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Posts Tagged ‘usability’

Links for September 3

In Commentary on 3 September 2009 tagged math, Ruby on Rails, torture, usability with no comments

First of all, happy birthday to my friend Paul, who doesn’t read my blog.

• Guardian: CIA doctors face human experimentation claims. Just read the headline.
• Tim Bray: Ravelry. Tim interviews Casey Forbes, the tech guy behind Ravelry, a site for knitting enthusiasts and covers everything from bootstrapping a business to scaling Ruby on Rails.
• The Numbers Guy: Some Theorists Withhold Best-Voting-System Award. Voting experts weigh in on the new voting system for the Oscars this year.
• Hanan Cohen: Spoken Directions to Web Content (aka “Go to page number”). A good, simple idea for improving Web site usability. This approach could also be extended to create a spoken instructions/shortened URL hybrid service for a site.

The economics of ratings systems

In Commentary on 20 February 2009 tagged economics, usability with 1 comment

Tyler Cowen on the economics of ratings systems:

Evaluation systems with fewer and grosser distinctions are often more credible because they are easier to monitor.

On the topic of Spin magazine going from rating records on a scale of 1 to 5 to a scale of 1 to 10.

Usability and performance, part 1

In Commentary on 17 April 2008 tagged performance, usability, Web development with 4 comments

I’ve started collecting screen shots that illustrate the problem of performance issues affecting the usability of Web sites. I saw this one in a shopping cart from an online store (I don’t remember which one, and they probably wouldn’t want to be identified anyway).

As you can see, this text was added to the Web page because the “add to cart” request takes a long time to process. To prevent users from adding duplicate items to their cart, the Web site warns the user to keep waiting rather than pressing the button again.

The proper approach would be to improve the shopping cart so that adding items doesn’t take so long, or to find a more robust hosting provider, but those alternatives are more work and more expensive. I’d be willing to bet that the people running the site are using third party software that they can’t fix even if they want to.