Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

GPS: Labeling and doing two things at the same time

Posted on June 23rd, 2008 by by eklem

GPS: Labeling and doing two things at the same time

GPS navigation for cars still have a way to go before perfect. A while ago, as a passenger from Oslo to Lista in Norway, I got to examine a TomTom GPS screen real estate a bit more thorough, and found an odd detail. Whenever driving South-West, the arrow in the lower left corner of the [...]

Finn.no bits: more on ordering

Posted on June 16th, 2008 by by vdl Labs

A short addendum to the post on Finn.no’s ordering criteria puzzle. I wanted to look around at offers in the rental market, and as I reached the list of counties, I found another surprising - for lack of a better word - way of ordering the list.

Technorati fails on login failure

Posted on June 12th, 2008 by by vdl Labs

Last night I was going to visit the Technorati site so manage some blogs I have registered over there. It was a first time login with the new laptop, and in the old I had stored the password in Firefox password manager. Hence I tried a password being unsure if it was the correct one.

Where’s the content? A crude real estate allocation comparison of six leading norwegian news sites

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 by by vdl Labs

I have done a crude comparison of the same six leading news sites HPs as in the previous post, to show visually how much real estate is allocated to news content on each of them. This is shown by dimming out everything that is not news content, and so advertising, headers, logos, menus etc.: Take [...]

Six norwegian news websites homepages: a visual comparison

Posted on May 30th, 2008 by by vdl Labs

This post is more about the visual attached than anything else. I have many opinions on norwegian news websites: I am used to Italian newspapers, where the “tabloid factor” is not so important, and politics dominate the content (well, someone may argue that italian politics IS entertainment suited for tabloids….but that’s another story…..).
Let’s give the [...]

The “click here” nightmare

Posted on May 13th, 2008 by by vdl Labs

I am absolutely astonished that there still are so many websites which label links with a resounding “click here”. It is, so far as I can recall, one of the oldest usability rules that a link label should provide users with a clue as to what happens if one clicks: what content one will access, [...]