Chris Hanrath

Windows 7 now visualizes progress right in the system tray even when the window is minimized. I like it!

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I just opened a blank new Tab on my browser and Google presented me with a context sensitive page suggesting most visited pages, recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs… uhm, Thanks! …I guess…

I wonder about the missing thumbnail screenshots, why an icon of a broken camera? Did i break something, or do i have to get my digital camera out and take a picture of each screen so that Google can post it? I am also not sure what the recent bookmarks are, since i don’t bookmark pages or click on bookmarks…

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Today i experienced an absolute showstopper even though I have been pretty satisfied with Windows Vista so far. For the past time as long as i remember the “Off” Button to the left of the “Lock” Button has been setting my Laptop to Standby.

Today – when leaving the Coffee shop – the same button suddenly decided to shut my system completely off with all my applications running. What would Nielsen say? Where is the Consistency, Recognition and Error Prevention?

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Tom Allen from Yahoo! Membership posted an article on the Yahoo! Developer Blog about the “OpenID: One Key, Many Doors” usability study that was conducted to uncover usability issues associated with enabling OpenID on 3rd party sites and using it for subsequent logins.

[ Found via 25hoursaday.com ]

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Access Matters conducted an interesting test on how information is visible to screen readers using different approaches in hiding content from being displayed on the actual page. The provide a table or matrix to compare the different test cases with different screen reader products and versions.

[ Found via access-matters.com ]

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Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

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