Random HCI Related Tidbits
IBM has some interesting HCD PDF posters available for download. My favorite one is “Computing is about people, not machines“.
I’m getting excited for the upcoming HCIL Symposium next week at UMD College Park. I signed up for the Usability Testing workshop on Thursday and the Symposium on Friday. The Open House is free of charge and has an interesting list of projects which will be displayed.
Work is pretty slow today so I have been gathering my data and working on statistics for my Reading on the Web study. Over the past two weeks I have had a little over 90 participants. I think participation has slowed enough (about 1 participant a day) to justify closing the test. Wish my luck on this math, Brian is having quite a time helping me out.
A little while back, Miffy told me about this company who manufactures geek jackets. These jackets come with tons of pockets, personal area network, solar panels to recharge usb devices, and more. Drool.
After a jab at humor with Mike, I found out yesterday there really was a full moon. It figures, because people on the KDE-Usability mailing list thought it would be a good idea to replace Alt+F4 with Esc (my response) and replacing shortcuts such as Ctrl+C/V (even tho Klipper takes care of this).
seele :: May.24.2005 :: General, HCI, KDE/Kubuntu, Technology, Usability :: 4 Comments »
This one is also very funny (KISS). Notice how “stupid” will fit in the blank crossword.
ctrl-c ctrl-v only make sense on a US keyboard. I’m certain you heard about the AZERTY keyboard, yes? Z isn’t in a neat line with X, C, and V there. That’s the only reason those keys were picked for common operations: they are one of from home row, and therefore easier to hit than the DOS keys of insert/delete.
Escape to leave an application isn’t a bad idea, so long as confirmation is always made. I prefer cmd-w cmd-q myself, but even I, a Mac power user, tend to miss and hit the more “deadly” of the two on occasion. Not all the apps out there support confirm on quit, this web browser (Safari) among them.
Those clothes are pretty crazy. I like the pants a lot. The jackets were cool too but holy friggin expensive. Although I guess when you can charge devices with a jacket and pour water on it without having to worry about it that’s worth something :)
Actually, the argument for eliminating Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V was because “they are too close together and sometimes I accidently copy over it instead of pasting” or vv. What they failed to notice is that KDE has a very nify Klipper widget for saving copied data.
The escape method was discussed with the “confirmation”dialog, however it progressed into ever action required a confirmation and confirmations needing confirmations.. it really just turned into a giant flame war.
CMD+Q shouldnt exist in KDE because we use a Single Document Interface. I wouldnt want to “quit” an instance of an application and terminate every instance I have running.