I had the opportunity to provide some usability counsel to a client of the firm today. The client is implementing a multi-million dollar platform to provide commercial line insurance quoting functionality to their independent agents. I was contacted by the project team because the client had expressed an interest in utilizing user-centered design for this effort.As part of … [Read more...]
Just some funny graffiti
Context is King
A while back, I had the privilege of seeing a demo of Beyond Broadcast, which is a project of Northwestern University's Infolab. Infolab is the group that brought us Watson search technology. With Beyond Broadcast, Infolab is attempting to bring the same level of context awareness to your television that Watson brings to your desktop.For those of you unfamiliar with Watson, it … [Read more...]
Suretyor on the blackberry
Most days, I love suretyor on the blackberry. However, as you can are, youneed to stay pretty vigilant or you may hey burned. It's not like I sendemail with a shutloaf of typos or grammatical errors in it, but it's enoughthat it's annoying. Ironically, it's the common words that cause the mostissues. Those are the words most likely to share keys with another … [Read more...]
Radio 2.0
One of the radio stations in Chicago, WLUP, was having a "you-fer" weekend this weekend. That's a pun on "two-fer," which means the station plays two songs in a row by each artist, for the uninitiated. This usually happens on Tuesday, which ends up being called "Two-fer Tuesday." What was interesting about the you-fer was that the station picked the first song by the artist … [Read more...]
Lao Tzu’s Hotkeys – Quicksilver
I recently installed Blacktree's Quicksilver for OSX on my MacBook. Those of you already using it are probably saying, "Yeah? What took you so long?" Now that I've had some time to play with it, I'm asking myself the same thing. Quicksilver is difficult to describe as an application, which is probably a good indication that Blacktree is on to something. It's basically a … [Read more...]
Vista: Throbbers, and Progress Bars
I installed Vista on my home-built PC about three weeks ago to stream HD video to my Xbox 360 and to generally kick the tires a bit. There's a lot to be said about the usability of Vista (both good and bad), and I'll detail that over time. This post is to address something that annoyed me during the installation process.After gathering information about my machine and … [Read more...]
On the importance of acronyms
Back in 1999-2000, I was working on a project for an entertainment retailer. We were developing a multi-channel solution for them which included a new website, MSN tabs (seemed like a big deal at the time), and in-store kiosks and listening/viewing stations. It was pretty cool work, at the time...We decided to develop the kiosk to run in a full-screen (kiosk mode) instance of … [Read more...]
Skinning your web
I was asked to co-author a white paper on the state of rich clients in this "Web 2.0" world. As I thought about it, "rich client" doesn't seem an appropriate term for the state of the art interfaces of today.Rich clients were developed to inherit some of the server's processing responsibilities and lessen network traffic. The idea was to distribute the application … [Read more...]
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