“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I have heard from a variety of people about voting instrument confusion in many states, not just near West Palm Beach Florida. We know from lots of examples of usability studies that errors on tasks arising from “dumb mistakes” are very common, with rates of easily 5%, 10%, or more. Elections, even important ones like for President of the United States, are often decided by much slimmer margins than
that. In our ever-mobile world, thorough testing of ballot techniques and standardization may be called for if we are to believe that we truly choose our elected officials rather than flip a coin.”

“Before I review “A Field Guide to the Yettie” I should first acknowledge that I cannot offer an objective critique. I am, after all, a “young entrepreneurial technocrat” — a “yettie” — myself. I write for an online
magazine; I own my fair share of midcentury modern furniture, as well as a soundtrack downloaded from the Web that runs heavily to electronica. Most important, I pass the ultimate yettie test: Although I’m not an extreme example of “an employee of an Internet company [who] cannot explain to my mother exactly what it is I do for a living,” my grandparents still can’t figure out what I do. I carry a cellphone, a Palm Pilot, an MP3 player and a bike messenger bag, drink lattes and shop vintage chic. I know what Unix is.”

“Reading the discussions of individual bugs provides an interesting glimpse into the workings of the Mozilla open-source process, and into the interactions between Mozilla and Netscape. In a number of cases, Mozilla engineers have fixed standards-compliance bugs and have had their patches to the source code reviewed twice by senior engineers. Even when the patches are extraordinarily simple ones, and the engineers are convinced that they pose no risk of introducing other bugs, their requests to include the fixes into the Netscape 6 release are denied by the Netscape Product Development Team (PDT) out of fear, apparently, that accepting these patches would cause the release schedule to slip.”

“As I write this, Netscape’s 5.0 web browser is almost two years late. Partially, this is because they made the suicidal mistake of throwing out all their code and starting over: the same mistake that doomed Ashton-Tate, Lotus, and Apple’s MacOS to the recycle-bins of software history. Netscape has seen its browser share go from about 80% to about 20% during this time, all the while it could do nothing to address competitive concerns, because their key software product was disassembled in 1000 pieces on the floor and was in no shape to drive anywhere. That single bad decision, more than anything else, was
the nuclear bomb Netscape blew itself up with.”

Jakob Nielsen, maintainer of www.useit.com, has published a hardcopy book entitled Designing Web Usability. This article asks “What can we learn from this book?”

Nielsen writes for a broad audience of decision-makers, HTML designers, graphic designers, and programmers. Nearly all of the examples are from e-commerce, corporate, or commercial sites. ArsDigita Systems Journal has a narrower audience in some ways. Nobody comes to ASJ to learn about HTML or graphic design, for example. But our audience is interested in a broader class of Web services than those treated by Nielsen. In particular, ASJ readers aspire to build sites that are collaborative, sites that use computing technology in an effective way, sites that have a dramatic impact on the users’ perceptions of how the Internet can be applied. We do have readers that would like to sell a few more widgets from their catalog ecommerce sites, but on balance we’d like every article here to be worth the time of an MIT computer science senior taking Software Engineering for Web Applications (http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web).

The goal of this article is to pick out the most interesting stuff from Nielsen’s book, leave out stuff that would be obvious to our readers (e.g., “frames suck”), and tie Nielsen’s material to related ideas.”

“I have a certain tendency to think of Michael Moore as a funny, slap-dash kind of guy. I think it’s because time dulls the memory of how dark Roger & Me and Moore’s later TV shows were — they were funny, but whistling-in-the-dark funny. From reading his latest letter, however, it sounds like he’s stopped whistling, and started shouting.”

“In my hometown of Flint, 32,000 GM jobs have been lost since you and Clinton took office. That’s 5,000 MORE GM jobs than were lost there during the ENTIRE 12 years of Reagan/Bush! Are you even aware
that two-thirds of the school children in Flint live below the federal poverty level? And you wonder why the race in Michigan is so close! These people you left behind had nowhere else to go EXCEPT to Nader — unless they choose to just stay home on Election Day, which is what the majority of them will do.”