Frontend.com offers a analysis of ELearning software usability, a topic which, given my new gig, is particularly relevant. More interesting for the market analysis than the usability critique, they do use an interesting testing process in which they interrupt the testee in the midst of the task. Interruption is a good stress test of an application and gets at the "time to relearn" quandrant of software performance metrics as well as the memory load heuristic.

The other three performance metrics: time to learn, rate of errors, and time to execute. Subjective impression is also important, although potentially divergent from performance metrics. There's some nice exploration of the interplay of performance and subjective measures in the recently published A Simplified, Unified Measure of User Experience,William B Whitten II, AT&T Labs

6/8/2001 9:43:10 AM

I've been digging into Mozilla lately and came across a true hypertext advance, the use of relationships in links. ICab (Mac) has supported these for a while and it looks like Mozilla will too * **, creating forward, back, index and related list UI components. If you've never checked out a extended Mozilla bug thread, this is a good one and like many others demonstrates a very interesting design process.

Contrastingly, a negative blow for the longstanding hypertext vision, it seems M$oft is selling linkspace to the highest bidder in WinXP. Similar to NBCi's evolution of Flyswat, a squiggly underline indicates a set of links with origins other than the page author (see the wsj scoop or a screenshot).

On a positive note, the use of what are essentially sticky tooltips with embedded links is a technique available to most page authors via the cross-browser OverLib library... and of course, there are a variety of semi-practical tools for doing annotations including a Mozilla project and an IE javascript implementation for the W3C Annotea project.

6/7/2001 1:25:40 PM

Accck! Popup windows have evolved dramatically as click through rates have dropped over the years. There are actual pop-under banners for site owners who want to be a kindler, gentler intrusion. Today, I witnessed my first interstitual popup ad which brings itself back into focus for it's animation run. I still favor the full screen width banner ad, like my logo banner above.

6/5/2001 6:08:02 PM

O'Reilly explores OS X and the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, pointing to the Apple UE site.

In a bizarre twist of fate, my new gig is in iXL's old Los Angeles headquarters. In a word, swank.

6/4/2001 4:37:51 PM

Coming up, AAAI-2000 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence For Web Search (papers in ps, get ghostScript)..

6/3/2001 11:47:03 AM