I recently got an 18" Cornea flatpanel. It's great, a terrific monitor at the price of the other guy's 17". I suppose some might balk that it only has VGA analog inputs, but that's all I'm ready for anyway.
I think the company is Korean, maybe did some work for OEMs, and now they're out on their own.
Probably all psychosomatic, but it feels great to only be beaming myself with hours and hours of CRT radiation at work, not at home...
You know, this reminds me of why I'm such a Nintendo fanboy...by sticking 4 ports on the brilliant N64 (not to mention staging the comeback of the non-flightstick analog control stick) they really reinvigorated multiplayer gaming.
I admit first person shooters aren't quite as good as on a LAN party, with a single processor struggling to make 4 viewpoints, and you able to sneak glances at what you're opponents are up to. And people use to mouse+keyboard balk a bit (having never played a PC FPS since my DOOM days but a bit of quake, I'm still an all-keyboard wuss)
Still, the convenience factor is important, and the social aspect is great.
Interesting article "Homeland Insecurity" from on how some of this national databasing can make systems more brittle security wise, rather than more robust.
I'm not crazy about the idea of sending out confirm e-mails...it makes me feel like a bit of a spammer myself, especially if the incoming spam contains a from: address of some poor unsuspecting sap. Also, I worry just a little bit about non-technical people 'not getting it'.
Since I already do certain auto-whitelisting based on subject for mailing lists , mostly for [randomyahoogroup],[Slashdot], and [Stella], I'm toying with publcizing [Kirk] as well as a magic passphrase...
Ok, I read the article but quickly, and at the end of it I wasn't sure how he ultimately told the system that an individual e-mail was spam or that it was legitimate, so it would know into which bin to toss those words...is that a manual process?
I set up a homebrew whitelist (which still shows me the potential spam) I'm pretty happy with. I'm trying to figure out if I should keep in the subject based whitelisting or not...some spammers use my typical "hey" or "hi" subjects now...and it's the part of the system that grows the most. I'm just worried I'll send out mail to someone and they'll reply with a different e-mail address...maybe I should expire subjects?
Still (and not get into too much console advocacy here) that would be the only game I'd be getting the system for. As opposed to Nintendo, where there's maybe 6 or 7 games I bought the system for. (And still waiting for 4 or 5 of those)
litter the hallways with corpses?
on
New DOOM III Shots
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
You know, that's one thing I really hope it will have: hallways full of tons and tons of monster corpses to mark the trail of where you've been (or where are the places not to stand in the case of a deathmatch)
Seriously, that's what was so cool about the Doom and Doom II engines; because they were sprite based, they could leave the corpses lying about. Most polygon based shooters don't do that. I supposed some realistic ones might, but those aren't the ones that send hoardes of bad guys to be mowed down like wheat in the first place.
So assuming they "have" to go full-Polygon, I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...
Yeahbut...I don't know, for the dabbler in music, it still seems kind of tough...even if these sites have a good concept of "featured artist", you need to keep coming back to keep up.
In college, you're exposed to so many people, that you can rely on your pre-existing opiniin of them and their tastes as a way of prescreening all the music out there. There may be online near equivalents of this, getting involved in chatrooms and stuff like people have said, but you have to work at it a lot more than back in the day...
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25!
Yeah, that's where I got introduced to N*E*R*D (album by the same guys who do a lot of the background work for many big pop stars) but you know, over all the album was kind of a bummer despite sounding so good on NPR...
They removed SmarterChild from AIM, which was where I used it to. Too bad, it was about the best way to get dictionary/spellcheck, weather, headlines, and movies out there. Terrific fast interface.
Not sure how they planned to make money on it..they had some "text based" ads in there.
By any chance, are you in your in your mid- to late- twenties? Many people stop getting into new music in that timeframe, and have been for 25-30 years.
Gawd, ain't it the truth.
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music. The death of napster doesn't help.
On the other hand, I think the late-90s/early-2000s might've been a particularly soso time for new music. On the radio, I still here the same songs I heard played in the gym in 1997, along with what to me sounds like pretty anonymous modern R+B. Other electronica stuff I find interesting, but genre-wise it's all firmly planted in the 90s.
Sometimes I really wonder how the hell my cd collection got as big as it did (it's not even that big, like 300 give or take 50)
And more often these days, new albums I buy are pretty big dissapointments. From N.E.R.D. to the new Alanis.
I really miss the party rap of the early 1990s, pre-gangsta. That was good stuff to dance to.
Which is a note to content providers out there...there are several "unlimited traffic" webhosts out there that are still pretty cheap. I don't know how they prevent abuse, but this one is really good and that one ain't bad either.
Often they have limits on how much storage space you get though, like 50 megs...maybe that helps prevent them running out of pipe.
I just wanted to take the chance to burn some karma and plug the miniwebsite I advertise in my sig: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guideor: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death. From the lead paragraph: Coming to grips with mortality- this is the biggest personal issue that every one of us will have to deal with. It can be especially difficult for people who don't believe that there's an afterlife waiting for them. To contemplate the end of our selves in this world is frightening; to not convince yourself that there is life after this world requires a special kind of bravery. This site is here to try to share the thoughts that have allowed me to understand and accept the situation.
I went through a time when I was thinking about Cryonics. And other times when I've gone through paralyzing anxiety about death in general. This site is the result of all that, and might help others in the same boat.
Ehh, I've heard some funnier variants: Mathemetician... "1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. The result follows by induction."
Engineer...(kind of close to the physicist one) "1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. 9 is...prime enough for practical purposes, 11 is prime..."
And my favorite Computer Scientist... "1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime..."
I think all these better reflect on their professions (and I hate the variants where one of the professions "gets it right", usually told by a member of that profession.
Wow, Tog himself responded! I'm very delighted. He also wrote me an e-mail explaining the slashdot badly munged his post (obviously), maybe the site isn't Mac friendly?
Anyway, I accept his point that Fitt's law is just one piece of a grander puzzle...I guess the way the quiz was presented made me think he was suggesting this as the FULL answer to the questions he posed.
4. I still think "logic" has a big place, because of the way it can reduce thinking time. I agree it's bad to sacrifice usability on the alter of "purity", but in the case of the popup taskbar, the whole bottom area being active didn't seem problematic the few times I used it.
5. In terms of "sensible" I did mean "usable". In this case, Win and Mac tie into different part of Fitts...with Windows the target menu bar might be closer to the mouse action (at least with a mouse based application) but with Mac some common tasks are always in the same place. (Also, when I leave my PC (attention-wise) and come back, I think menu-on-window might be easier to figure out what app is active, but I haven't used Mac enough to say for certain)
7. It still seems like a circular menu might be harder to scan than a regular list, just based on our usual tendency to read up and down. Though I don't have the data to back this up.
8. Well, from my personal test, I *really* hated mouse cursors that snapped to ok buttons and all that when I tried turning them on in Windows. So I'm just a datapoint, but I'd be surprised if "unpredictable" mouse behavior turned out to be a good thing usabilitywise.
10. I do agree with this, and feel I've learned something in the process. I think the format of the quiz, where the correct answer was always Fitts related, implied that all the other possible answers involving improving usability weren't as important as applying Fitts' law.
And for a long time, salon.com was the site of some kind of resource for hairdressers (one that seemed to be pretty content light and coming soonish) and salon had to use salonmagazine.com. (That url still works, actually...they had better maintain it or the pornlords would swoop down.)
And "salon" isn't just a random name. It's an old fashioned term for a conversation group-- well, m-w.com says " a fashionable assemblage of notables (as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held by custom at the home of a prominent person", but I remember the liberal rag Utne Reader was trying to start a kind of grassroots "salon revival", and I think this was a few years before the site, might well have been an inspiration for the name; there's overlap between the general feel of the two publications.
No, I have read (though I don't remember where) usability experts who, stopwatch in hand, berate expert users who claim that their keyboard shortcuts are faster than the mouse equivalents, even though the stopwatch proves that the mouse is quicker.
My counterpoint is that even if those very same expert users are measurably quicker with the mouse than their beloved shortcuts, if they view the mouse as more disruptive in some sense than it probably is.
No one argues tht menus and what not are much better for people getting started with a given program. (Though even then, good programs will implment some of the defacto standards, especially ctrl-c ctrl-x ctrl-v when those options make sense, and ctrl-z undo.)
On that AskTog link...(honestly I forgot to read it before, but I think it proves my point about "overall usability is not measured by a stopwatch" in spades) I'd say he starts with a wrong principle, and then makes about 8/10 wrong conclusions from that: Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. This completely ignores several other important factors involving the mental process of locating the correct button you're looking for. Reducing scanning and searching goes a longer way to improving speed than these two factors...
Point by point: 1. I don't disagree but he missed "C. because sometimes I can read faster than I can think about icons". Hell, I always use Save or Load from the File menu rather than the standard buttonbar, because I can't be bothered to think about what the damn icon means. I'm sure this isn't the case for everyone.
2. I don't disagree but he missed "C. make sure the tools are logically grouped by function"
3. A one pixel target? What is he smoking anyway? In any case, despite the mechanics of arm movement, a *logical* placement is more important than thinking in terms of the whole damn screen!
4. I personally like the taskbar as a glance-able reminder of what tasks I got going. I think his point "A" is obsolete now that Windows taskbars have that QuickLaunch section. And has always mised the useful clock that was there...the taskbar isn't really "one object" And as for stuffing it in the corners...well, I don't know about "accidental triggers" (not that I think people are randomly mousing around anyway) but if the taskbar is constrained to take an edge so it has enough room to be useful, then the entire edge should LOGICALLY activate it, rather than some "magic hot corners"
5. I'm biased because I grew up on Win3.1 and not Mac OSwhatever, but I think having menubars on windows, with its mapping of what the hell the program wants to do close to the task at hand, is more sensible than a bar that's always changing around. But I think people are gonna want whatever they grew up with.
6. Actually, I agree with him here. I find Windows menus to be excessively futzy.
7. Oh Sweet Jimminy Crickets. My logitech mouse has an option to bring up a circular menu...how are you supposed to read that thing, twist your head in a circle?
8. While I guess I've found some "mouse acceleration" algorithms to be unobtrusive and useful, I don't think context sensitive mouse movement is a good thing.
9. I'll grant him this, not knowing much about it.
10. Overall, I agree with some of his conclusions. Bigger buttons are probably a good idea. But to think that it all comes down to some kind of "mousing olympics", that it's all sprints and hurdles instead of a mental process, is plain dumb.
PS: usability advice from Nielsen? The same guy who didn't have the non-"www." version of his site URL ( useit.com ) working for YEARS?
Re:Serious Question...
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've taken some UI in college, and had a fair chunk of real life experience.
I think "usability experts" are way too quick to disregard user feedback in favor of things that can be easily measured. I think that those metrics leads to a reductionist viewpoint that misses the overall user experience. Yes, I might be.2 seconds faster to locate an item in on a long list if such and so scrollbar is set thus, but that doesn't mean a system that used that method would be improve by virtual life. User satisfaction is a better goal than user speed.
Here's a great example: keyboard shortcuts. Experienced users love 'em. "Usability experts" point out how most tasks are faster with the mouse, and point to this as proof that you shouldn't listen to the users. This is R-O-N-G wrong. If using the keyboard comes more natural to the power user, than it's likely using less mental energy, and not distracting the user from whatever he or she's actually focused on, what he or she is trying to get accomplished overall. I haven't seen many tests that get into that level of detail, that really focus on the whole job rather than tiny subtasks.
Back to the dock vs the task/launcher seperation: Yes, the underlying technology should be transparent, like if the system shuffles old process to disk or whatever, but I think for most users there is a big difference between getting back to things (documents, webpages) they're working on now (tasks) and wanting to start on new things, blank documents, new browsers (hence, the seperate launchers)
Nontechnical users think of the UI as the whole OS. Even if they know better, they still make a connection at the gut level. By doing a major overhaul of the UI, MS gives users the impression that they're buying a completely new version. People will pay more for that than for a few bug fixes.
Interesting to compare this to my "technical" viewpoint...really, I think of the OS as just a glorified program launcher (heh, DOS anyone?)/ task switcher and look and feel specification for my apps. And whatever services they need...so the less the whole thing changes, the better.
I do like that they make it easy to get to the previous look and feel...maybe they'd irritate too many mid-level folk and techies who got very used to the way things were.
I see the idea in theory, but I'm not sure if it holds up in practice: most useful apps are very stateful. I'm editing a specific document, I'm viewing a particular webpage, I have a ssh connection open and who knows what's gone on in there. Getting back to those app instances is very different than starting up a new activity...also, I prefer a seperate "task list", because it acts as a reminder of things I probably want to get back to sooner rather than later, as opposed to my launch icons...who knows when I want to get to them. (Also, I like a marked hierarchy w/ my launchers: I put everything I come back to regularly on my immediate start menu, and everything else lives in the hierarchal menu ghetto.)
I haven't used OSX enough to know if the "little arrows" is enough of a difference for me, because I don't consider the difference between things I'm doing and things I may want to do in the future as secondary. (Also, I assume you don't put *all* your launchers in the dock, just the ones you like to use a lot, so I don't know where the rest of the launchers live, what tht's like)
(You know, one of the things I miss from 3.1 was that it made it really easy to "paint" the icon canvas, it was just like any other screen, so it was fun to make mini-art there)
Slashdot Mirror
I recently got an 18" Cornea flatpanel. It's great, a terrific monitor at the price of the other guy's 17". I suppose some might balk that it only has VGA analog inputs, but that's all I'm ready for anyway.
I think the company is Korean, maybe did some work for OEMs, and now they're out on their own.
Probably all psychosomatic, but it feels great to only be beaming myself with hours and hours of CRT radiation at work, not at home...
You know, this reminds me of why I'm such a Nintendo fanboy...by sticking 4 ports on the brilliant N64 (not to mention staging the comeback of the non-flightstick analog control stick) they really reinvigorated multiplayer gaming.
I admit first person shooters aren't quite as good as on a LAN party, with a single processor struggling to make 4 viewpoints, and you able to sneak glances at what you're opponents are up to. And people use to mouse+keyboard balk a bit (having never played a PC FPS since my DOOM days but a bit of quake, I'm still an all-keyboard wuss)
Still, the convenience factor is important, and the social aspect is great.
Interesting article "Homeland Insecurity" from on how some of this national databasing can make systems more brittle security wise, rather than more robust.
I'm not crazy about the idea of sending out confirm e-mails...it makes me feel like a bit of a spammer myself, especially if the incoming spam contains a from: address of some poor unsuspecting sap. Also, I worry just a little bit about non-technical people 'not getting it'.
Since I already do certain auto-whitelisting based on subject for mailing lists , mostly for [randomyahoogroup],[Slashdot], and [Stella], I'm toying with publcizing [Kirk] as well as a magic passphrase...
Ok, I read the article but quickly, and at the end of it I wasn't sure how he ultimately told the system that an individual e-mail was spam or that it was legitimate, so it would know into which bin to toss those words...is that a manual process?
I set up a homebrew whitelist (which still shows me the potential spam) I'm pretty happy with. I'm trying to figure out if I should keep in the subject based whitelisting or not...some spammers use my typical "hey" or "hi" subjects now...and it's the part of the system that grows the most. I'm just worried I'll send out mail to someone and they'll reply with a different e-mail address...maybe I should expire subjects?
Hmmm.
Cool, and the bodies stick around?
;-)
Dang, if only I wasn't such a Nintendo fanboy
Still (and not get into too much console advocacy here) that would be the only game I'd be getting the system for. As opposed to Nintendo, where there's maybe 6 or 7 games I bought the system for. (And still waiting for 4 or 5 of those)
You know, that's one thing I really hope it will have: hallways full of tons and tons of monster corpses to mark the trail of where you've been (or where are the places not to stand in the case of a deathmatch)
Seriously, that's what was so cool about the Doom and Doom II engines; because they were sprite based, they could leave the corpses lying about. Most polygon based shooters don't do that. I supposed some realistic ones might, but those aren't the ones that send hoardes of bad guys to be mowed down like wheat in the first place.
So assuming they "have" to go full-Polygon, I hope they give thought to not pushing the models so much that they have to magically sweep away the dead bodies...
Yeahbut...I don't know, for the dabbler in music, it still seems kind of tough...even if these sites have a good concept of "featured artist", you need to keep coming back to keep up.
In college, you're exposed to so many people, that you can rely on your pre-existing opiniin of them and their tastes as a way of prescreening all the music out there. There may be online near equivalents of this, getting involved in chatrooms and stuff like people have said, but you have to work at it a lot more than back in the day...
Not always. Just in the last month, NPR introduced me to two new composers, and I'm not much older than 25!
Yeah, that's where I got introduced to N*E*R*D (album by the same guys who do a lot of the background work for many big pop stars) but you know, over all the album was kind of a bummer despite sounding so good on NPR...
They removed SmarterChild from AIM, which was where I used it to. Too bad, it was about the best way to get dictionary/spellcheck, weather, headlines, and movies out there. Terrific fast interface.
Not sure how they planned to make money on it..they had some "text based" ads in there.
By any chance, are you in your in your mid- to late- twenties? Many people stop getting into new music in that timeframe, and have been for 25-30 years.
Gawd, ain't it the truth.
It's disturbing me, but after college it's really difficult to get exposed to new music. The death of napster doesn't help.
On the other hand, I think the late-90s/early-2000s might've been a particularly soso time for new music. On the radio, I still here the same songs I heard played in the gym in 1997, along with what to me sounds like pretty anonymous modern R+B. Other electronica stuff I find interesting, but genre-wise it's all firmly planted in the 90s.
Sometimes I really wonder how the hell my cd collection got as big as it did (it's not even that big, like 300 give or take 50)
And more often these days, new albums I buy are pretty big dissapointments. From N.E.R.D. to the new Alanis.
I really miss the party rap of the early 1990s, pre-gangsta. That was good stuff to dance to.
Which is a note to content providers out there...there are several "unlimited traffic" webhosts out there that are still pretty cheap. I don't know how they prevent abuse, but this one is really good and that one ain't bad either.
Often they have limits on how much storage space you get though, like 50 megs...maybe that helps prevent them running out of pipe.
I just wanted to take the chance to burn some karma and plug the miniwebsite I advertise in my sig: Dealing With Mortality: A Skeptic's Guide or: Kirk's Big Fun Pages O' Inevitable Death. From the lead paragraph:
Coming to grips with mortality- this is the biggest personal issue that every one of us will have to deal with. It can be especially difficult for people who don't believe that there's an afterlife waiting for them. To contemplate the end of our selves in this world is frightening; to not convince yourself that there is life after this world requires a special kind of bravery. This site is here to try to share the thoughts that have allowed me to understand and accept the situation.
I went through a time when I was thinking about Cryonics. And other times when I've gone through paralyzing anxiety about death in general. This site is the result of all that, and might help others in the same boat.
Ehh, I've heard some funnier variants:
Mathemetician...
"1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. The result follows by induction."
Engineer...(kind of close to the physicist one)
"1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime. 9 is...prime enough for practical purposes, 11 is prime..."
And my favorite
Computer Scientist...
"1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime, 1 is prime..."
I think all these better reflect on their professions (and I hate the variants where one of the professions "gets it right", usually told by a member of that profession.
1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime,
I don't know what OS you need for these...sure aint WinXP-able (even in "compatability mode")
Wow, Tog himself responded! I'm very delighted. He also wrote me an e-mail explaining the slashdot badly munged his post (obviously), maybe the site isn't Mac friendly?
Anyway, I accept his point that Fitt's law is just one piece of a grander puzzle...I guess the way the quiz was presented made me think he was suggesting this as the FULL answer to the questions he posed.
4. I still think "logic" has a big place, because of the way it can reduce thinking time. I agree it's bad to sacrifice usability on the alter of "purity", but in the case of the popup taskbar, the whole bottom area being active didn't seem problematic the few times I used it.
5. In terms of "sensible" I did mean "usable". In this case, Win and Mac tie into different part of Fitts...with Windows the target menu bar might be closer to the mouse action (at least with a mouse based application) but with Mac some common tasks are always in the same place. (Also, when I leave my PC (attention-wise) and come back, I think menu-on-window might be easier to figure out what app is active, but I haven't used Mac enough to say for certain)
7. It still seems like a circular menu might be harder to scan than a regular list, just based on our usual tendency to read up and down. Though I don't have the data to back this up.
8. Well, from my personal test, I *really* hated mouse cursors that snapped to ok buttons and all that when I tried turning them on in Windows. So I'm just a datapoint, but I'd be surprised if "unpredictable" mouse behavior turned out to be a good thing usabilitywise.
10. I do agree with this, and feel I've learned something in the process. I think the format of the quiz, where the correct answer was always Fitts related, implied that all the other possible answers involving improving usability weren't as important as applying Fitts' law.
Cute point.
And for a long time, salon.com was the site of some kind of resource for hairdressers (one that seemed to be pretty content light and coming soonish) and salon had to use salonmagazine.com. (That url still works, actually...they had better maintain it or the pornlords would swoop down.)
And "salon" isn't just a random name. It's an old fashioned term for a conversation group-- well, m-w.com says " a fashionable assemblage of notables (as literary figures, artists, or statesmen) held by custom at the home of a prominent person", but I remember the liberal rag Utne Reader was trying to start a kind of grassroots "salon revival", and I think this was a few years before the site, might well have been an inspiration for the name; there's overlap between the general feel of the two publications.
I'll miss Salon if it goes the way of Suck.com.
Odd that she mentioned thepenismightier.com, since a version of it it is a fairly thriving site, and they like the ambiguity of the name.
One my favorite tech info resource sites has to have a dash in its name, otherwise it might look like "expert sexchange" instead...
NONE of these seems to work on XP, even with Win95 mode, and doing all the stuff to download the sprites...any advice?
No, I have read (though I don't remember where) usability experts who, stopwatch in hand, berate expert users who claim that their keyboard shortcuts are faster than the mouse equivalents, even though the stopwatch proves that the mouse is quicker.
My counterpoint is that even if those very same expert users are measurably quicker with the mouse than their beloved shortcuts, if they view the mouse as more disruptive in some sense than it probably is.
No one argues tht menus and what not are much better for people getting started with a given program. (Though even then, good programs will implment some of the defacto standards, especially ctrl-c ctrl-x ctrl-v when those options make sense, and ctrl-z undo.)
On that AskTog link...(honestly I forgot to read it before, but I think it proves my point about "overall usability is not measured by a stopwatch" in spades) I'd say he starts with a wrong principle, and then makes about 8/10 wrong conclusions from that:
Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
This completely ignores several other important factors involving the mental process of locating the correct button you're looking for. Reducing scanning and searching goes a longer way to improving speed than these two factors...
Point by point:
1. I don't disagree but he missed "C. because sometimes I can read faster than I can think about icons". Hell, I always use Save or Load from the File menu rather than the standard buttonbar, because I can't be bothered to think about what the damn icon means. I'm sure this isn't the case for everyone.
2. I don't disagree but he missed "C. make sure the tools are logically grouped by function"
3. A one pixel target? What is he smoking anyway? In any case, despite the mechanics of arm movement, a *logical* placement is more important than thinking in terms of the whole damn screen!
4. I personally like the taskbar as a glance-able reminder of what tasks I got going. I think his point "A" is obsolete now that Windows taskbars have that QuickLaunch section. And has always mised the useful clock that was there...the taskbar isn't really "one object" And as for stuffing it in the corners...well, I don't know about "accidental triggers" (not that I think people are randomly mousing around anyway) but if the taskbar is constrained to take an edge so it has enough room to be useful, then the entire edge should LOGICALLY activate it, rather than some "magic hot corners"
5. I'm biased because I grew up on Win3.1 and not Mac OSwhatever, but I think having menubars on windows, with its mapping of what the hell the program wants to do close to the task at hand, is more sensible than a bar that's always changing around. But I think people are gonna want whatever they grew up with.
6. Actually, I agree with him here. I find Windows menus to be excessively futzy.
7. Oh Sweet Jimminy Crickets. My logitech mouse has an option to bring up a circular menu...how are you supposed to read that thing, twist your head in a circle?
8. While I guess I've found some "mouse acceleration" algorithms to be unobtrusive and useful, I don't think context sensitive mouse movement is a good thing.
9. I'll grant him this, not knowing much about it.
10. Overall, I agree with some of his conclusions. Bigger buttons are probably a good idea. But to think that it all comes down to some kind of "mousing olympics", that it's all sprints and hurdles instead of a mental process, is plain dumb.
PS: usability advice from Nielsen? The same guy who didn't have the non-"www." version of his site URL ( useit.com ) working for YEARS?
I've taken some UI in college, and had a fair chunk of real life experience.
.2 seconds faster to locate an item in on a long list if such and so scrollbar is set thus, but that doesn't mean a system that used that method would be improve by virtual life. User satisfaction is a better goal than user speed.
I think "usability experts" are way too quick to disregard user feedback in favor of things that can be easily measured. I think that those metrics leads to a reductionist viewpoint that misses the overall user experience. Yes, I might be
Here's a great example: keyboard shortcuts. Experienced users love 'em. "Usability experts" point out how most tasks are faster with the mouse, and point to this as proof that you shouldn't listen to the users. This is R-O-N-G wrong. If using the keyboard comes more natural to the power user, than it's likely using less mental energy, and not distracting the user from whatever he or she's actually focused on, what he or she is trying to get accomplished overall. I haven't seen many tests that get into that level of detail, that really focus on the whole job rather than tiny subtasks.
Back to the dock vs the task/launcher seperation: Yes, the underlying technology should be transparent, like if the system shuffles old process to disk or whatever, but I think for most users there is a big difference between getting back to things (documents, webpages) they're working on now (tasks) and wanting to start on new things, blank documents, new browsers (hence, the seperate launchers)
Nontechnical users think of the UI as the whole OS. Even if they know better, they still make a connection at the gut level. By doing a major overhaul of the UI, MS gives users the impression that they're buying a completely new version. People will pay more for that than for a few bug fixes.
Interesting to compare this to my "technical" viewpoint...really, I think of the OS as just a glorified program launcher (heh, DOS anyone?)/ task switcher and look and feel specification for my apps. And whatever services they need...so the less the whole thing changes, the better.
I do like that they make it easy to get to the previous look and feel...maybe they'd irritate too many mid-level folk and techies who got very used to the way things were.
I see the idea in theory, but I'm not sure if it holds up in practice: most useful apps are very stateful. I'm editing a specific document, I'm viewing a particular webpage, I have a ssh connection open and who knows what's gone on in there. Getting back to those app instances is very different than starting up a new activity...also, I prefer a seperate "task list", because it acts as a reminder of things I probably want to get back to sooner rather than later, as opposed to my launch icons...who knows when I want to get to them. (Also, I like a marked hierarchy w/ my launchers: I put everything I come back to regularly on my immediate start menu, and everything else lives in the hierarchal menu ghetto.)
I haven't used OSX enough to know if the "little arrows" is enough of a difference for me, because I don't consider the difference between things I'm doing and things I may want to do in the future as secondary. (Also, I assume you don't put *all* your launchers in the dock, just the ones you like to use a lot, so I don't know where the rest of the launchers live, what tht's like)
(You know, one of the things I miss from 3.1 was that it made it really easy to "paint" the icon canvas, it was just like any other screen, so it was fun to make mini-art there)