Category: Human-computer interaction
The design and user experience of a site is often a make or break experience. Users, company hires and investors are heavily swayed not only by how neat a site looks, but how well thought out it is. Simply put, if your site is bad on the experience or design front, it makes it look like your team can't execute, which is about the worst thing you can say about a startup.Continue
In modern web interface design, no other principle has been heralded and pushed onto us as much as the concept of user-centered design. User-centered design tells us that we should do everything we can to make our user interfaces as easy to use and as intuitive as possible.Continue
Google is reporting that its Web search, which was fully or mostly accessible yesterday in mainland China (where it is now 6 a.m.), is now being completely blocked.
The company's stock had slipped nearly 2% in after-hours trading at the time of this post. Google has not made an official statement to the media or on its blog.Continue
"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others. Continue
Rumor has it Google will be finally launching a cloud-based "Google Music" later this year, but if you can't wait that long, there's an alternative - Cloud Music.
The iPhone app is surely not as full-featured or integrated as something we'd expect to see from Google or Apple, but for two bucks and a bit of ingenuity, it'll certainly do.Continue
When people hear about ‘usability testing,’ many things come to mind—eye-tracking cameras, big HCI labs, a long testing process, a lot of expenses, and maybe a little confusion as well. Even at this stage in the proverbial game, usability testing isn’t so well understood, and misconceptions abound.
While it’s true that when doing usability testing there are several stumbling blocks that can impede your progress (lack of funding, lack of time, lack of motivation, and especially lack of testers), there are also many ways to get around these issues. There may even be reasons why they’re no longer valid in today’s Internet world.Continue
The LA Times reported over the weekend that Google had missed its deadline for implementing a the city's new email system, in part because it had not fully responded to some of the LA Police Department's security concerns.
But Google announced this morning that it was introducing a new edition of Google Apps, Google Apps for Government, an indication that Google is still committed to making inroads into enterprise, schools, and now government.Continue
A new report from Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond makes the case that Google's support for open-source is endearing the company to developers, who will in tern use Google's development tools to drive enterprise penetration. Hammond also argues that the company's appeal to end-users, through search and tools like Google Docs, will encourage IT managers to spring for Google's enterprise services like Google Apps.Continue
Earlier this year, Google added 