Author: Vince Kimball

ControlledVocabulary.com. David Riecks pointed me to his site on controlled vocabularies. David discusses the benefits of using CVs and offers a lot of examples of heavily-used controlled vocabularies and thesauri. Since David is a photographer, he also has a special interest in image indexing and devotes a special section to image databases and CVs. [ia/… Continue reading ControlledVocabulary.com

Usability of Specs?. Ever been frustrated when what the developers built didn't match what you designed or architected? Maybe your specification had some usability problems itself. Brian Krause has useful tips in Getting Creative With Specs: Usable Software Specifications – An effective, usable spec serves two main purposes: First, it elicits feedback early, which helps… Continue reading Usability of Specs?

Jakob's best Alertbox in a long time.. The advice on intranets and staff directories is useful in Jakob's latest piece Employee Directory Search: Resolving Conflicting Usability Guidelines. But that's not why I think it's the best Alertbox in recent memory. It's because it shows the complex and paradoxical issues that comes with any signficant design.… Continue reading Jakob's best Alertbox in a long time.

Getting Started with a Career in User Experience. For those of you who might be new to the field of IA or user experience design, or almost anything related really, Marcus Haid has written a nice primer on breaking into the industry for Adaptive Path. [ia/ – information architecture news]

Wi-Fi Alliance sets July as tenative date for 802.11g interoperability testing: News.com reports that products certified as interoperable with the 802.11g could be on shelves as soon as August. I've already seen a few signs that I can't discuss yet that indicate rapid movement among vendors to assure continuous improvement in existing implementations.  [80211b News]

Exploring Office 2003. After Office 11 ships, we face a classic chicken-and-egg scenario. Developers can't really learn the art of modeling data in business documents without user feedback. But users can't provide that feedback until they start actually working with XML-enriched documents. Office 11's XML support isn't a final solution. Rather, it allows for a… Continue reading Exploring Office 2003

Ari Pernick on HTTP kernelization in Windows Server 2003. Ari Pernick offers insight into the HTTP.SYS kernelization of (some of) the HTTP stack in Windows Server 2003: Well, it's a scary change, but hopefully appropriate. The chunk of the HTTP stack that we put in the kernel was the routing part. In the same way… Continue reading Ari Pernick on HTTP kernelization in Windows Server 2003

New Social Rules For Wireless Society. Among college, high school and middle school girls who own keitai, keitai e-mail use is effectively 100 percent. Boys are not far behind with 88 percent in the middle school and high school group and 96 percent among college students. This contrasts to the lower numbers of adults over… Continue reading New Social Rules For Wireless Society

Caring for Your Introvert. Rarely does a passage of text resonate with how I am as a person as the opening paragraph of Jonathan Rauch's Caring for Your Introvert did: Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to… Continue reading Caring for Your Introvert

Flow in Web Design – Speed Up Your Site. What is this thing called flow? Learn how to design your site to enable that optimal experience for your users. This exclusive excerpt from Andy King's new book includes an interview with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of “Flow.” From New Riders.  [WebReference News]