Focus On Goals, Not Actions

Last week, ReadWriteWeb published an article on Facebook and their universal login initiatives like Facebook Connect. The article bore the headline “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”. The keywords in the headline pushed the article to the top of the Google search results page for “facebook login”, as a latest news result.

While the article was number one, a curious thing happened. Hundreds of Facebook users arrived at the article, presumably wanting to login to Facebook. They didn’t understand that the page they arrived to was not actually Facebook…

Blogging Simplified

I’ve just finished migrating UsabilityPost to another blogging engine. Before, the blog was powered by the usual suspect: WordPress. The new engine is called Toto which was recently launched by Alexis Sellier, the creator of LESS. Unfortunately Feedburner has re-published all the articles to RSS again, so apologies to all the RSS subscribers for the confusion.

Ok, so what’s Toto? Yet another blog engine? Not quite. Toto’s features are so compelling that I just couldn’t resist switching over…

On the iPad

Wow, I’m seeing a lot of negative commentary on the new Apple iPad tablet from pundits all around the Web. People are already shouting that this will be a flop and that Apple have dropped the ball this time. A lot of criticisms: no USB, no multitasking, low memory, no Flash support, no camera, no full OS, and so on and on. Everyone seems to be missing the point completely.

I am personally really impressed with what Apple have delivered and I have absolutely no doubt it will be one of Apple’s best selling products. Let me tell you why.

One mistake people are making is assuming the iPad is just a “scaled up iPod Touch”. Mistake? Really? Absolutely. It’s a mistake because this evaluation of the device comes from an anchored comparison to Apple’s previous work. Instead of looking at the product for what it is, the evaluation simply analyzes the differences, which is mainly the screen size. Instead, you should look at what the product actually is, and what it’s going to do for you…

What's in a Name?

Gruber of Daring Fireball posted his take on a suggestion that the Apple tablet could be called “Canvas”. I agree that it would make a great name, and the artwork in Apple’s invitation does point towards it. This post gave me another thought though for a potential use for this device.

Everyone is talking about reading stuff, watching movies and playing games on the device. It’s all about digital consumption, not creation. How would you write documents and manage spreadsheets on a small tablet device which likely doesn’t come with a physical keyboard? The answer: you wouldn’t. But there is a form of creation that doesn’t require a keyboard: art…

E-books are Books

Today everybody is still using a misleading term: the e-book. What’s an e-book? An e-book is an electronic book. But what does it really mean? Essentially all it means is: “a digital book”. A book that’s not made from paper, ink and glue, but from bits and bytes. This is misleading.

It’s misleading because the term ‘book’ doesn’t really refer to the type of materials used to realize written work — it refers to the format of such work. It’s all about distinguishing and categorizing a piece of writing so that readers know what to expect in terms of length and structure…

Flash Is Never Coming To the iPhone

TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) posted a list of things their readers want to see in iPhone 4.0. Flash made it on the list with 80% support.

"Almost 80% of us want Flash, even if it's a bad idea."

Personally, I’d love to see Flash work on the iPhone. There are so many sites and apps on the Web that use it that it would most certainly be something users will benefit from. But, this just isn’t going to happen — at least through the phone’s Safari browser that is. The reason for this has nothing to do with technical problems; it’s all about Apple’s strategic vision for the device…

Introducing the UsabilityPost Forum

A lot of interesting and valuable discussions take place in the comments of the posts here on the blog. I think it would be useful to have a dedicated platform to take these discussions even further. So today I’m opening up a new section of the site: the UsabilityPost Forum. Access it from the menubar above or go directly to: forum.usabilitypost.com

Feel free to post about anything you find interesting — for example, a good book you’ve just read or a useful app you’ve discovered. Launched a new site or app and need feedback? Post about it. Discuss latest trends and design ideas.

Of course since the forum has just been launched there might be a bug or two hiding somewhere and a few design elements to iron out. If you find a bug please let me know, either here or on the forum itself.

Get started by signing up here.

High Quality

I see the term “high quality” used quite a lot when reading descriptions of what a good product should be, or indeed companies advertising their own products. But this term is ultimately meaningless.

Quality is a distinctive characteristic or attribute possessed by something. The screen on that new device can be described as “high quality” but that won’t actually say anything about it. What will say something about the screen are things like resolution, contrast, color, size and so on. All these factors contribute to the overall quality of the screen, yes, but using the term “high quality” without elaboration is meaningless because it doesn’t provide any parameters to measure this quality…

Make It Difficult to Read

Every article I read on writing content for the Web revolves around one key idea: make the content easy to read. It’s all about making it scannable, writing great headlines and headings, and using simple and clear language. But before you follow that advice you need to answer this: why?

Why make the content easy to read? Why not ignore readability and just focus on your own particular style? Or perhaps even make it more difficult to read? You think it’s all clear cut and writing something that’s hard to read has absolutely no value?

How about this: writing content that’s difficult to digest slows the reader down. They can’t scan it so they have to slow down and actually read it. If they cannot understand something they may even have to stop and think about what they’ve just read — perhaps even re-read it over again…

The Web Is the Perfect Content Delivery Channel For Tablet Readers

A while back I wrote a post on why we still use paper. I’ve talked about the idea of consumption of digital content, mainly textual content. We still read books and magazines because they’re much more suited for consumption — it’s just much easier to sit comfortably in an armchair read a book than to read a book on a computer monitor at your desk. Personal computers are more suited towards content creation because of their size, input devices, big monitors and so on.

I believe than eventually paper books and magazines will become obsolete. This will happen when we get a good digital device for reading them, a good reading tablet. Amazon has begun this with the Kindle, Barnes & Noble have recently answered with the nook, but I think it will take us a lot more time to arrive at a perfect device of this sort. When it does arrive, there will become little point in printing thousands of paper copies when you can distribute the same content in digital form.

One interesting thing I notice a lot is that people tend to be confused about tablets. They see no reason for making a digital tablet. Who would use it and why?