Masha Ioveva

Mar 23

Awesome handdrawn GIF sketches. More awesomeness @ http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/19932/hand-drawn-animated-gifs-by-dain-fagerholm.html

Feb 24

Unanswerable Prayers by Christopher Hitchens | Byliner -

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Jan 10

eGrades

Jan 06

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More to love about Neal Stepehenson - here is a small gem from his 1999 essay, “In the Beginning was the Command Line”:

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27….

and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes—and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

Jan 03

Insiders Tell The Story Of LinkedIn's Stunning Success -

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“HOFFMAN: The two most key people were Allen Blue and Jean-Luc. Alan knew everything from product specs to design to HTML. Jean-Luc does everything from server engineering to operations to technology strategy and planning. One of the things that makes small startups fun to work is you don’t have any deadwood. Everyone pulls more than their own weight. If you don’t do that you don’t survive.” — Insiders Tell The Story Of LinkedIn’s Stunning Success

“Of the several ideas I had post-SocialNet, I found that transforming the way people could take control of their professional lives and easily work together to find the right people and right information was the one that was most compelling, so I cofounded LinkedIn.” — Insiders Tell The Story Of LinkedIn’s Stunning Success

“During testing it turned out that most, but not all, players understood the sliding button control scheme right away. But when playing in groups, if one person figured it out, everyone else then picked it up as well, which showed that the process was teachable. And that’s why, where you would normally see a “press start” prompt at the beginning of the game, Dance Central instead features what Challinor describes as a “passive tutorial,” which quickly teaches players how to use the menu. What’s great about this set-up is it that it manages to intuitively show players how to navigate the menu, but it’s so brief that experienced players can simply blow past it without any real thought.” — The Kinect effect: how Harmonix mastered Dance Central’s menus

The Kinect effect: how Harmonix mastered Dance Central's menus -

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My take is that it’s a very complicated issue. When Bob Virzi and others conducted research in the 1980s on the number of users, it was found that five to eight users was typically enough for testing. But the field has changed since the research was conducted.

Since these initial studies, there are many differences. Many more people are using the same application for different task goals. Also, the audiences today are much larger than they were in the 1980s. Interfaces are just much more complex because many of the UIs we use are embedded in other things.

For example, how do you conduct a usability test with only 5-8 people on an iPhone with 25 applications on it? We’re talking about a highly customizable mobile device where the individual experience is very different from one person to the next. This wasn’t true in the early studies on the number of users.