Here's a post by David Pogue on what everyone assumes that everyone else knows but is wrong. I thought I would know every single thing on the list but was surprised to find a keyboard shortcut that was new to me - using shift + space to scroll up in a web page.
You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.Yahoo! recently released their research findings about an OpenID usability report. They were not surprising:
None of the users had heard of OpenID before, and none of them even noticed the OpenID sign-in box displayed below the traditional email/password login form on the site. [...] Observing these tests was more than a bit frustrating for the Yahoo! OpenID team, and the test subjects may have been distracted by the sounds of the groans and head-pounding coming from the other side of the one-way mirror. Certainly there is a lot of work to be done on the OpenID UX (user experience) front.(At the risk of over-simplification, OpenID is a common username/password using which you can login to multiple websites without creating individual username/passwords for each.)
@free online games: Are you some sort of super-intelligent context-aware spam bot? If yes, I'm impressed. Seriously. Would love to know how you're built.
ReplyDeleteFree online games is a user centered spam bot. It shares, because it cares.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, Inmates is a old(ish) book, but the situation is still true in the Indian software industry. Specially, the Internet industry.
Daily user behavior assumptions are made, not based on actual data but "how we want/wish the user to behave". Then the product fails, and the decision is taken to change the background colors + clipart to make the site more user friendly.
Sometimes, you just want to stab yourself in the eye with your graphic pen tablet. :(