:Web Application Usability

Jordans furniture has a space builder RIA based on Morphics user interface, done by Hookumu. All objects in this interface have standard controllers on their borders. On the desktop, if an application uses a UI paradigm, it is locked into it. There is no place to test new UI concepts except inside labs. For example look at Autocad, the interface was designed decades ago. The command prompt exists even now for backword compatibility. This is good for the users, as they dont have to learn new stuff. But, there is no place where new User Interface concepts could develop. Now, RIA’s will solve this problem. The development cycles are fast and new experiments will be tried out. But, even the RIA UI developers should be careful about taking unnessasary leaps.

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Jim Gasperini experiments with a simple way to present sterioscopic images. Just put the left and right images in a gif. Creates an amazing effect with a simple solution. But you see only earthquakes in the images. There is also a neat flash interface.

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Google’s preferences page is not setup for privacy conscious users. If cookies are disabled, google bluntly says that the feature is not available with out enabling cookies. In order to make the page more usable to privacy conscious users, google can….. [More]

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This flash interface for a quiz simulates a paper prototyping environment. Also, the quiz is about recognizing serial killers vs programmers. If you are in human resources or the police, it is the perfect test for you. 🙂

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Don Park writes on paper, and photologs it. Cheap, no typing skills, no computer, no thumb typing. What if you have one of the bluetooth digital pens? Just write it down and click a button to blog. What if the same pen functions as a phone/stylus for the tablet pc? 🙂

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Sarah Allen put up the process they followed in putting up the Laszlo pet sorry, pot store. The interface is only useful to compare the ‘looks’ of the pots. Any other comparisons between price, features is only possible after the pots are added to the shopping cart. Also, there were lots of places where the mouse turned to the hand symbol, but there were no interactions. The zooming and re-arrangement of the images was nice, especially the equal sized image view.

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This thumbnail viewer, also present on the right side of the blog’s main page, is
like a mini picture blog. It shows the images in reverse chronological order and
is suited for browsing the pictures in a limited space. The swf uses XML-RPC to
log on to the server and gets the data through a member login. It gets a list
of all the pictures on the server and shows only the pictures which have a thumbnail.
For example, “thumb myPic.JPG” is the thumbnail for “myPic.JPG” in the pictures
list. The pictures could also be emailed to the server and made to appear in this
widget if the email2blog component of manila is installed. Update: The
XML file is now loaded from the same domain to satisfy the security requirements in
flash player 7.

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Don Park writes that most metadata gathering efforts focus on the creation phase. Another way to generate metadata is by donation. I think that the metadata collected this way will be highly biased. Google included voting buttons on its toolbar. Google instead of using the data to generate page rank, it is using it to find anomalies. Like finding pages which artificially boost their page rank or good pages with good content not in google’s cache. The trick is to find ways to gather metadata with minimal change to the user. Then analyze the data to see the different ways it can be used.

Metadata Collection: …

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Ask yourself, do you want to learn a new way of driving, get your license again and loose all the experience you had? As for newcomers, what if they had to learn both joystick driving and steering wheel driving? Well, I think it’s the same with RSS and Echo. Echo’s wiki says,
“Now, if you want to build a weblog tool, you need to know a variety of different formats and protocols: HTTP, XML-RPC, RSS 0.9, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, the Blogger API, the MetaWeblog API, the new Blogger API, etc. We’d like to make this just one format (Echo) and one protocol (HTTP).”
The final result will be, there will be even more protocols, HTTP, XML-RPC, RSS 0.9, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, the Blogger API, the MetaWeblog api AND Echo. Building on what already exists is evolution, the other way is demolition. This is the same problem with some flash interfaces, innovation is given more importance than backword compatibility.

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Design patterns convert a few design constraints into one rule which reduces design complexity. How can people share the knowledge gained by experience? Jared M. Spool talks about transferring information between people. Give templates, guidelines or something else? The something else is design patterns, “Patterns suggest that the team trusts the contributor to do the right thing, but that they might be missing essential design knowledge that can really only come from experience, which reduces the Us vs them phenomenon”

Why design patterns: …

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