I admit I have never read any of Jakob Nielsen’s books, only a few of his articles online, and the ensuing angry reactions they incite from the design community. And I never really understood what the big deal was. Sure he comes across as a bit of a pompous ass, but the majority of his… Continue reading The Problem with Nielsen (UW2k4, Day 4)
Author: Craig
Usability Week 2004, Day 3
More of same. More graphs. More statistics. More information of no value in my day-to-day work. And more doodles. Actually, I did glean a bit of actual interesting information today, but it was barely mentioned in passing so I pretty much latched onto it by accident. Somewhere in the middle of the presentation on usability… Continue reading Usability Week 2004, Day 3
Usability Week 2004, Day 2
Today was more of the same. Lots of theory, lots of procedural guidelines, little or no actual principles to put into practice. This seminar is intended for “usability professionals,” i.e., people whose job it is to test systems for usability and report on their findings. It is not for the designers and developers who then… Continue reading Usability Week 2004, Day 2
Usability Week 2004, Day 1
This week I’m attending Usability Week, a 5-day usability boot camp put on by the Nielsen Normal Group. As in Jakob Nielsen. Day 1 was a pretty low-level overview, covering the science of usability and going into some procedural detail about how to perform usability testing. Quite honestly, it was nothing I didn’t know already… Continue reading Usability Week 2004, Day 1
Bureaucrats Finally Starting to Get It
A few things happened this week in the fight against invasive marketing. Foremost is the announcement that the very first arrests under the federal CAN-SPAM act have been made. Arrest warrants were issued for four spammers in the Detroit area on the grounds that they sent fraudulent emails hawking weight loss pills, though two of… Continue reading Bureaucrats Finally Starting to Get It
FP!
Well, ok, it’s not really the First Post in the most technical sense, but it’s the first truly NEW post since the change of venue. I still have some more old stuff to add in, but first I’ll need to get the archiving sorted out. The left-side menu is already an unweildy height (especially on… Continue reading FP!
Impending site overhaul update: Overhauled
Update: 4.29.04 As you may have guessed if you’re reading this now, the relaunch has occured and I’m now in a spiffy new weblog format. Still plenty of kinks to iron out, numerous css bugs to address (many in IE, no surprise) and old content to be imported, but here it is. I’ll be fiddling… Continue reading Impending site overhaul update: Overhauled
The Page 23 Meme
For the past few days a meme has been spreading through most of the design blogs I read. I first saw it on Asterisk, then it spread to Hicks, Inman, Stopdesign, Binary Bonsai, Airbag and many others. In a few short days it has overrun this segment of the weblogging community (I refuse to use… Continue reading The Page 23 Meme
The IE6 Randomly Bulleted Menu Bug
Update This article was written in 2004, long before I had learned of IE6’s mysterious and vexing hasLayout property. The disappearing bullet backgrounds can be fixed without increasing the selector’s specificity by invoking hasLayout on the list items. There are a few ways to trigger Layout in IE, but the preferred method nowadays is the… Continue reading The IE6 Randomly Bulleted Menu Bug
2003, The Obligatory Year in Review
The new year is upon us and ’tis the season to look back on everything we just lived through. G.fc has continued to flounder, with little or no community activity and very low traffic. It’s become very much a personal project, essentially my own blog with occasional contributions from a few good friends. The impending… Continue reading 2003, The Obligatory Year in Review