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WUD: captcha problems discussed in assistive tech expo
Tom Schultz and I are at the World Usability Day event hosted by Michigan State University today. We sat in a session this morning that focused on a demonstration and discussion of assistive technologies. An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual impairments. One of the presenters went…
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Paper: crucial to Web design
At first thought, Web design is a digital job. But as long as I have done this work, I’ve had paper on hand. In the 90s I’d quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each…
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XSL to get text from Apple Pages documents
Pages is the name of Apple’s basic word processor program that comes with their iWork suite of applications. It’s not a bad program, but a number of months ago I needed to switch up to MS Word for the Mac. Well, this morning I was looking through some old files and found a text document…
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Pistol match, Oct 20, 2009: the good and the bad
Last night after work I drove up to Bay City to Duncan’s Outdoors Shop to compete in a pistol league match. It’s the second one I’ve made it to, and shot some of my best…and worst scores. National Match Course 1 Total SF TF RF 95 91-2X 93-1X 279-3X National Match Course 2 Total SF…
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Bing delivers surprising amount of traffic to rangelistings.com
One of my hobby sites is rangelistings.com, a site with the goal of providing a map of each state with the locations of shooting ranges on it. I keep an eye on the web traffic pretty regularly, and about 90% of the traffic it receives is from search engines. Up till the last couple of…
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A Walk in Ringwood Forest
We spent about 2 hours in Ringwood Forest yesterday. Lila and Eva carried sticks to fight off the evil fairies and demons that inhabited the woods. You could tell they were attacking when the wind moaned through the treetops and yellow leaves swooped down to us. Luckily, we made it back to the car.
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How to aim with iron or open sights
A guy in his 50s a few benches to my right was thumbing .40 cal cartridges into a pistol magazine. He had arrived when I was about to box up my gear and head home. But, I had seven rounds of .22 leftover, so instead of letting them roll around in my gun box, I…
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A Sad Tale of Pagination
I imagine some professional chefs are accused of over-analyzing a bowl of soup now and then. Like that, as a user experience designer, I get caught up in little pieces of user interface on a regular basis. This particular story concerns a navigation system that utilizes pagination in what at first seems an obvious choice,…
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UserVue review
UserVue is an application from TechSmith. At work we’ve used it recently to do remote user interviews, where we’ve had people who use our services talk us through some emailed reports they received from us. It allows us to view and record a user’s screen, and save it as a WMV or Morae file. Additionally,…