Ren & Stimpy create a home page for the web, perform usability analysis on it, and analyze the results using multiple regression. "With the help of three hardworking, good looking, talented, and underpaid graduate students, we'll find a better way to make a home page!"
posted by ewagoner on Aug 15, 2003 - 27 comments

Usability Bazaar sounds like a crazy idea: getting together a group of people that will create usability guidelines for open source projects. Do you think that can work? Do OSS projects actually have usability problems? And can this actually work? Generally, usability people don't seem to get involved in open source. Why? (via webword.com)
posted by Adman on Jun 17, 2003 - 24 comments

Emotion and design: Atrractive things work better.
Of note here is that Don Norman works with Jakob Nielsen. In this essay he addresses the accusation that usability people want ugly design.
posted by Su on Jul 13, 2002 - 11 comments

Driving Over Jakob Nielsen: use left arrow to move left, right arrow to move right (which is quite useable really!)
posted by justgary on Jul 18, 2001 - 6 comments

Palm Beach Butterfly Ballot Reportedly Cost Gore "The newspaper said the ballot confusion also hurt President George W. Bush; 1,631 people voted for both Bush and Buchanan, whose hole was directly under that of Bush"
posted by owillis on Mar 11, 2001 - 34 comments

Chicago to enlist graphic designers for friendlier ballots. [free reg may be req'd] There's been a bunch of discussion about the usability problems with various voting systems, notably punch-card ballots. Chicago didn't have anything as dramatic as a "butterfly" prexy ballot or two pages' worth of candidates, but we still had close to 120,000 discards from 2.1 million votes -- and when compared with jurisdictions using other systems, there's little evidence to suggest that voters are skipping the presidential ballot. That's just how bad manual punch card technology is. Even if we can't get rid of them just yet, at least we can make sure they aren't confusing. Did I just post the twenty-sixth link on Metafilter today? GO AWAY. METAFILTER IS FULL. :)
posted by dhartung on Nov 29, 2000 - 24 comments

Greenspun on Neilsen. Damn if that don't sound like the Thrilla in Manila. I just stumbled over this piece on ArsDigita's Systems Journal site, formerly Web Tools Review. If you enjoy watching one so-called expert pick apart the opinions of another, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're sick unto death of both of them... skip it.
posted by baylink on Nov 29, 2000 - 1 comment

Ok, here comes the firestorm. Joel on Software has some very good things to say -- though, like most user-interface-design mavens, I think about 50% of the time that he hasn't comprehended what the problem really is... but in this piece, he's wrong.
posted by baylink on Aug 7, 2000 - 17 comments

Why tab based interfaces suck This site finally fell into interface hell. Originally they used tabs as navigation and still are now... BUT it doesn't work... Watch... every ecommerce company that copied its interface will also fall into the same interface hell... The others include ebags.com, urbanfetch and more....
posted by efader on Apr 8, 2000 - 8 comments

Here's a gross mis-use of the web: 800-357-7766.com. This mail order company is spamming the airwaves with commercials for their goofy 'tap lights,' and at the end of each commerical, they advertise their website with this unwieldy address. For less than $50, the company could have bought 'taplights.com' and directed customers there, but instead they force people to write down an address that goes against all the reasons why we have the domain registry in the first place. Why don't they just give our their IP address instead? It's about as useful as their phone number domain name.
posted by mathowie on Dec 25, 1999 - 0 comments