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Icons, Pedagogic Vectors, Forms Design and Posture
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Icons and Pedagogic Vectors We all have trouble remembering a program’s graphical icons. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has a standard for icons – an icon must be interpreted correctly by 2/3 of test subjects. In usability and error-prevention terms, a 1/3 error rate is poor, but reality is even worse – an experimental study […]
Healthcare IT in a Nutshell
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
Keith Conover, M.D., FACEP version 1.2 10/22/14 You may want to read this introduction before you dive into this material. Get computer-literate and learn Healthcare IT in just a few hours: read/click on the links *.*: Star-Dot-Star (any file name, any file extension) .$$$: Temporary File 3G: “Third-Generation” cellular services: broadband over cellphones and cellphone […]
Goals vs. Tasks
Friday, January 8th, 2010
In past articles, we discussed human-illiterate computers, usability, memorability, learnability, Tognazzini’s Paradox, design integrity, simplicity, abstraction, discount usability testing, and personas. Now, we will discuss goals and tasks. These are similar terms, and sometimes used almost interchangeably. But using the terms task and goal sloppily is, according to expert software designers, an error that leads […]
Personas
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
In past articles, we discussed human-illiterate computers, and we discussed usability, memorability, learnability and Tognazzini’s Paradox: how changing a single word can make big differences in usability. We also discussed design integrity, simplicity, abstraction, and discount usability testing. Now, we’ll talk about personas. It seems to me that personas are a bit like Critical Incident […]
Discount Usability Testing
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009
In the first of this series, I tried to persuade you that your computer was human-illiterate, and we defined and discussed usability, memorability, and learnability. In the second, we discussed Tognazzini’s Paradox: how the hardest part of designing an effective program is often what seems the most trivial—sometimes simply a matter of changing a single […]
