This is one that really annoys me. You’re sitting in your comfy chair, reading an article, written in beautiful, flowing prose, on your favorite blog or website. All of a sudden, you’re jarred out of your blissful unawareness that you’re not actually reading printed matter in an age long since expired by a glaring blue abomination: Click here.
Yes, it’s true that — for the most part — a piece of online content’s usability is primarily the responsibility of the software powering the website. In most cases, a well-designed piece of software will take much of the accessibility burden off of the content author, freeing her to focus only on producing the substance of the next great American novel. Ironically, the problem arises when content producers think about the computer too much. (more…)
So Alyssa IMs me in a rage this morning over something that I’ve long had a problem with myself. She was working at a student activities fair, and during some downtime, decided to write a post on the discussion board of one of her classes (a required weekly assignment). While she was writing it, however, a student came up to her table, so she had to stop and talk for a few minutes. When she returned to the computer, the session had expired and she had been automatically redirected to an error page, leaving her no way to save or retrieve her work.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: this is 2009, not 1994. There is no excuse for modern web apps to expire sessions without allowing you some way to save your work first. In fact, the whole usability model behind session expirations needs work. Let’s consider a few examples. (more…)
By now, you’ve probably seen the Verizon ads that go a little something like this: There’s a Map For That.
I’ll admit, they’re relatively clever. They do, however — and maybe I’m a little bit biased, being a loyal AT&T customer for a long time — reveal just how much the iPhone is digging into Verizon’s sales: it’d be a pretty vicious ad campaign for a company that’s not feeling that much of an effect. They’re pretty convincing ads, too; when you look at the AT&T and Verizon 3G coverage maps side-by-side, it’s pretty clear that Verizon’s 3G network is considerably larger.
It’s too bad the ads are so misleading. (more…)
You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a good watch nowadays. After about three years of being a rebel, insisting that the only thing I needed to tell me the time was my iPhone, I’ve made an about-face on my position for one simple reason: the iPhone does a great job at telling me the time, but that’s not its purpose. Being the semantic person that I am, and endeavoring to have some sense of fashion, I’ve decided that the time has come.
Now let’s put this in perspective. My last watch was the Fossil Abacus Wrist PDA (yes, a watch with a stylus that runs Palm OS), and before that I owned the Fossil Wrist Net watch for MSN Direct (weather, sports, etc. delivered over FM transmissions to the watch… for $60 per year). They were big, bulky, and very semantically not-correct. My iPhone does everything they did, and for that reason, I now pursue a simpler ideal: a watch that tells time and is actually attractive. (more…)
It wasn’t long ago that if you asked someone the color of their eyes you’d get a straight answer. Blue, green, hazel, brown, orange, or whatever else is considered kosher for the Martin-Schultz Scale. Increasingly, however, the answer I get nowadays from a surprising number of people is “well actually, they change color.”
Wait, they change color? You mean they aren’t always the same? Don’t ask my why that strikes me as so strange, I myself claim the same thing. But you’re trying to tell me that I’m not the only person?
Science tells us that, yes, while eyes do change color over extended periods of time, day-to-day or minute-to-minute changes just don’t happen — it’s all a trick of the lights. I’m dubious, myself, as I’ve witnessed what seem to be considerable eye color changes influenced by more than just lighting. When it comes down to it, though, it’s kind of irrelevant, because it’s not the color changes themselves that are important: the fact that so many people say that they’ve seen eyes change color means not that the world is undergoing a color-changing eye epidemic, but rather that so many more people are paying attention to it.
That means that people care.
It is evidence of a minutia of attention to detail in this fast-paced world that’s growing faster by the second. It is evidence of a human race that cares about the little things. And it is good. Strange how such a simple thought can make all the difference in one’s hope for the world.
