Tom Smith
Tom Smith is now helping improve collaboration at the University of York.
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Tag Archives: Usability
Take Two Google Accounts Into Shower?
Did you know that you can be logged into two Google accounts at once? This is particularly handy if your organisation uses Google Apps AND you have a personal Google account. All you have to do to enable this feature … Continue reading
The Man in the White Coat (or My Think Visibility Review)
This weekend I did a session at Think Visibility ( #thinkvisibility ), a mini-conference that brought together a great variety of people who’s lives touch the internet. From marketers to accessibility, geeks, seos and usability people. All the talks I … Continue reading
Less is More And Always Will Be (Unless You’re In Marketing)
One of my favourite usability horror stories (from 2002) was how Tesco, having created an easy-to-use, accessible, light-weight version of their shopping site called “Access”. Unfortunately Tesco’s big wigs were disappointed to discover that everyone was using it. Everyone was … Continue reading
Comics, Bigfoot and Coffee Cups in Business Meetings
You probably saw that Google published an introduction to their new browser called Chrome as a comic. How fab! It quite often baffles me that, when we set out to communicate something (well) that we cling so desperately to text. … Continue reading
Wonderful ZuiPrezi presentation
Recently, a GeekUp message rekindled my long-standing appreciation of all things zoomable. One of the problems with many zooming demos is just that, they’re only demos. Like many visualisation examples, zooming works best when you it’s a tool rather than … Continue reading
Modern Life Is Rubbish (Again)
Ironically, this post begins having been locked out of my Flickr account since Yahoo took it over, so I’ve not been dumping my phone photos like I used to. I’ve found that my phone camera is a sort of visual … Continue reading
User-centred SEO and The Blueprint CSS Framework
I’ve been working with Jo at Track Surveys lately helping them with what I’m starting to call user-centred SEO (but then I do seem to think up crazy names for things). By user-centred SEO I mean that optimising pages and … Continue reading
Stop making it look like a System
The content doesn’t really fit Classic. Nice usability article about a very common problem. My take is that, in design terms, when using grids it will almost always go wrong and that a “solution” of sorts is to use real … Continue reading
Stalking your users
Apart from Google Analytics and any number of log reporting tools, there seems to be more online services offering ways to help you understand your users… Crazy Egg €“ visualize your visitors ClickTale – because every user has a story … Continue reading
Wikis vs The Usability of Online Document Editors
I have just had a quick play with site builder WetPaint, and made this… everythingability page. I was impressed with the tools but it really got me thinking about the future of wikis. Do wikis have a future at all … Continue reading
Getting from A to B: Usability is not dead
There are times when actual, real, dyed-in-the-wool usability ebbs from what I do. It’s always a core value, a passion but at times, I like many others have seen its significance and relevance fade and usability bows down to other … Continue reading
Spiral Calendar
Should it start at the middle or the edge? Which is best/makes more sense for you? Is this circular calendar more useful? I also like this Compact Calendar because I REALLY hate it when tools like iCal show months (as … Continue reading