Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: usability

  • MFA on a smartphone

    Multi-factor authentication (MFA; aka Two-factor authentication aka 2FA) makes access to things more secure. However, how to do it from the same smartphone seems to be an afterthought. First, if someone has the smartphone which is used to generate the code, receive the text, answers the phone call, or confirms the access, then is MFA…

  • Open Letter to UX Designers

    Do not move things right before I click on them. Windows this means you. Opening up a new window steals focus from my mouse to the new one. Opening a new window when I did not explicitly request it and while I am typing or navigating something in order to do something critical infuriates me. Facebook this…

  • Microsoft Outlook 2007 Wishlist

    From 2001 to 2006, Microsoft Outlook was the email client I used for work (and on my home computer to access work stuff). Back then, Exchange was not available, so a number of the features were more hacks than reality. However, it worked pretty well. When I changed jobs, Netscape and Thunderbird were the pre-installed…

  • Tumblr

    I’m not a fan of Tumblr. At the moment I use it for a partial life stream (a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline – thanks Krynsky). It is just publishing a feed of several of my blogs. It a very limited public view. The one main thing I dislike…

  • Found My Soul

    A few weeks ago when I got home from out of town, I could not find the remote to my TiVo. On the third day, I ran to Best Buy to acquire a universal remote replacement. The replacement lacked critical usability features. Several buttons were simply missing: Select button to navigate the menus. Guide button…

  • More Spiking CPU Over Assignments

    More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • False Panacea

    I ran across Jon Udell’s post on The once and future university which pointed to Mike Caulfield’s post with the video (Transcript). Technology, I think, is a false Panacea. The role of information technology is to better aggregate information for whatever it is we do. Such aggregation draws disparate sources together, but the sources fail…

  • A More Usable Usability

    Previously I have seen usability describing ease of using a web site. These four essences of usability are interesting. I believe that to satisfy customers, a Web site must fulfill four distinct needs: Availability: A site that’s unreachable, for any reason, is useless. Responsiveness: Having reached the site, pages that download slowly are likely to…

  • links for 2007-07-18

    . Innovation at Risk (tags: books economics copyright patents law intellectualproperty) A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not – New York Times (tags: copyright economics law patents intellectual_property) Contents (tags: oracle oracle.features database) Vista Ate My Homework (tags: blackboard resources webctvista.support webctvista.howto WebCT_Vista Blackboard_Vista) Show and Tell: Tips for a Successful Implementatio n…