The Web Design Book Blog

The Usability Expert · 26 days ago

Jakob Nielsen is nothing if not a source of entertainment. One of his recent columns includes this gem:

We conducted most sessions in the United States, and a few in Hong Kong to ensure the international applicability of our findings.

That seems to cover it.

— Nigel Chapman

MAMA—the "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application" · 37 days ago

For a company producing a browser with such a tiny share of the market, Opera Software does a disproportionate amount of useful and interesting work. Their latest contribution is described in a recent series of articles. This is the sort of work I was expecting to come out of the Web Science Research Initiative, but they are more interested in the usual academic thing apparently. (More for the student of irony here: the picture of Berners-Lee has no alt attribute.)

— Nigel Chapman

INSPIRE · 38 days ago

For those of you with a taste for irony, the Adobe “Experience Design” team have started a new blog called INSPIRE. (I mistyped that as INSPITE to begin with, doubtless a Freudian slip.) It demonstrates, as nothing I have seen outside the Adobe Store does, why you shouldn’t use Flash except for things you can’t do using Web standard technology.

I actually found this monstrosity following a link from John Nack’s blog. Judging from the comments posted there so far, I am not alone in my assessment.

In case you are setting up as a rival to Adobe, here are two things that are Bad Ideas:

1. Implementing an online store that makes it hard for people to buy things.
2. Creating a showcase site for your User Experience team that is unusable.

— Nigel Chapman

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