Davin's blog

Category: User experience, web, technology

  • UX is a quality, not discipline, thoughts spurred by Peter Merholz

    I thought this post from Peter Merholz was a nice philosophical step-back for usability. User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline One of the things that has been hard for the “usability community” to accept is that usability is not really interesting in and of itself. And that usability isn’t really a goal, and…

  • Features of robust dynamic menus

    There are many fine examples of dynamic menus, menus that display sub menus when you hover your mouse pointer or bring focus to them in other ways, such as tabbing through links with your keyboard. I was reading a recent article on AlistApart.com regarding hybrid CSS menus, and the discussion that followed the article showed…

  • Software Development Company, nice branding

    I like the branding done by the company Art&Logic at their web site. It is a company of software engineers who telecommute on projects. Basically, what I like is that they are very straightforward about differentiating themselves. They say: We Do the Hard StuffWe specialize in difficult projects. Our clients typically have complex requirements and…

  • Change is afoot in the web…More foundational than when the first graphic showed up in a web browser…

    What an exciting time to be in the Web industry. I just read an essay by Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path that really got me thinking. Major change, like questions of what happens to our bookmarks when we lose our current definition of a web page? In 2002, Luke Wroblewski of the NCSA published a…

  • Oh, and how about major merger?

    In case you hadn’t heard already, Macromedia is being bought by Adobe. This is a huge deal, especially for the web industry. (Read about it at CNET.com) Me, I’m not pleased to hear it. I sort of like having them compete for market share. Keeps prices down. Increases innovation. What I hear is that Adobe…

  • Wired article: Ads that Annoy Also Succeed

    Ads That Annoy Also Succeed by Adam L. Penenberg of Wired.com points out a great fact: Spam and Pop-up ads actually work, or advertisers wouldn’t still be using them. One of the reasons they work is that the cost of doing these kinds of ads are so low, that a very low conversion rate can…

  • Legal action on accessible web sites in USA

    Here’s the press release from the New York State Attorney General’s Office: SPITZER AGREEMENT TO MAKE WEB SITES ACCESSIBLE TO THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED. As far as I know, this is the first major legal case in the U.S. where .com web sites are made to provide accessible web sites. The sites are Ramada.com…

  • IOC vs Free Speech?

    Wired.com posted an article, You’re Athletes, Not Journalists, that to me sounds like it is at odds with the whole “free speech” idea. The International Olympic Committee is barring competitors, as well as coaches, support personnel and other officials, from writing firsthand accounts for news and other websites.

  • Beauty of a web site

    Tractinsky, N., Katz, A.S., and Ikar, D.

  • Fitt’s Law Applied to the Web

    Fitt’s Law Applied to the Web by Scott Berkun, Microsoft Corporation. The basic idea in Fitts’s Law is that any time a person uses a mouse to move the mouse pointer, certain characteristics of objects on the screen make them easy or hard to click on. The farther the person has to move the mouse…