It’s easy to take computers for granted. If I want to go
shopping, visit a library, play a game, or share my thoughts with the rest of
the world, I can do this all by typing on my laptop. I can exchange email with
friends and colleagues, wherever they might be. If I were to pick up a
screwdriver and go exploring in my house, I’d find computers in kitchen appliances,
gaming and entertainment consoles, telephones—even in the walls, controlling
the temperature.
Have you ever wondered what gives computers such remarkable
power and flexibility? One answer is that computer designers and software
developers build them that way. But that’s not entirely satisfying as an
answer. Computing for Ordinary Mortals starts in a different way:
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
Darrell Huff's 1954 book, How to Lie with Statistics, is a classic introduction to statistics. It's very informal; I first read it when I was a teenager. I remember one passage in part because I had no idea what what it was about:
For further evidence go back to 1936 and the Literary Digest's famed fiasco. The ten million telephone and Digest subscribers who assured the editors of the doomed magazine that it would be Landon 370, Roosevelt 161 came from the list that had accurately predicted the 1932 election. How could there be bias in a list already so tested?
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
Moodle is... a Free [sic] web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.
I'm ambivalent about Moodle, the system my university has adopted for course management. It's awful beyond reason, but if I'm ever at a loss for a usability problem to show my students in class, I just do something in Moodle and take screen shots as I go.
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
Jacob Nielsen offers this heuristic (one of ten) for designing a usable interface:
User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
I'm in the Macintosh Finder, looking through my file system. On the top right of the Finder window there's a text box with a standard search icon; I click in it (or press a shortcut key combination, Command-F) to search for a file somewhere within "Applications".
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
A few months ago Stephanie Buck collected a list of pet peeves from Mashable staff: 20 Things Your Most Annoying Friends Do on Facebook.
Here's number 20:
20. Redundant Links
Pet peeve: people who don't remove the URL once they've copy/pasted it into a status update. Result: ilooklikebarackobama.com on top of ilooklikebarackobama.com. Hurts my eyes.
"St. Amant uses many analogies to explain difficult concepts, but is quick to point out where these analogies break down, so as not to lose accuracy and truthfulness. It can be dense, and can require a little time in each chapter to really get one’s head around some of the concepts, but the author really strikes the perfect balance between accuracy and understandability."
From the San Francisco Book Review.
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
A few years ago I attended a workshop on the future of interactive systems; it was a wonderful chance to talk with world-class researchers in human-computer interaction and to speculate about the directions the field might take.
One of the workshop sessions involved brainstorming, in which we jotted down thoughts about a given topic on Post-It notes and then tried to figure out how they might all fit together. We stuck the notes to the wall, talked about the emerging organization of ideas, and then went off to lunch.
This is how things looked when we returned.
In the courses I teach about human-computer interaction, I typically open each class with an example of a usability problem. I'm putting these online, in case others find them useful.
This is how the Scrabble app on my iPhone worked for some time (the current interface has gone through a few revisions). Let's walk through it.
I decide that I want to play a game of Scrabble. When I start up the app, this screen appears.
