x28's Blog, Archive 2006

For user interfaces navigation, D. Berry distinguishes two paradigms: "go to" and "bring to me". Which of these is the background for IE7 abolishing the old flyout favorites menu from the default settings, in favor of the favorites side bar? Apparently the side bar is supposed to be more "bring to me", but when actually working with IE7, it is really just the annoying opposite. Read more....

"Different people seem to have different levels of task switching that is tolerable or even enjoyable." And these different people exhibit very different styles of multitasking, some of which seem plausible to me. Read more....

Bold, italics, and underline each fulfill a distinct role, and underline is ideal to indicate all kinds of relationships or links. But unfortunately, underline is underused. Why is it so unpopular? Perhaps because it is the markup of teachers. Read more....

"Getting Real" offers striking, plausible recommendations for building successful software. Several of their arguments would also support the idea that usable apps should cater to cognitive styles. Read more....

A today's newspaper article complains about the current financial promotion policy that divides universities into those with research and those that merely serve a cost-effective (i. e. lowbrow) training. It causes thinking about the underlying concept of learning and knowledge. Read more....

Explaining blogs or other collaboration/ personal productivity tools is not easy. Often, they are a mixture of similar ones. Here is my attempt. Read more....

My attempt to answer this interesting question. A few reasons are specific to collaboration, but the major reasons are also applicable to other, personal productivity tools: the new subtle distinctions are hidden by overdone integration. Read more....

In her keynote speech at GMW06, G. Reinmann identified an innovation throttle of educational research: Methodological Monoculture. Read more....

Thanks to N. McKeand I have downloaded "Folder Marker", and with minimal extra effort I can even assign infotip labels to my folders. Read more....

Jack pointed to a test for assessing one's own innovation style, and he values the mutual awareness of styles. I wonder how this applies to the relationship between consultants and their clients. Read more....

There is an interesting discussion going on about whether we need a new term for blogs in order to "sell" them to non-believers. I think we should not try to sell them to everybody. Read more....

I am glad to see that there are more and more approaches considering the relationship between cognitive styles and software user interfaces. But still it is a long way to go. Read more....

Musing about the usability of the signposting, I found another example where forced narrow context annoys me. Read more....

Finally, my most-clicked text is translated. It shows how to use graphics and database programs to reorder, rearrange, and visualize concepts in an easy way, for instance, with simple elbow connectors for hierarchical relationships, and curved connectors for cross-reference relationships. Read more....

In an earlier posting on Usability 2.0 I complained that user interfaces don't yet cater to cognitive styles. Now it seems that Office 2007 and Vista do exactly this in a decisive, courageous way. They take sides for one type of users that can roughly be referred to as left-brainers: focussed on a narrow context. Read more....

The "cognitive styles" underlying the preferences with IT tool usage have intrigued me since long. Finally I read about theories with some plausible concepts and tried to apply them to my observations: Some people just don't like to expand/ collapse details near the border of a topic, click on stand-in's for distant ideas, or smoothly zoom out and in from narrow contexts to wider contexts and back, but they prefer to hide everything not immediately relevant and make the focussed current context as comfortable as possible. Read more....

Some usability strategies suggest that the IT entities, such as folders and applications, should be hidden in favor of the user's semantic entities, and that a stable, focussed context should be maintained. I agree only partially. Read more....

After struggling for many days, I found out what made me hesitate to follow the intended approach for migrating to a personal wiki, and so I won't split my existing Notepad files of assembled tiny notes. Read more....

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I am in the process of switching to a new tool for my notes. The process is far from finished, and I realize how hard it is for me to give up an affordance of Notepad: its immediacy. Read more....

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Jack's ongoing struggle with selecting a suitable RSS reader, is symptomatic for the outdated usability objectives of many software products. Blog reader software is particularly sensitive to different cognitive styles, since blogs are a fine-balanced hybrid between email postings and personal web pages. Read more....

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Since I am bad at inventing search words, my referer logs have an additional value for me: I can imitate them and find gems. Read more....

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K. Egan's 1997 book "The Educated Mind. How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding" offers great insights about tools like oral language and literacy. How would his theory extend to New Media and IT tools? Read more....

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Another great post by D. Grey, about how meta-data can enhance collections/ content by means of connections/ context. Read more....

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I hate corporate homepages where the company's acronym is not explained. Read more....

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In his "Connectivism Taxonomy", G. Siemens enumerates various stages of learning, and he positions Contribution and involvement before Pattern recognition. This did not convince me at once. Read more....

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When we need to communicate something important to our bosses, the mix of graphics, written words and oral narration must be very well balanced. Read more....

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I won't like IE7's feed reader and will stick to my dedicated aggregator newzcrawler that rather resembles an email reader than a browser. Is it my backwardness, or my "accent" as a "digital immigrant" from the ancient land of email-centrism into the country of the "digital natives?" I think no, it's preferences or cognitive styles. Read more....

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It is amazing how meager the progress has been to leverage the human sense of 3D orientation for IT applications. The wide physical movements and rotations of one's head and body are much easier to be remembered than the tiny fine-motorical mouse moves in our 19 inch 2D world. How could I leverage this physical orientation? Read more....

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Usability "1.0" has attempted to find the one optimized user interface, e. g. an ideal menu tree, or a perfect classification of items. The next generation usability has learned from the users of the read/write Web 2.0 that there are alternate usage profiles, and it acknowledges that there are different cognitive styles. Read more....

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Approx. 130 web pages, linked to from 62 blog postings, tagged with 95 combinations of 51 del.icio.us bookmarks, plotted in a diagram, make up an impressive visualization of thought connections. Read more....

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