. has started a new blog. Arathi Sethumadhavan is a Human Factors Scientist at Medtronic’s Cardiac Rhythm and Disease Management. She received her PhD in Experimental Psychology (Human Factors) from Texas Tech University.  Second, Ergonomics in Design, a publication of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, has started [...]

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Coming to APA in August: Information Foraging in the Social Web

July 21, 2011
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Peter Pirolli (currently a Research Fellow at Xerox/PARC) will be presenting on Information Foraging Theory. See below for an abstract of his upcoming talk. Information Foraging Theory is a theory of human-information interaction that aims to explain and predict how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people.  The approach involves [...]

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Website Usability Success Story – Bethel University

April 18, 2011
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a great “interactive graphic” about Bethel’s re-design of their admissions page. It includes their metrics of success, an important but often difficult to quantify validation of usability. Special problems they faced: A large number of specialized programs with different application methods Including financial aid information appropriately and early in the process Managing multiple [...]

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Usability vs. Providing an Experience

January 10, 2011
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Some humor for 2011: a “Things people have never said about a restaurant” website. My favorite excerpts: “I really like the way their cheesy elevator jazz interacts with the music I was listening to in iTunes.” “I hope the phone number and address are actually images so I can’t copy and paste them!” “I go to restaurant websites for the [...]

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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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Was it the interface?

November 1, 2010

A story at The Chronicle discusses the appointment and immediate resignation of a faculty member elected as chairperson of their department. Below are some quotes from the article that make me wonder what one had to do to remove one’s name from the ballot. Mr. Sheppard was elected under an online-election system, introduced last year, that was designed to make [...]

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New website for Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology

October 22, 2010

Looks like Division 21 has updated their website. Check it out! An important link to note is the one for a free year of membership in the division. This includes getting the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Division 21 holds a program at APA each year as well as a mid year meeting. Here are some of the posts on [...]

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Almost Here: Designing Displays for Older Adults

July 20, 2010
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After a long process and over a year of work, Anne’s and my book on user interface design for older adults is almost available!  The cover of our book has been finalized (shown below).  The book will be released September 21st, 2010 and will be available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press. We’ll give [...]

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Facebook and Privacy: A Guest Post by Kelly Caine

May 8, 2010
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Many of my friends have threatened to leave Facebook because of their concerns over privacy, but for the first time, this week one of them actually made good on the threat. In his “Dear John” letter, my friend Yohann summarized the issue: I don’t feel that I am in control of the information I share on Facebook, and of the [...]

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Facetted Navigation Primer

April 22, 2010

A List Apart recently posted an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender that presents a great description of facetted navigation (FN), a type of search interface. FN is contrasted with just text searching (e.g., Google), taxonomies (e.g., Windows Explorer or Mac Finder), and tag-based interfaces (e.g., Flickr).  See illustrative figure below if you [...]

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UXURLS: A usability news aggregator

March 1, 2010

Harry Brignull has created a convenient news aggregator for user experience and usability news from around the web.  A nice one-stop shop.

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Tabs, tabs, and more tabs…

January 11, 2010
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This post on Smashing Magazine about vertical navigation had me thinking about the book Anne and I are writing (manuscript due this Friday; panicking…I’m a 10 on the Wong-Baker scale).  In one of the chapters I discuss tab navigation.  When I was looking for a particularly bad example of the use of tabs I remembered Amazon’s website circa 2000.  Fortunately, [...]

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HF Potpourri

January 6, 2010
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James Rubinstein sends along a this post about a 32 inch LCD TV presumably designed for older users.  It has features such as a dramatically simplified remote control, fewer wires, and a shut-off timer.  [Engadget] Designing Devices is a relatively new blog devoted to “how and why to create devices” from Dan Saffer (author of Designing for Interaction).  I’m loving [...]

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Vision-themed Potpourri

December 20, 2009
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Today’s potpourri happens to be related to understanding or enhancing what your users see (or don’t see): Google Browser Size let’s you see how much of your web content is visible by users. Rocker Lou Reed (of the Velvet Underground) designs an iPhone app for near-sighted users.  It basically increases the font size in the contacts application.  It appears that [...]

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HF Potpourri

December 14, 2009
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More potpourri from the web: Jakob Nielsen has a new book on using eye-tracking in web usability. View a 32 page chapter PDF (26 mb) for free (via PhotoshopSupport). Using autistics for software quality-control work. Would this work for usability? An obsessive attention to detail is good for design/usability (via Slashdot) The HF/usability company HumanCentric held an internal competition to [...]

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