Here’s the presentation I gave at Trinity College last Thursday night. Thanks to Marc and Netsoc for asking me, and to Trinity for buying me dinner at Tante Zoe’s afterwards.
Here‘s how Alan thought it went… he assures me that “top usability expert” is only in quotes because that’s what it said in the announcement 🙂
I usually go on the defensive when people are quick to slag off Ryanair‘s
customer service– if you’re only willing to shell out a few coppers
for your flight, it’s a bit rich to go looking for compensation or
overnight accommodation if it’s a few hours late or cancelled, or moan
when they charge you for every ounce of overweight baggage. (Fates
which have never befallen me on any of the dozens of Ryanair flights
I’ve taken, I have to say.)
I did find an insidious little addition to their online booking form
last week, though… a “purchase insurance” checkbox, checked by
default, that when unchecked changes your country of residence from
Ireland (or whatever) to Other. ‘Oh, I need to change that back to
Ireland’ you think, only to notice (if you’re lucky) that when you do,
the insurance checkbox is checked again.
Even if you work out that it’s perfectly acceptable to leave the
insurance box unchecked and your country of residence as “other” (you
have to enter it in an unconnected box as part of your address further
down the page anyway), you get another ‘We really think you should
purchase insurance from us’ popup before you’re allowed to continue to
the next page. All rather intimidating really.
For anyone who’s interested, the article I wrote on OSS usability a few months back is now available online (“Meeting the Challenge of Open Source Usability”, starting on page 9).
Alistair Edwards from the University of York Computer Science Department is conducting an interesting little study in the memorability vs. security of passwords– read about it and take part here.
On the vagaries of installing a new Windows-based touchscreen interface in San Jose police cars…
An interesting article over at The Register highlighting how tabbed browsers can increase the risk of phishing. There are a couple of concrete recommendations that I guess Epiphany should take on board (if they haven’t already– Firefox and Konqueror are already on the case):
Of course, if everyone followed the HIG and didn’t use tabbed MDI interfaces, we wouldn’t have the problem, right? :o) (Kidding!)
mozilla-accessibility list has exploded.
We posted a proposed keyboard navigation spec for Mozilla there towards the end of last week, and there have been well over 200 replies so far. Mostly from visually impaired users and assistive technology developers (i.e. people who know what they’re talking about), and with disappointingly-few “me toos” among them, so we’re actually having to read them all 🙂
Tragically the archives don’t seem to be working, so you’ll just have to take my word for it…
Offensive as the brick-like monstrosities that purport to be Minis these days are, their advertising monkeys do at least have a sense of humour. Hang around on their website for long enough, and see what pops up…
D’oh… the missing email finally turned up– Evolution had somehow managed to sneak it into my Local Folders Inbox, which I never look at.
Apologies to Steven Garrity, who probably thinks me very rude for not replying. By way of some recompense, here’s the article he wrote that he was trying to tell me about: The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software.
Okay, I know this is an old article now, but I’ve just been reading it again and think it’s still worth a mention.
