Friday 24 December 2010
User Experience for Developers
I have been banging on about users being savvied up on UX and Usability for years now. I am a firm believer that as a developer you should have at least some basic knowledge/experience in this area.
This article sums those points up nicely.
I also like this bit: "But sometimes you just need to cut the middleman and talk directly to the source" and I think Agile takes care of a lot of that.
This article sums those points up nicely.
I also like this bit: "But sometimes you just need to cut the middleman and talk directly to the source" and I think Agile takes care of a lot of that.
Tuesday 21 December 2010
Interesting Usability Links
The first one is about User Expectations with Mobile Apps.
The second is about Accessibility First - for a Better User Experience
The second is about Accessibility First - for a Better User Experience
Monday 20 December 2010
Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On
This is a really good paper, definitely worth a read. This is my favourite part of it:
"If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to
work—its technologies, its business models, and
perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And
to do that, we must take the Web to another level.
We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.
It’s time for the Web to engage the real world.
Web meets World—that’s Web Squared"
"If we are going to solve the world’s most pressing problems, we must put the power of the Web to
work—its technologies, its business models, and
perhaps most importantly, its philosophies of openness, collective intelligence, and transparency. And
to do that, we must take the Web to another level.
We can’t afford incremental evolution anymore.
It’s time for the Web to engage the real world.
Web meets World—that’s Web Squared"
Friday 3 December 2010
Amazon MP3
Last Thursday, Nina and I were looking for music for our Playing with Justice Concert. After determining the set list, we decided to purchase them from the Amazon MP3 website. This is by far the worst place I have ever purchased music.
Firstly, the download failed. Ok no big deal, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Was there an option to re-download though? No! After spending ages searching to re-find the download option, we had to contact the Amazon customer services, who then 'reactivated' the link. Tried a second time, download fails again, re-download link no longer available. Contacted them the third time, this time only 2 out of the 8 songs purchased downloaded and the link once again de-activated.
At this point, I decided to give up and download from iTunes. This is a major flaw in their system design as it does not count for download failure. There is no mechanism in place that allows you to track whether the download was successful or not (not even their player) and therefore ensuring the download link is not disabled.
This is such a waste of Oxfam money and I won't be using their store again. I'll stick to iTunes :)
Firstly, the download failed. Ok no big deal, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Was there an option to re-download though? No! After spending ages searching to re-find the download option, we had to contact the Amazon customer services, who then 'reactivated' the link. Tried a second time, download fails again, re-download link no longer available. Contacted them the third time, this time only 2 out of the 8 songs purchased downloaded and the link once again de-activated.
At this point, I decided to give up and download from iTunes. This is a major flaw in their system design as it does not count for download failure. There is no mechanism in place that allows you to track whether the download was successful or not (not even their player) and therefore ensuring the download link is not disabled.
This is such a waste of Oxfam money and I won't be using their store again. I'll stick to iTunes :)
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