826 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2021
  2. Feb 2021
    1. I think one thing would have been a solution to basically everything here: Player created maps. As Im involved in many modding communities, I know for a fact that player created content can be vital in making games last so much longer, and the quality can shoot for the stars, Player created maps would have been fantastic for this game.
    1. While Trailblazer offers you abstraction layers for all aspects of Ruby On Rails, it does not missionize you. Wherever you want, you may fall back to the "Rails Way" with fat models, monolithic controllers, global helpers, etc. This is not a bad thing, but allows you to step-wise introduce Trailblazer's encapsulation in your app without having to rewrite it.
    1. Couldn't find on Steam. https://steamdb.info/app/793300/ claims that it is there, but https://store.steampowered.com/app/793300/?curator_clanid=4777282&utm_source=SteamDB just redirects to home page.

      Don't redirect to a different URL, esp. without a message explaining why it did so instead of keeping me on the page that I request. That's just incorrect behavior, and a poor UX. Respond with a 404 if the page doesn't exist.!

      That way (among other things), I could use Wayback Machine extension to see if I can find a cached version there.

      But even that (http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://store.steampowered.com/app/793300) is saying "huh?" so I'm confused.

      Where did it go and why?

      I guess it's no longer available, because this page says:

      section_type    ownersonly
      ReleaseState    unavailable
      

      ... but why?

    1. In Nix, different users can have different “views” on the set of installed applications. That is, there might be lots of applications present on the system (possibly in many different versions), but users can have a specific selection of those active — where “active” just means that it appears in a directory in the user’s PATH. Such a view on the set of installed applications is called a user environment, which is just a directory tree consisting of symlinks to the files of the active applications.
    1. Have you ever been emailed something from a company and tried to reply only to be frustrated with a failed-to-send message response? A no-reply email frustrates your customers.Instead, use a dedicated email to send out your messages and to keep business emails in a central location so you can answer customer concerns quickly and decisively. This level of customer service will help develop your reputation as a company that cares about its customers.
    1. Then recently I was shopping at the John Lewis website, and they brought up the Verified By Visa page in an iframe - wonderful! I'm still looking at the John Lewis site, and all that's happening is I'm being asked for my Verified By Visa password - no problem. Although as a web developer I know that there's no technical difference between that and a plain old redirect-there-redirect-back, the user experience is so much better!
  3. Jan 2021
    1. WhatsApp rose by trapping previously-free beings in their corral and changing their habits to create dependence on masters. Over time, this made it difficult or impossible to return to their previous lifestyle. That process should sound familiar: it’s eerily similar to the domestication of animals. I call this type of vendor lock-in user domestication: the removal of user autonomy to trap users into serving vendors.

      This is a good definition of "user domestication". Such an apt metaphor.

    1. Group Rules from the Admins1NO POSTING LINKS INSIDE OF POST - FOR ANY REASONWe've seen way too many groups become a glorified classified ad & members don't like that. We don't want the quality of our group negatively impacted because of endless links everywhere. NO LINKS2NO POST FROM FAN PAGES / ARTICLES / VIDEO LINKSOur mission is to cultivate the highest quality content inside the group. If we allowed videos, fan page shares, & outside websites, our group would turn into spam fest. Original written content only3NO SELF PROMOTION, RECRUITING, OR DM SPAMMINGMembers love our group because it's SAFE. We are very strict on banning members who blatantly self promote their product or services in the group OR secretly private message members to recruit them.4NO POSTING OR UPLOADING VIDEOS OF ANY KINDTo protect the quality of our group & prevent members from being solicited products & services - we don't allow any videos because we can't monitor what's being said word for word. Written post only.

      Wow, that's strict.

    1. There's a lot of advice online showing how to get rid of snap. (e.g.: https://cialu.net/how-to-disable-and-remove-completely-snaps-in-ubuntu-linux/ worked for me) so the only result (so far, a few months later) is that Chromium has lost a user, and having upgraded Ubuntu since the original Warty, if snap becomes obligatory I'll have to take a look at Mint, or Devuan.
    1. We talked, for example, about how stores and governments were adding new rules and social distancing guidelines, often communicated through purely visual means, like stickers on the floor and printed signs. Mr. Johnston acknowledged that it was a tough new time for businesses, but shared that he faces new types of exclusion as a result.

      this just makes me wonder how society in general will cope with this. Companies nay be more sensitive to all these challenges COVID has pushed in fast forward mode.

      This is not only about designers being in the front seat of the business development plan, is about we as users setting-up these expectations!

    1. In addition, PPAs are awful for software discovery. Average users have no idea what a PPA is, nor how to configure or install software from it. Part of the point of snap is to make software discovery easier. We can put new software in the “Editor’s Picks” in Ubuntu Software then people will discover and install it. Having software in a random PPA somewhere online is only usable by experts. Normal users have no visibility to it.
  4. Dec 2020
    1. It took faaaaaaaaaaaaar too long to signup at this site to reply to you. This site rejected the real address I use for amazon, username.place@cocaine.ninja so I created an email address that I'll never check again just to signup here. I have zero tolerance for spam.
  5. Nov 2020
    1. Include the ability to dismiss or decline the promotion. Remember the user's preference if they do this and only re-prompt if there's a change in the user's relationship with your content such as if they signed in or completed a purchase.
    2. Keep promotions outside of the flow of your user journeys. For example, in a PWA login page, put the call to action below the login form and submit button. Disruptive use of promotional patterns reduces the usability of your PWA and negatively impacts your engagement metrics.
    1. rickrolling

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

      While Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," has existed since the 1980s, it was user-generated-content spawned from 4chan that linked the song to the bait-and-switch practice of surprising unsuspecting internet users with it after being promised something else (Dewey, 2014).

      Works Cited:

      Official Rick Astley. (2009). Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Video) [Video]. YouTube.

      Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/

    2. where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented

      While 4chan has developed a mostly negative public perception for itself, with the Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey even calling it "the Internet's own bogeyman," it also has brought attention to User-Generated-Content as beloved as Rickrolling and Chocolate Rain (Dewey, 2014). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwTZ2xpQwpA

      Works Cited:

      Dewey, C. (2014). Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman. Retrieved 5 November 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/25/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-to-understand-4chan-the-internets-own-bogeyman/

      TayZonday. (2007). "Chocolate Rain" Original Song by Tay Zonday [Video]. YouTube.

    1. The Web needs to be accessible to everyone who wants to participate, who wants to share their knowledge with the world, who is not satisfied with the status quo and ready to change culture and society. Yet instead, we are currently building a Web of superficial distractions that is becoming less and less accessible to future generations.

      i am dead cold afraid that the web that is coming seems like it will not support extensions. the bookmarklet is dead, extensions are only on desktop. websec has won, sites are secure, and alas, secured against the almighty user who we all agreed we served.

      what sites do- now that's also been, frankly, not great.

  6. Oct 2020
    1. To silence circular dependencies warnings for let's say moment library use: // rollup.config.js import path from 'path' const onwarn = warning => { // Silence circular dependency warning for moment package if ( warning.code === 'CIRCULAR_DEPENDENCY' && !warning.importer.indexOf(path.normalize('node_modules/moment/src/lib/')) ) { return } console.warn(`(!) ${warning.message}`) }
    1. Identify your user agents When deploying software that makes requests to other sites, you should set a custom User-Agent header to identify the software and provide a means to contact its maintainers. Many of the automated requests we receive have generic user-agent headers such as Java/1.6.0 or Python-urllib/2.1 which provide no information on the actual software responsible for making the requests.
  7. Sep 2020
    1. In '07, safety implied an unacceptable performance hit on slow single-core devices with 128MiB of RAM.

      In 2007, safety implied an unacceptable performance hit for hosting extensions, on devices with one core and 128MiB ram. In 2020, the lack of extensions is the ultimate app-ification of the web, the reduction of the web into a useless, powerless medium where users have no control.

    1. Over the last year, we have gained a better understanding of the performance and correctness characteristics of the various rendering technologies available on the web, and have been experimenting with a second approach that uses CanvasKit. CanvasKit brings Skia to the web using WebAssembly and WebGL, enabling a hardware-accelerated drawing surface that improves our ability to render complex and intensive graphics efficiently.

      you are setting dynamite to hypertext & turning the web into a webassembly powered VNC viewer. this is an awful thing for users, for the web in general. please desist. please i beg you stop.

      the web is not for pushing pixels into people's faces. the web is a system of interlinking hypertext, a place where structured information can be viewed/enhanced by users, navigators, & extensions.

    1. WebAssembly is pretty great, but should web applications just be rendered to a canvas, and every application brings its own graphics toolkit? Do we really want anti-aliasing differences between web applications? Applications-in-containers is a thing - look at Qubes - but it’s not really something that users should want.

      Flutter seems intent on turning applications into mini-VNC sessions into webassembly, with CanvasKit work proceeding full steam ahead. can you please for the love of god NOT, Flutter? abomination.

      the web is more than a means to pump pixels at people's faces; it is a system of structured information, that users, their navigators, & extensions have rights & capabilities to traverse.

    2. The idea of a web browser being something we can comprehend, of a web page being something that more people can make, feels exciting to me.

      my personal hope is that we can build a more sensible coherent web, that exudes the machines inside of it, by better harkening towards custom elements ("webcomponents"). move the page from being a bunch of machines in javascript, to a bunch of machines in hypertext.

      and then build pages that start to expose & let the user play with the dom. start to build experiences that bridge the gap into the machine/page.

      and keep going. keep going. build wilder web experiences. build more machines. and keep building battlesuits for the user, out of more componenets, out of more web, to let them wrestle & tangle with & manipulate & experiment & hack on & see & observe & learn about the truthful, honest, direct hypertext that we all navigate.

    1. Mais il ne songe pas aux causes

      C’est ce que font les interfaces dites «user-friendly»: elles nous dispensent de penser, elles nous font oublier de penser.

      La transparence de la technologie, sa présence normalisée, voire imperceptible dans la vie quotidienne est aussi une bonne chose – c’est la tâche du design de faire bénéficier une technologie de pointe au plus grand nombre.

      Seulement, le numérique dissimule des enjeux de vie privée que nous ne pouvons percevoir directement par les sens: les enjeux sont invisibilisés, et les technologies «user-friendly» étendent leur pouvoir abusent du fait que les mécanismes échappent à notre perception, à notre entendement.

  8. Aug 2020
    1. So when we ask users to answer questions that deal with the future, we have to keep in mind the context in which they’re answering. They can tell us about a feature they think will make their lives better, but user val-idation will always be necessary to make sure that past user’s beliefs about future user are accurate.

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  9. Jul 2020
    1. Users also don’t like to deal with dozens of opened tabs and some visitors tend to become quickly angry with the disabled back button. Furthermore, some visitors may not even realize that a new window was opened and hit the back-button mercilessly — without any result. That’s not user-friendly, and that’s not a good user experience we, web designers, strive for.
  10. Jun 2020
    1. The EARN IT act turns Section 230 protection into a hypocritical bargaining chip. At a high level, what the bill proposes is a system where companies have to earn Section 230 protection by following a set of designed-by-committee “best practices” that are extraordinarily unlikely to allow end-to-end encryption. Anyone who doesn’t comply with these recommendations will lose their Section 230 protection.
    1. A year’s worth of cajoling back and forth has ultimately resulted in the EARN-IT bill wending its way through the U.S. system, a bill that, if passed, would see messaging services become legally responsible for the content on their platforms. While not mandating backdoors, per se, without some form of probes into message content, the argument runs that the punitive risks become unsurvivable.
    2. there’s a bill tiptoeing through the U.S. Congress that could inflict the backdoor virus that law enforcement agencies have been trying to inflict on encryption for years... The choice for tech companies comes down to weakening their own encryption and endangering the privacy and security of all their users, or foregoing protections and potentially facing liability in a wave of lawsuits.
    1. Once the platforms introduce backdoors, those arguing against such a move say, bad guys will inevitably steal the keys. Lawmakers have been clever. No mention of backdoors at all in the proposed legislation or the need to break encryption. If you transmit illegal or dangerous content, they argue, you will be held responsible. You decide how to do that. Clearly there are no options to some form of backdoor.
  11. May 2020
    1. Don’t go to code academy, go to design academy. Be advocates of the user & consumer. It’s not about learning how to code, it’s about translating real-world needs to technological specifications in just ways that give end users agency and equity in design, development and delivery. Be a champion of user-centric design. Learn how to steward data and offer your help.

      The importance of learning to design, and interpreting/translating real-world needs.

    1. A "tag" is a snippet of code that allows digital marketing teams to collect data, set cookies or integrate third-party content like social media widgets into a site.

      This is a bad re-purposing of the word "tag", which already has specific meanings in computing.

      Why do we need a new word for this? Why not just call it a "script" or "code snippet"?

    1. I know, you don't trust Mozilla but do you also not trust the developer? I absolutely do! That is the whole point of this discussion. Mozilla doesn't trust S3.Translator or jeremiahlee but I do. They blocked page-translator for pedantic reasons. Which is why I want the option to override their decision to specifically install few extensions that I'm okay with.
  12. Apr 2020
    1. By rendering important parts of the application with the real data on the server-side, an isomorphic application can show a meaningful initial page. On the other hand, client rendering application can’t show any meaningful information until it fetches all external data it needs. In the meantime, the only thing a user will see is a loading indicator.
    1. One of the drawbacks of waiting until someone signs in again to check their password is that a user may simply stay signed in for a long time without signing out. I suppose that could be an argument in favor of limiting the maximum duration of a session or remember-me token, but as far as user experience, I always find it annoying when I was signed in and a website arbitrarily signs me out without telling me why.
    1. There is a fundamental difference between these two kinds of content: the user comments are stored in our databases, which means their Markdown syntax can be normalized (e.g. by adding or removing whitespace, fixing the indentation, or inserting missing Markdown specifiers until they render properly). The Markdown documents stored in Git repositories, however, cannot be touched at all, as their contents are hashed as part of Git’s storage model.
    1. Did you expect the temp directory to get printed? In the last example, we saw the directories ./temp and ./C/temp got printed, but not now. This is the effect of the -print option. By default, the find command prints all the files matching the criteria. However, once the -print option is specified, it will print files only on explicit print instructions. In this find command, -print is associated in the other side of the OR condition, and hence nothing will get printed from the 1st part of the condition.
    1. One mistake that we made when creating the import/export experience for Blogger was relying on one HTTP transaction for an import or an export. HTTP connections become fragile when the size of the data that you're transferring becomes large. Any interruption in that connection voids the action and can lead to incomplete exports or missing data upon import. These are extremely frustrating scenarios for users and, unfortunately, much more prevalent for power users with lots of blog data.
    1. Thousands of enterprises around the world have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network, and data center layers and confidently selected Zoom for complete deployment. 

      This doesn't really account for the fact that Zoom have committed some atrociously heinous acts, such as (and not limited to):

  13. Mar 2020
    1. For years, the most used solution was to add an ugly captcha to the form, with some hard to read letters, numbers etc on an image. The user had to type these in an input field. The spambots have a hard time reading these images: problem solved!But this solution is not very user-friendly: it’s ugly, and annoys users so much you might lose conversions.
  14. Feb 2020
    1. To add insult to injury I learn that when Cloudflare automatically detects an anomaly with your domain they permanently delete all DNS records. Mine won't be difficult to restore, but I'm not sure why this is necessary. Surely it would be possible for Cloudflare to mark a domain as disabled without irrevocably deleting it? Combined with the hacky audit log, I'm left with the opinion that for some reason Cloudflare decided to completely half-ass the part of their system that is responsible for deleting everything that matters to a user.

      ...and this is why some companies should not grow to become too big for the good of their customers.

  15. Jan 2020
  16. Dec 2019
  17. plaintext-productivity.net plaintext-productivity.net
    1. Avoiding complicated outlining or mind-mapping software saves a bunch of mouse clicks or dreaming up complicated visualizations (it helps if you are a linear thinker).

      Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with this thought/sentiment (though it's hard to tell since it's an incomplete sentence). I think visualizations and mind-mapping software might be an even better way to go, in terms of efficiency of editing (since they are specialized for the task), enjoyment of use, etc.

      The main thing text files have going for them is flexibility, portability, client-neutrality, the ability to get started right now without researching and evaluating a zillion competing GUI app alternatives.

    1. An ssh public key in a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file can have a command="" option which forces a particular command to be executed when the key is used to authenticate an ssh connection. This is a security control that mitigates against private key compromise. This is great when you only need to execute a single command. But if you need to perform multiple tasks, you would normally need to create and install a separate key pair for each command, or just not bother making use of forced commands and allow the key to be used to execute any command.
    1. echo "from="${MYIP%% *}",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty,command="rsync ${SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND#* }" $(ssh-keygen -yf ~/.ssh/rsync_rsa)" | ssh targetserver "cat - >>~/.ssh/authorized_keys" Note that the ‘command=’ restriction (http://larstobi.blogspot.ch/2011/01/restrict-ssh-access-to-one-command-but.html) will not apply if ‘/etc/sshd_config’ has already a ‘ForceCommand’ directive.
  18. Nov 2019
  19. Oct 2019
  20. Sep 2019
  21. Aug 2019
    1. "But in moving towards flat design we are losing much of the wisdom that was embedded in the old 3D style of UI, for example: a user must be able to glance at a screen and know what is an interactive element (e.g., a button or link) and what is not (e.g., a label or motto); a user must be able to tell at a glance what an interactive element does (does it initiate a process, link to another page, download a document, etc.?); the UI should be explorable, discoverable and self-explanatory. But many apps and websites, in the interest of a clean, spartan visual appearance, leave important UI controls hidden until the mouse hovers over just the right area or the app is in just the right state. This leaves the user in the dark, often frustrated and disempowered."
  22. Jul 2019
    1. Unfortunately, misguided views about usability still cause significant damage in today's world. In the 2000 U.S. elections, poor ballot design led thousands of voters in Palm Beach, Florida to vote for the wrong candidate, thus turning the tide of the entire presidential election. At the time, some observers made the ignorant claim that voters who could not understand the Palm Beach butterfly ballot were not bright enough to vote. I wonder if people who made such claims have never made the frustrating "mistake" of trying to pull open a door that requires pushing. Usability experts see this kind of problem as an error in the design of the door, rather than a problem with the person trying to leave the room.
  23. Apr 2019
    1. The primary benefit of this would be to make the Hudson River and Public Square park areas more easily accessible to everyone who lives and works east of Hudson Yards. Opening 10th avenue to street facing retail, turning the six lane street two-way, and adding bike lanes would also make it more forgiving.

      Concluding appeal and explanation of the author's call to action. Considering the lack of walkability and limited potential use, they suggest a new design that will maximize access. This also has the benefit of altering the public's sense of that the space is exclusive.

    2. The Javits Center is often used by urbanists as an example of the perils of inhumane design. The unused and un-policed periphery attracts crime and vagrancy while its one entrance opens upon an eight lane street. This combination means that most conference attendees hire a taxi to ferry them to a more hospitable neighborhood.

      This is an excellent example of creation without context, particularly use by target populations. Walkability was so poor that it negatively affected the area.

    3. The only way to reach the Public Square promenade from the street is to climb three flights of stairs onto the High Line, then cross a fairly narrow bridge connection. The street level features a large cafeteria, but like the 10th avenue perimeter, the sidewalks are so narrow and the road so heavily trafficked with vehicles that it is unlikely the street can thrive as a public space.

      Examples of why this space is not user-friendly and basically unwalkable. Those designing the space did not consider practicalities like access.

    4. But over time, they become numb to the novelty of art, and other considerations exert a far greater influence on their experience of the building: things like who uses the space, when the space is used, how the space forms community and how it integrates the the community that surrounds it.

      His argument is user-orientated, criticizing experts in the field who work separately to build components of a shared urban ecosystem. Each architect was chosen for their fame, not their ability to work as part of a team, and spare little consideration about those who will live, work, and move through the space. Most importantly, the question of fostering community is addressed.

      Similar to scholars at the top of their field, these architects place little consideration towards the mass consumption of their work and its context.

    5. Street front retail creates foot traffic in places that might otherwise be desolate and inhospitable during different parts of the day. A diversity of land uses is key in cultivating walkability. For example, New York’s financial district is generally a ghost town after office hours because it lacks residential buildings. Adjacent Battery Park City has the opposite problem; it is so domestic that its streets are empty except during commuting hours.

      Cites two examples of spaces in the city that fail to maximize walkability and reduces user satisfaction/use. Users require mixed-use spaces that promote diverse populations, keeping them from becoming too exclusive and barren during the off hours.

  24. Feb 2019
  25. Jan 2019
  26. www.at-the-intersection.com www.at-the-intersection.com
  27. Nov 2018
    1. Mobile Based User-Centered Learning Environment for Adult Absolute Illiterates

      This study reviewed the education of absolute illiterates globally. It was based on the creation of game-based learning (GBL) which provides a user-friendly learning platform with little cost and little intimidation for the learner. The research also identified 60% of the world's illiterate population residing in rural areas with little access to computers and educational centers. The GBL environments created real world environments that allow learners to practice real-life scenarios in familiar surroundings using 3-D technology. The study also adapted a English language program to meet the needs of various languages. The context of the game is a farmer and a wife then acquire items and count them in their native language. The numbers used in counting are spoken and the game produces the correlating number so the learner becomes familiar with the written form of the letter. In conclusion, the participants identified that the mobile learning was more beneficial than PC applications due to unreliable electrical service at home. The mobile system was also available on demand.and applied to participants real-life usage.

      RATING: 10/10

  28. Oct 2018
  29. cloud.degrowth.net cloud.degrowth.net
  30. Aug 2018
    1. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told the AP it is “frustratingly common” for technology companies “to have corporate practices that diverge wildly from the totally reasonable expectations of their users,” and urged policies that would give users more control of their data. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey called for “comprehensive consumer privacy and data security legislation” in the wake of the AP report.
    1. Design is inherently political, but it is not inherently good. With few exceptions, the motivations of a design project are constrained by the encompassing platform or system first, and the experiences and values of its designers second. The result is designers working in a user hostile world, where even seemingly harmless platforms or features are exploited for state or interpersonal surveillance and violence.As people living in societies, we cannot be separated from our political contexts. However, design practitioners research and implement systems based on a process of abstracting their audience through user stories. A user story is “a very high-level definition of a requirement, containing just enough information so that the developers can produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it23.” In most cases, user are grouped through shared financial or biographical data, by their chosen devices, or by their technical or cognitive abilities.When designing for the digital world, user stories ultimately determine what is or is not an acceptable area of human variation. The practice empowers designers and engineers to communicate via a common problem-focused language. But practicing design that views users through a politically-naive lens leaves practitioners blind to the potential weaponisation of their design. User-storied design abstracts an individual user from a person of lived experience to a collection of designer-defined generalisations. In this approach, their political and interpersonal experiences are also generalised or discarded, creating a shaky foundation that allows for assumptions to form from the biases of the design team. This is at odds with the personal lived experience of each user, and the complex interpersonal interactions that occur within a designed digital platform.When a design transitions from theoretical to tangible, individual user problems and motivations become part of a larger interpersonal and highly political human network, affecting communities in ways that we do not yet fully understand. In Infrastructural Games and Societal Play, Eleanor Saitta writes of the rolling anticipated and unanticipated consequences of systems design: “All intentionally-created systems have a set of things the designers consider part of the scope of what the system manages, but any nontrivial system has a broader set of impacts. Often, emergence takes the form of externalities — changes that impact people or domains beyond the designed scope of the system^24.” These are no doubt challenges in an empathetically designed system, but in the context of design homogeny, these problems cascade.In a talk entitled From User Focus to Participation Design, Andie Nordgren advocates for how participatory design is a step to developing empathy for users:“If we can’t get beyond ourselves and our [platforms] – even if we are thinking about the users – it’s hard to transfer our focus to where we actually need to be when designing for participation which is with the people in relation to each other25.”Through inclusion, participatory design extends a design team’s focus beyond the hypothetical or ideal user, considering the interactions between users and other stakeholders over user stories. When implemented with the aim of engaging a diverse range of users during a project, participatory design becomes more political by forcing teams to address weaponised design opportunities during all stages of the process.
  31. Jul 2018
    1. For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding.
  32. Dec 2017
    1. A mental map (or cognitive map) is our mental representation of a place. It includes features we consider important, and is likely to exclude features we consider unimportant.

      (Urban planner Kevin Lynch, early 1960s)<br> Elements of mental maps

      • paths
      • edges - boundaries and endings
      • nodes - focal points like squares and junctions
      • districts
      • landmarks

      Modern maps could use augmented and virtual reality to help clarify those elements, making a place easier to navigate and use. But they can also add useless noise that makes the place seem more confusing than it actually is.

  33. Oct 2017
  34. Sep 2017
    1. For a technology to evolve in accordance with users’ needs, aiding social and economic development, the focus must move beyond mere adoption. When users appropriate technology and make it their own, new uses and innovations emerge. The appropriation process is a contest for control over a technological system’s configuration, as users, designers, and manufacturers battle over who can use that technology, at what cost, under what conditions, for what purpose, and with what consequences. This confrontation, we argue, constitutes a powerful innovation mechanism.

      La adopción y la apropiación están muy cercanas en los metasistemas como Pharo/Smalltalk, pues que un usuario use una herramienta suele estar muy cercano a la idea de que esté en condiciones de modificarla.

      Para el caso de Grafoscopio, la comunidad de práctica avanza, con miembros relativamente constantes entre edición y edición del Data Week y las Data Rodas y progresivamente miramos cómo modificar la herramienta. Aún así, no hay usos cotidianos de la misma (adopción) y la modificación (apropiación) aún es muy lenta. Sin embargo, el potencial de la herramienta para adaptarse a la comunidad y sus problemas, ha sido mayor que el de otras que se probaron.

  35. May 2017
    1. Neither Apple nor Microsoft really captured the essence of what made the Smalltalk system powerful. They used it as a model to make computers more accessible, but they left out the aspect of letting people bend the system to their will, to customize it to be just what they want. Their systems were really an object-oriented facade over a traditional, non-object-oriented system. They lacked a consistent metaphore of everything being an object. The web has been even more stultifying in this regard (I mean the web interface), though Firefox has helped some, so I hear, with the concept of browser extensions.
  36. Mar 2017
    1. Jessica Helfand in her essay The Dematerialism of Screen Space (2001) critiques the phenomenon of design practise being led by developments in software engineering. She argues that designers should take the initiative: “design must submit to a series of commands and regulations as rigourous as those that once defined Swiss typography. Aesthetic innovation, if it indeed exists at all, occurs within ridiculously preordained parameters: a new plug-in, a modified code, the capacity to make picture and words ‘flash’ with a mouse in a non-sensical little dance. We are all little filmmakers, directing on a pathetically small screen – yet broadcasting to a potentially infinite audience. This in itself is conflicting (not to mention corrupting), but more importantly, what are we making? What are we inventing? What are we saying that has not been said before?” Helfand here is referring to the web, but her argument applies equally well to designing tablet publications. Designers of book and magazine apps should be asking themselves those last three questions. Since tablet publishing conventions are in the process of being formed (like child invention), we have a unique opportunity right now to influence their direction.
    2. Some key themes arise from the two NNG reports on iPad usability: App designers should ensure perceived affordances / discoverability There is a lack of consistency between apps, lots of ‘wacky’ interaction methods. Designers should draw upon existing conventions (either OS or web) or users won’t know what to do. These are practical interaction design observations, but from a particular perspective, that of perceptual psychology. These conclusions are arrived at through a linear, rather than lateral process. By giving weight to building upon existing convention, because they are familiar to the user, there is a danger that genuinely new ideas (and the kind of ambition called for by Victor Bret) within tablet design will be suppressed. Kay’s vision of the Dynabook came from lateral thinking, and thinking about how children learn. Shouldn’t the items that we design for this device be generated in the same way?

      The idea of lateral thinking here is the key one. Can informatics be designed by nurturing lateral thinking? That seems related with the Jonas flopology

    3. The document argues that the use of illusionary surfaces and objects will lead to a more intuitive and pleasurable experience for the user. It also, yet again, looks to prior conventions for solutions rather than starting afresh.
  37. Nov 2016
    1. Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and new operations does a principle suggest? What a priori surprising relationship between those objects and operations are revealed by the principle? Can we find interfaces which vividly reveal those relationships, preferably in a way that is unique to the phenomenon being studied?
    2. Speech, writing, math notation, various kinds of graphs, and musical notation are all examples of cognitive technologies. They are tools that help us think, and they can become part of the way we think -- and change the way we think.

      Computer interfaces can be cognitive technologies. To whatever degree an interface reflects a set of ideas or methods of working, mastering the interface provides mastery of those ideas or methods.

      Experts often have ways of thinking that they rarely share with others, for various reasons. Sometimes they aren't fully aware of their thought processes. The thoughts may be difficult to convey in speech or print. The thoughts may seem sloppy compared to traditional formal explanations.

      These thought processes often involve:

      • minimal canonical examples - simple models
      • heuristics for rapid reasoning about what might work

      Nielsen considers turning such thought processes into (computer) interfaces. "Every theorem of mathematics, every significant result of science, is a challenge to our imagination as interface designers. Can we find ways of expressing these principles in an interface? What new objects and operations does a principle suggest?"

  38. Jul 2016
  39. Apr 2016
  40. Feb 2016
    1. Content organization refers to features that require little effort from the user and that help fellow users receive useful information about the content. These features include the “like” button and options such as ratings (star ratings or a numerical scale) or tagging content with user-suggested keywords.

      Hypothes.is lacks this first step in the ladder. We don't have a like button. Tagging doesn't seem as easy as it could be.

      Maybe when we rethink page level notes, we might prioritize calling user to action there: tag the text; maybe offer a broad statement/description.