Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Category: Usability / Accessibility

  • Trusting a black box

    Steven Johnson wrote in Everything Bad Is Good For You about how in video games we have to figure out the rules of the built world. We are not just exploring a virtual space but build a mental map of cause and effect. The humor of memes about video games having prepared one when finding…

  • The X

    Dear software designers. An X in the top right corner means to close the window. I get why it does not do anything. You really want me to go on the product tour. Just understand that I am easily distracted, so let me go on the tour later. (Really not at all.)

  • Enlightened Empathy

    At the time AirBNB was so small, Joe Gebbia personally went to listers to photograph homes for the listings. In taking these photos… “We got so close that we go to step into their shoes for a moment and see the world through their eyes, and really see the pain points that they were feeling,” says…

  • Pocket Feature Request: Pin

    I tend to collect things to read later. Pocket is where they aggregate. (I do use Facebook’s Save Post feature, but only when on my phone to send to Pocket once I am at a browser.) A feature that would help me is to pin important ones to the top. Ideally, anything I have partially…

  • I know Kung Fu!

    (No, not really.) What If We Could Upload Books to Our Brains?: At this point [Neil deGrasse] Tyson interjected: Are you saying we could just upload “War and Peace”? Yes, Kurzweil answered: “We will connect to neocortical hierarchies in cloud with pre-loaded knowledge.” There is a scene in The Matrix where the program for Kung…

  • WP Jetpack Publicize Expiration

    WordPress.com makes the Jetpack. They strongly push self-hosted sites to use it, especially the Publicize feature. Publicize is how my blog posts show up on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Google+. WP.com also strongly pushes using the composition on their site rather than the one on the self-hosted site. It is cleaner and easier to use.…

  • Buffer Feature Requests

    Dual Window LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ have significantly different character number restrictions than Twitter. Naturally, Twitter limits posts to their notorious 140 characters. LinkedIn allows 700, and Google+ / Facebook allow about five thousand. I like to post things with a quote from the articles I share that captures what I found most interesting about it.…

  • Email Changes

    Ran across a site where if one changes the email address associated with the account, it sends the confirmation email to the new address. Say, I am a Blackhat and used a phishing attack to get the password for the account. Having legitimately logged in, I then change the email address associated with it from victim@outlook.com…

  • Confirmations

    Received an email from a company they were using to validate my email address is the correct one. It specifically told me not to do anything if the email address is correct and to let them know if it was not. We’re writing to confirm that this is your current email address. If this email…