Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

Tips from Two Tweeps

Boston has a very strong usability community, which every year turns out in great numbers to their own annual “Mini-UPA” conference in the spring. It’s called Usability & User Experience and it actually has grown to compete with the national UPA conference.
A couple of my former peers at Bentley (@jledwell and @kaniasty) created a great [...]

Designing for Big Data

Jeffrey Veen (Small Batch, Inc.) gave a great talk on data visualization at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco recently (March 31-April 3, 2009). He provides a history of usage of visualizations, including the first subway map (the tube map) and John Snow’s map that is credited with ending the 1854 cholera outbreak in [...]

OK/Cancel Buttons on the Web

I’m a member of ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) and I had a great time recently at CHI ‘09 in Boston. Recently, all members of ACM received a postcard with instructions to vote in the board elections. The postcard directed members to a website similar to this:

I had to enter my PIN twice. [...]

Touchscreen Phones for the Blind

Making touchscreen phones accessible seems like an impossible challenge. But, the Eyes-Free Android project is working on it! Skip to about 2 minute mark for the demo.
[Gizmodo]

Revolutionary New Laptop with No Keyboard

The Onion just released one of its funniest Mac-bashing videos yet. It’s the day before the last (and Steve Job-less) Apple keynote at MacWorld, and I think this video is a great follow-up to my last post on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). BCIs are keyboardless and so is this new laptop dreamed up by The Onion [...]