usability 13

People often email me questions they could have answered with ChatGPT. I just copy-paste the question, copy-paste the answer. This isn’t new. From 1998-2005, I used to do this Google searches. Even people who have Google Maps on their phone ask me for directions. I pull out my Google Maps and tell them. They don’t even get the sarcasm. Effectively, I’m the Human-as-an-Interface (HAAI everyone!) But I learnt today that this has historical precedent. Doormen, lift operators, doormen, the waiter who recites the menu, the secretary we used to dictate to, … ...

This week, I learned: Mughals just replaced the top of most temples with Mosque domes as part of the conquer or die policy “Math is racist”. Because people who can’t solve it can’t because of their underprivileged background! Winners: commodity businesses, companies that own lots of data like Reddit and Stackoverflow, profitable bootstrapped businesses Making a tool more usable, e.g. a video, can have a 10-100X impact. Yet every developer thinks it’s redundant All in one podcast. Can Google save itself? the success of a developer platform is the number of people using it. But not everyone uses it equally. Some people create winning products which drives attention to the platform. Use llm proxy like that to measure weekly average users and cost saving through caching one week ago, if someone at Google stood up and said we have too many black people in our images, the responsible AI team would have shut them down calling them racist. They had too much power and it was a one-way conversation. With the backlash now, there is a lot more awareness and acceptance of the balance. Security is like that. It’s too easy to empower and shut things down until there is a backlash the lawyer’s job is to tell you what’s not possible. But like Travis, your job is to decide whether it’s worth the risk of running a taxi company without a license or not Americans pronounce Sundar pichai’s name as Sun Daar! data licensing has become a business model. Reddit, Accel springer, stack overflow and many others are licensing their content to Google and open AI for several million dollars.

In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.) Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly. ...

A List Apart’s article on Inline Validation is one of the most informative I’ve read in a while — and it’s backed by solid data. Some useful lessons: Inline validation can reduce form completion time by 40% Use inline validations where the user doesn’t know if they’ll get it wrong (e.g. is a username available?). Don’t use them if user knows the answer (e.g. their name) Validate on blur, not on keypress (it’s distracting, and users can’t multitask) Comments jesse 25 Sep 2009 4:15 pm: maybe u should add some inline validation on your comments form, instead of the wordpress error page?

Creating user friendly 404 pages.

Jakob Nielsen’s old write-up on how users read on the web. Actually, this is how people read anything. I write my e-mails, PowerPoint presentations, and Word reports this way.

HTML keyboard shortcuts using the “accesskey” attribute.

10 best intranets of 2005 according to Jakob Nielsen.

Neat prank on the RIAA. Intruiging, though, about their contact address being hard to find. So I tried the same, by Googling RIAA First hit: www.riaa.org/index.cfm -> The Page Cannot Be Found Second hit: www.riaa.org. No contact info on 1st page. Tried “About us”. No luck. Searching for “contact” on the site gave 704 useless pages. Google search for “contact” in www.riaa.org gives www.riaa.org/contact.cfm -> The page cannot be found I give up. But this guy John Hargrave is good.

Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 web design mistakes of 2002. Fortunately, I was committing only one of them – fixed font sizes. Now rectified.

I always felt using voice to communicate with computers was a bad idea. In my case, it’s more because speaking takes up a lot of energy. But looks like it takes up a lot of thought power as well. Maybe speech recognition is not such a good idea.

Jakob Nielsen has a whole bunch of patents relating to Internet usability. Metafilter has an interesting discussion on whether that’s a good idea.

Web usability. About interface design on the Web.