10 Must-see UX Videos

http://johnnyholland.org/2010/03/01/johnny-tvs-10-must-see-ux-videos/

1. Interaction Design—Bill Verplank

2. Drawing Ideas and Communicating Interaction—Mark Baskinger

3. Designing Humanity into Your Products—Bill DeRouchey, FBtB09

4. Sketch-a-Move—Anab Jain and Louise Klinker

5. The Design of Future Things—Don Norman

6. Why designers fail and what to do about it—Scott Berkun

7. Singing the Body Electric—Fabio Sergio

8. Sketching & Paper Prototyping—Todd Zaki Warfel

9. Adam Greenfield at Frontiers of Interaction V

10. Being Human Is NOT Quantifiable—Jeff Parks

Nice overview of Prototyping

Just a reminder to myself.

Industry trends in prototyping

Of course it’s not without bias. But I recognize all the reasons he mentioned. It’s really a nice overview.

I don’t think I can structure and organize the reasoning that neatly even though I’m fully aware of all the advantages.

Love the comments, too.

Chrome couldn’t find www.google.com, is it a joke?

Let me start from a screen shot

Guess under what circumstance did I get this page

…

I got this page because the wireless route wasn’t ready, I didn’t have internet access. So, no browser could access anything at that moment. It isn’t really fair to say that they cannot find this website; whatever website it is. However, this line reads like typical error message when you try to access a url that does not exist.

What’s wrong with the traditional explanation: “Oops, we couldn’t access www.xxx.com right now.”?

Luckily, in this case, we all know that www.google.com does exist. And what if I set  www.yahoo.com or www.microsoft.com as my homepage?

“Oops! Google Chrome could not find www.microsoft.com”

It might invite other thoughts, isn’t it?

So, let’s hope this is a joke.

Good experience with IE 8

I started to really explore IE 8 and Bing from 1.5 hours ago triggered by the positive news of the coming marriage between MS and Yahoo.

Accelerator – dreams come true!

For years I wish there is a browser provides a shortcut of different services. For instance, the most common one would be Dictionary.com, IMDB.com, or Wikipedia.org. Let’s compare the following scenarios and find out the benefit of using Accelerator.

Scenario: from Wikipedia –> IMDB

I’m searching characters of TV series on wiki, I would like to check certain actor/actress on IMDB.com.

Old fashioned way:

1. copy the name of the actor/actress
2. start a new browser window/tab
3. make sure mouse is at the address bar of the new window/tab
4. type in www.imdb.com
5. paste the name into the search box of imdb

With Accelerator:

1. select the name of the actor/actress
2. wait 1 second for the Accelerator icon shows up or right click
3. select IMDB icon from the dropdown list.

Of course, to be honest, in order to be perfect, Accelerator has a long way to go, especially to manage the Accelerator at this moment takes quite some efforts. And it is confusing. There are at least two types of Accelerators, Default Accelerators and Accelerators. The default Accelerators appear directly in the dropdown list. Non-default Accelerators can only be accessed through the 2ndary dropdown list “All Accelerators”, as shown below.

InPrivate – A little more privacy

There is a very interesting article about InPrivate, IE 8: InPrivate Browsing Mode Details. It’s interesting because according to this article, InPrivate is been used because users want to browse naughty stuff. That is quite a statement. I don’t really agree. Oh, yes, there are so many reasons why we don’t want big corporations know what we are doing. Anyway, here is the summary of what InPrivate can do:

1. InPrivate™ Browsing lets you control whether or not IE saves your browsing history, cookies, and other data
2. Delete Browsing History helps you control your browsing history after you’ve visited websites.
3. InPrivate™ Blocking informs you about content that is in a position to observe your browsing history, and allows you to block it
4. InPrivate Subscriptions allow you to augment the capability of InPrivate Blocking by subscribing to lists of websites to block or allow.

Who decided that only password is forgettable? How about Usernames?

Since the first year I was on Internet, I’ve been kept wondering why there is never options like “forget your user name?” Why that all the administrators automatically assume that I could only forget my password but not my user name? Why?

The reality is that when I need to retreat log in information, 95% of the time I forgot the username instead of the password. I could always manage my passwords very well since there is no constrain in setting passwords. Your password wouldn’t be rejected because somebody else happens to use the same password. However setting user names usually does have many constrains. First of all, if it’s unique, which means if somebody has already used the string I wanted to use as my ID I would have to make up another name. Which is why I’m maintaining much less passwords than usernames at a time.

Plus, what I really hate is that when I request the “lost” password, I receive an email with the exact password just in plain text. Great, now everybody sees my password!

So, PLEASE, give us the right to forget username!!!!