Monday, January 06, 2003

Chiplace.org is introducing papers accepted to CHI 2003 with online discussions with the authors. Notably, work at MS is finally getting the idea, brought to realization with Zoe, that email messages don't happen in isolation but form conversations and relationships. This works takes a different tack with an attempt to represent the tree and sequence aspects of mail. Winning the neat idea award, check out Haptic gravity wells. 7:18:47 PM

	Thursday, December 19, 2002

Open source project spotting: xSiteable: xSiteable is a full relational and topical website creation framework and tool, written entirely in XSLT, using topicmaps as the backbone information technology, bundled with the fast Sablotron parser. It features XTM and a notation-language for content. Honorable mention: XPWeb, support for software development. 10:29:36 PM

	Wednesday, December 11, 2002

Sanjay points to a nice exercise in visualization for diffs. 12:02:01 AM

	Tuesday, December 10, 2002

UI Blooper of the day: Your search matched 0 of 392 documents. 0 are presented, ranked by relevance. No documents matched your query. This was the entire page. Location withheld to protect the guilty. Don't ever do this to your users... prevent errors, provide clear exits, enable recovery from error. 11:37:16 PM

Google Viewer is nifty. When I did a vcr (IE only sorry)for search results, I used a sidebar frame. I think my time controller, while it never got all the kinks out, is superior in allowing a full range of pages-per-minute, rather than a 1-second scale modify widget. Now, we just need the thing to have thumbnails and a quick way to switch from GViewer to the result list and back again. I'll have to put updating the search result version for Mozilla. 10:57:38 PM

I don't know whether to be dismayed or enthralled at the prospect of an rich media ad-oriented delivery platform on tablets. On one hand, a dedicated presentation layer tends to improve usability -- on the other hand, this kind of power play in client software tends to steal aspects of user control. 1:46:14 AM

	Monday, December 09, 2002

My talk slides from the Soc. for Computers in Psychology are now available. Exported via OpenOffice -- not quite ideal but better than MS PPoint html. 9:38:01 AM

Radial Context for phoenix! With working prefs (still unlike mozgest). 2:36:35 AM

	Sunday, December 01, 2002

Lots of things to think about in the working paper Usability and Open Source. One of my first reactions is to the suggestion that OS projects have a tendency toward "creeping featurism". Often this expresses itself as an array of preferences. Creeping featurism in preferences in the Mozilla project also seems to have stemmed from indecision in choices about methods of operation A solution to this problem is more user-support for learning and customizing the browser. Phoenix does this well with popup blocking by observing popups and offering to block further instances. This is a well received feature by all accounts -- the challenges may be greater elsewhere. As an aside to my reading, I tried a query in Mozilla's bugzilla on "usability". Interesting, there's an effort underway to collect more usage data, even if it is a Netscape serving aspect -- Netscape search. In another case, a critical mail/news feature for providing a sidebar free navigation system for folders has it's UI spec on an inaccessible Netscape intranet server. It's a shame, email is clearly a realm with lots of room for improvement and huge impact potential. 8:01:20 PM

It's interesting to compare JJG's Visual Vocabulary for IA to the Diane Notation for task modeling. 5:12:44 PM

	Wednesday, November 27, 2002

So we're rapidly approaching 10 years of web browsing, and browser history mechanisms are showing their age. There's good evidence to show the back button is broken. More on this to come as I crusade to fix it in Mozilla, and hack up my own solution to prove the utility. Lot's of context for this effort, here's some fresh waves: WebHCI :Foraging: Professor Anita H. Komlodi Collection WebHCI :History: Creating Custom Graphical Web ... Views Based Article HCI HOW USERS REPEAT THEIR ... ACTIONS ON Article WebHCI :History: Scratchpad: Mechanisms for Better ... Navigation\ in Article WebHCI :History: COOPerator's graphical browser Article WebHCI :History: WEBPATH - A Three ... Dimensional Web Article WebHCI :History: Review of Literature Collection WebHCI :History: Visualizing Web Browser History ... Data Article WebHCI :History: Browser History Diagram Discussion 6:38:58 PM