websites

Web-based tool to measure task workload

December 3, 2009
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I frequently use the NASA TLX workload assessment tool to measure a user’s perceived workload after they complete a task (e.g., complete an information search task). When the test is administered with paper it can be quite laborious to administer and score. A stand-alone computer-based version has been available but has some usability issues itself. For one thing, the TLX [...]

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HF Potpourri

August 17, 2009
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Some interesting items that have passed through my reader: Jerk can be emulated in software.  Cars with continuously variable transmissions sound and behave differently from other cars.  In this video, the speedometer and RPM smoothly increases (in most cars the RPM would bobble as gears shift and you’d feel a slight jerk).  I don’t know how I reached this page [...]

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HF/Usability Potpourri

June 26, 2009

Study Suggests People Prefer Bing’s Design To Google’s “The study was an intense focus group in which 12 subjects were monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches. Afterward, they were interviewed and completed a survey.” (TechCrunch with usability report) Nielsen recommends abandoning password masking in online forms “Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they [...]

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Map Information Visualizations = HOT!

May 1, 2009
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I‘ve noticed a trend in the newsworld/blogworld recently. Everyone wants to represent everything on a map. Some of these are genius, others make me wonder “why bother?” I collected some of each for this post… but I warn you, once you notice this pattern you’ll start seeing it multiple times per day. Job loss from Slate.com: (Usability note: good luck [...]

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High-tech Grandma

February 4, 2009

This really isn’t human factors related other than the fact that my research interests include older adults and the web.  Just to give you a teaser, here is some of the grandmother’s dialog: The other day, I was hacking around thinking I was running port forwarding my POP packets through SSH encrypted tunnels.  Turns out I got the port number [...]

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Crowdsourced Usability II: Mozilla Test Pilot

January 21, 2009

Interesting distributed/crowdsourced usability effort from Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. Enter Test Pilot. It’s a still-in-concept platform for a new user-testing program for Mozilla that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for interface and product experiments. From Wired: Raskin notes that the project was initially intended to [...]

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Crowdsourced Usability Testing?

November 25, 2008

Feedback Army is a new service where you submit your website, $7, and you receive 10 comments.  I wonder how effective such ultra discount usability evaluation would be.  I guess if some is better than none, this is a pretty good service.  However, who exactly is offering the feedback, what are their qualifications?  And is it more than, “your website [...]

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Where are visitors coming from?

November 25, 2008

This post isn’t human factors-related but I just wanted to share with you an image showing where the last 100 or so visitors came from (click for a larger image). For our United States readers, have a Happy Thanksgiving!

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Amazon Windowshop

October 27, 2008

Amazon has a new interface for “window shopping” on its website.  It is strangely compelling and offers something that the website lacked–that quality of just browsing what’s there without having to do too much clicking, searching, etc.  The navigation is simple and intuitive (right/left arrows) and if you stand at a window for a few seconds, a video description starts [...]

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Another tool to keep up with election news

October 8, 2008

TechCrunch posted a link to another tool to keep up with the flood of election-related news coming from news services and each of the presidential campaigns.  Dipity Election Center presents news items in a time-line format. The interface is very cluttered and not exactly intuitive (e.g., unclear what all the little icons below the timeline mean), but an interesting way [...]

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Mac-based usability testing software: Silverback

September 16, 2008

Easy usability testing on the Mac is now possible with Silverback.  The software looks incredibly simple and is quite inexpensive.  Although it appears to have much less functionality than Morae (on the PC), it is about 30 times cheaper!  They probably shouldn’t be compared since Morae has so much more functionality, but Silverback looks like a good solution to capture [...]

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Pew Internet: Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services

September 12, 2008

A new Pew report examines the usage of cloud computing applications and services which is a topic I’ve been interested in recently.  Something noteworthy was that, as we suspected, older adults don’t appreciate the benefits of cloud computing compared to other age groups: Older adults’ are seemingly the ones who could benefit most from cloud computing.  Keeping mail or other [...]

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Visualizing election news

September 11, 2008

Here is an interesting website that aggregates news items about both US presidential candidates and visualizes that data providing a nice dashboard-like “snapshot”.  Once you click on a bar or candidate name, it shows you word-sized historical graphs (sparklines) of their popularity.  For more information on sparklines or other ways of visualizing data, see Edward Tufte.

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Tag-based interfaces and Aging

September 10, 2008

I was recently interviewed by our campus news service about receiving a Google Research Award to study information retrieval and aging. The research involves designing information retrieval interfaces around the capabilities and limitations of older adults (those age 60 and above). Here is a snippet from the press release: Richard Pak, an assistant professor of psychology, has received a $50,000 [...]

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With automated tagging, Web links can surprise

August 4, 2008

I‘ve previously posted on the topic of tagging. As more products attempt to automate the process of creating tags from content, more problems are bound to appear like below.  A pretty clear case of automation gone wrong!: It wasn’t what anyone expected to see while perusing a news article. But there, in the final paragraph of an online story about [...]

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In Praise of a Good Interface

July 1, 2008

Those interested in creative usability, learning, and feedback should check out Moe’s Southwest Grill nutrition information website. Of course, as delightful as the menu interface is, it is very difficult to link. 1. Turn down speakers 2. Go to Moe’s home page 3. Wait through annoying splash screen, circa 1995 4. Mouse over “Menu” and click on “nutrition” 5. Enjoy [...]

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