From Apple’s point of view, iPhone OS and web technologies share equal footing. When you visit their developer site, the Safari Dev Center is prominently displayed. The iPhone gets all the press, but when you click on Safari Dev Center, there’s a ton of great information that explains how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on an iPhone.
One of the most fundamental rules of user experience on the web is that developers are rarely qualified to evaluate it. As developers, we know far too much about the web in general, and intuitively grasp details that mystify people who spend their days contributing to society in other ways. For this reason, it’s all too easy for us to build websites and applications that are hard to use. Good user testing during the development process can mitigate the problem, but in many projects, the testing budget is limited if present at all.
Summary: Showing summaries of many articles is more likely to draw in users than providing full articles, which can quickly exhaust reader interest.
via Corporate Blogs: Front Page Structure Jakob Nielsens Alertbox.
We ran a within-subjects study, testing each user on all 4 reading conditions — printed book, PC, iPad, and Kindle — rotating the sequence in which we exposed users to each device.
via iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).
Customer interactions create a wealth of timely data that marketing departments are eager to exploit. The customer status fact table provides a central switchboard for using this fast-moving data.
Tags: data warehouse, dimension, dw
Free Electron Got’chas:
» There are two classes of Free Electrons. Sr. Electrons and Jr. Electrons. Both have similarly productivity yields, but the Senior versions have become politically aware. In technology savvy organizations, most CTOs fall into this category. Think Bill Joy. The Junior versions have all the ability, they just don’t have the experience of dealing with people because they spent a lot of the youth writing their own operating system as a intellectual exercise. These Junior electrons represent the single best hire you can make as a hiring manager. If you get two in twenty years, you’re doing something right.
» Misdirected Free Electron intensity can yield odd results. On one project, I assigned a couple of slippery memory corruption bugs to a Free Electron who nodded quietly and promptly vanished for a week. When he returned, the bugs were fixed and the entire database layer had been rewritten. A piece of code that’d taken two engineers roughly six months to design had been totally redone in seven days. Sound like a great idea until you realize we were working on a small update and did not have the resources or time to test a brand spankin’ new database layer. Oops.
Tags: management
As a manager, think of your day as one full of stories. All day, you’re hearing stories from different people about the different arcs that are being played out in the hallways and conference rooms.
Tags: management
the problem of reasonable aggregation is no idle matter
via The Way We Live Now – Metric Mania – NYTimes.com.
the “extreme and hypothetical” illustration is quite good.
In the movie “Ironman 2,” Larry Ellison makes a cameo appearance as a billionaire, playboy software magnate. It is a role he knows well. He is playing himself — chief executive of Oracle Corp, one of Silicon Valley’s most enduring, successful and flamboyant figures.
via Special Report: Can That Guy in Ironman 2 Whip IBM in Real Life?.
Tags: digression
InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman likes to offer an authoritarian opinion about tech subjects, but rarely has any clue what he’s talking about. That’t evident in his “peace plan” regarding Adobe and Apple.
via InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman fails to understand Apple, Adobe Flash — RoughlyDrafted Magazine.