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User experience (“UX” to the cognoscenti) is a burgeoning field. Used to be we called this computer usability, user interface design or user interaction design. It was focused mostly on software such as word processors, spreadsheets, industrial control software, airplane cockpits, and medical applications. But, given how much money can be made on the web, […]

There is an electronic medical record program (EMR) called DocuTAP that I use at one of my jobs. It’s not bad overall, and it’s the top-rated Urgent Care Center EMR. But, as with every EMR, it can be improved. In many ways. I just ran across another new way in which it can be improved. […]

On occasion, an academic paper is published, but one of the following Letters to the Editor or editorial is much more important, with a longer-lasting influence than the original article. An example is an editorial about sore throats/tonsillitis by Dr. Centor, of Centor Criteria fame. Well, now we have similar situation in the field of […]

Fitts’s Law has been known since Paul Fitts first proposed it in 1954. Wikipedia has a detailed exposition of Fitts’s Law. In essence, it says that “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.” “Targets that are smaller […]

In Icons, Pedagogic Vectors, Forms Design and Posture we briefly discussed icon design. (Icons, in this context, meaning the sketch-pictures on buttons that you can click.) The bottom line was that it’s hard to learn and remember what icons stand for. In Performance, Data Pixels, Location, and Preattentive Attributes we discussed how icons should be […]