Ellen Beldner

And if you're wondering, yes, I lost the game....

Basic technique Qualitative discount usability studies. I'd phone the participant at the designated time and walk them through the process of getting GoToMeeting hooked up. I used to try to get them to call in on the official GoToMeeting line so we could record audio, but honestly it was usually too much of a pain in the ass. I didn't even bother trying to get them to use their computer's audio: Yeah, how many people have a microphone and headphone set up with their machine? Not many, and I didn't want that to become a screening criteria. Participant recruiting Hagen...

I'm assuming that you're already sold on the basic premise of why one ought to observe members of one's target market using one's software. Personally I drank the user-centered design Kool-Aid at CMU in the late 90s. The biggest problems I've dealt with in my career aren't about "You should watch users and fix the problems they have!" Mostly I run in to logistical issues. How do you execute the different types of data collection that you need for a clear and accurate picture of user behavior? How do you track those findings and use them to inform actual product...

vendor.modification_time.strftime('%H:%M / %d %b %Y') so that vaguely works, but i've been unable to find a decent list of all the possible formatting characters that work in whatever frankenstein jinja-django-python monster we've got running on the site. Not all of the django ones work (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/templates/builtins/). %a -- 3-char week abbr %A -- Full day of week %b -- 3-char month abbr %B -- full month name %c -- Thu Feb 18 08:56:31 2010 %C -- this outputs "20" for every line on the page, no idea %d -- day of month Pattern matching seems to indicate that you can format...

The system is what the user makes of it -- the system is what the user brings to it. That's the essence of social sites, compared to crowdsourced sites. Crowdsourcing fails and usually sucks, unless you have a community of people who actually know what they're talking about. So while everyone in the industry has been hyping social for several years now, it's not because authoritative, editorialized, expert content is actually going to die or go away. It's because we're just now getting the technology that ALSO affords other people the ability to create and partcipate. In other words, I'm...

UPDATE: I have found where the nerds have discussed such things: StackOverflow which I --- Which is why at work I'm taking on the (currently not-unmanageable) job of responding to customer support requests. However, I'm finding that gmail (we use google apps) is not really a good interface for doing this quickly. I want to be able to do things like bulk respond to a set of emails with the same message... Gmail has the canned responses plugin, but that doesn't cut it -- it's too slow to use. So I just hooked Thunderbird into our support queue, and now...

Recalling CMU intro HCI course whose capstone project was UI improvements for the PalmOS.... Here's the question on Quora, but haven't yet gotten much of a response: http://www.quora.com/q/What_are_the_best_fresh_up_to_date_academic_type_resources_for_mobile_UI_UX_design...

Data credits: Open Secrets and Wikipedia entry for Blue Dog Democrats...

Last November, I left Google / YouTube to join a startup, ChoiceVendor.com. Today we launched our Private Beta release. We've still got a long ways to go -- On to usability testing! www.choicevendor.com...

At our company almost everyone uses a MacBook Pro with a 30" Dell monitor. We all frequently have the DVI distortion issues that Gizmodo reported. (I've had my display fritz out twice in the past hour, for example.) Apple has been totally unhelpful and basically refuse to admit that they have a problem. Perhaps they're afraid of another product recall or class action lawsuit? And thus are not doing the best customer support thing, which is: acknowledge the problem, apologize, and promise a fix as soon as it's available. Anyway, I wanted to leave a review on the product page...