Ron Lusk's Radio Weblog

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Farmer's Markets in Pennsylvania
Just for the record
3:36:42 PM

Jakob Nielsen: [Website] Usability for Senior Citizens
We have two reasons for being interested in this article (and the report it references):

our residents are “Senior Citizens”; and
(from Nielsen's article) “we all have a very personal interest in increasing usability for seniors: It's the one user category we're all likely to join one day.”

1:51:01 PM

From a Jakob Nielsen article on home-page taglines:

Users decide quickly whether to stay or leave a site. To assess whether your homepage communicates effectively to visitors in the crucial first 10 seconds, follow two simple guidelines.

First, collect the taglines from your own site and your three strongest competitors. Print them in a bulleted list without identifying the company names. Ask yourself whether you can tell which company does what. More important, ask a handful of people outside your company the same question.
Second, look at how you present the company in the main copy on the home page. Rewrite the text to say exactly the opposite. Would any company ever say that? If not, you're not saying much with your copy, either.

1:45:58 PM

Supporting Multiple-Location Users
Jakob Nielsen addresses the need to change web applications in order to keep step with the change in “whence people access the web” (my convoluted phrasing). People now access the web from home and work, and this should be kept as seamless as possible, Nielsen argues.
1:40:49 PM

ISO Date/Time format
The ISO date-time format for HTML 4.01 is described as

  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD

See the reference for more details. Notice in the references that the embedded “T” between the date and time is a literal that must appear there; this is not called out typographically, which would be a nice touch, as in

  YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD

1:28:22 PM

Can dogs sniff out prostate cancer Researchers are betting they can. Dogs have such a good sense of smell that they can detect abnormal odors quite easily and because "cancer cells produce different chemicals and therefore have different odors," a dog may detect these odors in urine specimens. The current prostate cancer test is not very accurate; yet researchers will require the dogs to be 100% accurate... [Dog News: weird, inspiring dog tales]
12:29:30 PM

I've posted Harry Schaumburg's “Accountability Questions” on my website.
11:52:15 AM