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Book report: Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

19 March 2009

This book report originally appeared on the Team Rubber blog.

“Don’t Make Me Think!” is fun to say, and is rather fun to read too.

This is one book that everyone creating web apps,...

Book report: Attention and Interest Factors in Advertising

13 January 2009

First impression? I thought this book would have zero relevance to web usability because it was published in 1947. There is also a huge usability fail because the book doesn’t have a title on the cover (missing dust cover, perhaps?), though the title is on the spine. However, I did really enjoy reading the book because I love old things and it was quite interesting. As a bonus, I now have a good grasp of what makes for a successful print advertisement in 1940s America.

The results featured in Attention and Interest Factors in Advertising were compiled from 2,500 pieces of advertising that were carefully analyzed to determine the public viewer’s attention and interest to individual printed advertisements, thereby determining what actually makes an advertisement effective.

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Thoughts on Selenium IDE

12 January 2009

Selenium IDE is a free Firefox add-on that is used for automated website testing. One can record their mouse and keyboard inputs and create a 'test case'. Further customizion (i.e. confirming a phrase appears) can be done using Selenium or a text editor. One can then play back their test in Firefox and Selenium IDE will flag any errors or mismatches to the test case. Mostly I've used it to test Plone sites and bulletin boards. It's a brilliant tool for any development team.

Some of its best uses:

Testing any functionality that could become broken at any given time during development.
Automating repetitive tasks (like testing a registration form).
Populating a site...