Tuesday, November 9, 2004

Why should voting machines by usable? In her copious spare time, usability maven Whitney Quesenbery has been helping the federal Election Assistance Commission address usability issues in elections. Here's linkage to a timely report from Whitney on their progress: Oops! They Forgot the Usability: Elections as a Case Study . "An election is a perfect usability case study. It bring together large numbers of diverse voters, an unfamiliar interface and an outcome that shapes the future of our society. With such a seeming simple task, usability was not on the curriculum for elections officials. However, despite the focus on technology and security, it was poor information design and usability in the 2000 Palm Beach ballot that taught us all new words like 'chad' (hanging or pregnant)." (Whitney Quesenbery) [InfoDesign: Understanding by Design] I'm glad to know that someone who cares so passionately for humans (i.e., voters) is working on the problem. 3:53:02 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Happy Firefox! Good news on the browser front: Firefox, an Internet Explorer killer, has gone 1.0. Cory Doctorow: Firefox, the finest, most secure Web browser ever created for average-user applications, went 1.0 today. You can download it below, toss out Internet Explorer, and be relatively assured that you computer won't be compromised due to Microsoft's bad design decisions and lax security maintenance. Link [Boing Boing] I'm going to wait a day or two and let the load on the host sites and mirrors die down a bit; besides, my DSL service has gone south again, and of course SBC says there's nothing wrong. But I can tell something's wrong, so stop telling me nothing's wrong! 3:42:24 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

© Copyright 2002-2005 Fred Sampson. Last update: 5/21/05; 10:24:20 PM.