Juliette/SF

I recently decided to cut back on media consumption and increase vegetable consumption in one swift move, by cancelling Netflix and Rhapsody subscriptions and joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture — basically a farm subscription). I was generally pretty happy with Netflix but didn’t cycle through DVDs frequently enough for it to be worth it. […]

Found in today’s nytimes.com, a compelling proposal for a ballot re-design.

Jakob Nielsen just released his list of the 10 Best Application UIs of 2008
Here’s what he had to say about how the winners used usability research to build superior products:

Usability Methods: Cheap but Contextual
The winning designs are revolutionary, but there’s nothing revolutionary about the usability methods employed to ensure their quality. The teams used well-known […]

I grabbed this screenshot from an amusingly unhelpful page of help documentation.

Want to learn more about how to set up and manage a user research program within your organization? If so, you are humbly encouraged to vote for our panel for inclusion in next year’s SxSW: Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users. My partners in crime are Mark Trammell (Digg), Carla Borsoi (Ask.com), […]

Amaztype uses the amazon.com API to pull search results for a given keyword, then returns results in the shape of the search term. My name returns a lot of different editions of Julie of the Wolves.

(Another great find from Kristin.)

Wordle has been making the rounds lately but I’ve just gotten in to mess around with it — and it’s fabulous.
Here is a Wordle rendering of all of my del.icio.us tags:

Sure, it’s just a tag cloud. But, because the final layout is so well done and the creation interface is so thoughtfully put together, […]

I’ve been writing up research summaries and proposals and just penned this inelegant but hopefully useful statement on what I perceive as the value of user testing.
We’re working with a very small sample size and are not claiming that these are statistically significant results. Rather, the usability sessions are thoughtful, detailed conversations about our product […]

At Safari Books Online we have started a monthly Usability Friday — and you should, too!
The idea came from Steve Krug who outlined this model of running usability evaluations at last October’s Voices that Matter conference. He proposed that usability evaluation should be: regularly scheduled, attended in person rather than via webcast, and relatively fun […]

Educational technology of the future - unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)

Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next […]