Making Senses of Design

June 25th, 2004 by Kevin Cheng :: 13 Comments

1fe

Multitasking. The word is applied in many different contexts: How Windows does or does not multitask; How drivers multitask by talking on the phone or changing the radio station; How a person talks on the phone while doodling on a piece of paper. Perhaps it’s the word task that throws us off but we don’t commonly think about some basic multitasking done every day, at a more micro level. For example, holding a conversation.

8 9 6b

27 Separate but Equal Design : 5c Matt May of W3C talks about using text only versions as an accessibility loophole. - 9 3d Comment »

15 8 9 6b

34 UPA List for Local Elections Officials : 49 US Usability Professionals - sign up to help make a difference! - 9 3d Comment »

15 8 9 2b2

FeedBurner Syndication

June 26th, 2004 by Kevin Cheng :: 2 Comments

4c3

We’re trying out Feedburner for our syndication needs so that we can support more people with less hassle. If you were subscribed to us through RSS or wanted an Atom feed, please redirect your newsreaders to this feed. The old feeds will still be around but may slowly get phased out. If you don’t know what RSS is, this message probably doesn’t affect you but I highly recommend you find out. It may change the way you surf.

ff6

Mass Distraction : An Interaction Ivrea thesis studying mobile and in person communication with interesting jacket designs. - Comment »

Interruptive Technology and the Death of Deep Thought

June 30th, 2004 by Tom Chi :: 15 Comments

For those of you who know me, you know that I think Gauss is cool :: Gauss was so tremendously smart that he accomplished 10 times more than the average genius and I think I’ve started to understand how. Just imagine Gauss’s day: every morning he would wake up, and have nothing to do but work on his latest theories … 8-10 hours of uninterrupted time to think. Imagine that.

Nowadays its just the opposite: its hard to get 8-10 minutes of uninterrupted time, and this is mainly due to the interruptive communication technologies that saturate every minute of our waking lives. Its been shown that once someone has been interrupted from concentration it takes ~4 to 15 minutes to regain that initial level of concentration. Now if the mean time between interruptive events is on the order of 10 minutes, its not hard to see that the total amount of time that can be spent in deep concentration is exceedingly low (nearly zero, actually — depending on the distribution around the mean).

BrailleNote PK : The BrailleNote PK is the worlds smallest blindness personal digital assistant. - Comment » 2b

10 5 42

Advertise With Us

7 1b

Active Threads: » We're Not Dead Yet! (6); » Melissa (6); » Who ARE you? (2); » The scariest interface part II... (15); » Creating Conceptual Comics (1); » Google Answers HCI PhD Program (15); » Kicking the Llama (22)

412

OK/Cancel is a comic strip collaboration co-written and co-illustrated by Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi. Our subject matter focuses on interfaces, good and bad and the people behind the industry of building interfaces - usability specialists, interaction designers, human-computer interaction (HCI) experts, industrial designers, etc. (Who Links Here) ?