Category Archives: usability
11 May 2012
We Are All Stakeholders
Can you think of anyone whose life is not affected by government information and communications technology? Anyone at all?
Even in the farthest reaches of the remotest areas, even when a population is completely isolated from the outside world, people’s lives are affected by the policies and procedures of the government that administers the area in [...]
posted by at 02:05 Leave a comment
2 December 2011
Usability in Government Systems — A Forthcoming Book
Just before US Thanksgiving of 2011, my co-editor and I delivered to our publisher the manuscript of a new book on usability in government systems. Two and a half years after Dianne Murray suggested doing a book and we chose the topic — and six weeks after I began the most intensive period of work [...]
12 July 2011
My Comment to the White House on Federal Websites
Today at 4pm EDT (I’m writing this about 5-6 hours earlier) the White House will have a live chat on improving Federal websites. I plan to be there.
I put in a comment via the form at whitehouse.gov. Here’s essentially* what I said:
The problem is not so much the number of Federal domains (although I agree [...]
posted by at 10:07 Leave a comment
9 February 2011
Mobile boarding pass: Not for me, thanks
Yesterday I used a mobile boarding pass for the first time. United Airlines’ checkin didn’t make me choose between mobile and paper, so I chose both — it wasn’t a risk to try mobile because I would have the paper as a backup, just in case.
I clicked “Mobile” and had it sent to my phone [...]
posted by at 08:02 8 Comments
6 June 2010
ATAC’s new in-bus displays: A step forward, but more is needed
Rome’s public transportation system, known as ATAC (Azienda Tranvie ed Autobus del Comune di Roma), continues to improve in the 20+ years since my first visit to this wonderful city. For example, some of the bus stops now have signs indicating when the next bus is expected to arrive (see the article in L’Occhio – [...]
posted by at 11:06 3 Comments
8 October 2009
When Alphabetical Order Is Not Logical
Every so often, the question comes up among interaction designers and usability professionals regarding whether alphabetical order is a logical order. (See, for example, the February 2009 discussion on the Interaction Design list.) We’ve all seen numerous lists that appear in alphabetical order (and in which it makes sense): country, state, surname, street name, auto [...]
27 June 2009
The Unbearable Rightness of Catastrophizing
Most people think of catastrophizing as a way of thinking that healthy people avoid. The online dictionaries agree. Wiktionary, for example, defines the act as “to regard a bad situation as if it were disastrous or catastrophic”; Go-Dictionary has it as “to envisage a situation as being worse than it is”. Clearly they’re seeing it [...]
posted by at 01:06 Tagged expert review, usability assessment, usability evaluation, usability review, UX design 1 Comment
17 August 2013
“Usability in Govt Sys” book review from Society for Technical Communication