One of the things I find most fascinating (and frustrating) about games is that typically you’re not modeling an external goal-set, but are creating one out of whole cloth — and thus one that the potential user must find attractive, engaging, and fulfilling. It sets a whole new bar on software “usability.”This observation by my
Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica notes that voyeurism still rules the web 2.0 world. She refers to a speech this week by Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco: According to the report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly,
The current flurry of interest in the idea of a code of conduct for bloggers is a bit amusing to veterans of community building on the Internet. The issues being raised now about the costs freedom of expression exacts have been well-known since the days when Usenet News first gave anyone with an Internet connection
Tom Haskins paints an intriguing picture in his answer to the Learning Circuits blog big question this month. He replies to the question “ILT and Off-the-Shelf Vendors – What Should They Do?” with a description of what things are like “now” and the recommendation that given this set of circumstances “Leave a clean corpse” is
One of the things I like about the computer is that when I acquire software for it that I decide later I don’t really need, the clutter the unneeded stuff creates is totally hidden away once I turn off the box. This is not the case for dresses or household appliances which seemed like a
To hear some Web 2.0 enthusiasts tell it, “training” is becoming an outmoded concept. These days, anybody who needs to know anything can find it on the web. It is a new dawn for the autonomous learner. It is true that the read-write web has brought us an unprecedented avalanche of instantly available information. If
Raph Koster has a fascinating slide show he presented to the 2007 Games Development Conference. I like to keep a weather eye on the games industry, because they know a *lot* about how to engage people in the art of learning. In his presentation, he offered a slide with these points: The fail fast, fail
One of the ongoing struggles in the computer world is the quest for the “intuitive” interface. There are consultants who make big money helping software developers create interfaces to their software which might conceivably be understood by the mere mortals who seek to operate it. Personally, I’m a big fan of Alan Cooper, who pointed
Learning Circuits asks us to ponder our pondering this month. I love it when a group I’m a part of gets around to asking this question. It was one on which I was raised, by a wise mother of 4 little girls who knew that spending a lot of time and energy on answering the wrong
We’re having a planning meeting at Q2 this week. For a team which does most of its work together on the phone and in team discussion spaces, its a real treat to have the luxury of meeting face-to-face, of being able to riff back and forth and have that energy that people together bring to