The FT has a good article describing the amount of data the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission received from Goldman after a request for information about its mortgage-backed security trading activities. (Essentially a rather … cough … large amount.) While Goldman is hardly playing nice, the more serious issue highlighted in the article is how [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Usability'
“… and on fax page # 1,932,765,358 paragraph 3 …”
June 11th, 2010 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Usability
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Fundamental principles of design, market or otherwise
June 2nd, 2010 · No Comments · Economics, Usability
I recently finished reading this paper, What have we learned from market design? (pdf) by Alvin Roth (his blog Market Design here). He makes three points about successful market design. From the abstract (pdf): To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants [...]
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My own personal Don Norman hell
April 14th, 2010 · No Comments · Fun, Usability
One of my clients is in a building which is highly securitized (if you will). To enter most doors you need need a card key. To exit these doors you press a button to unlock the door. When multiple doors are close together this can cause some problems. Here we see the card key reader [...]
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Yes, your website’s usability matters
April 13th, 2010 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Usability
From the WSJ (subscription required), in an article about Morgan Stanley’s attempt to regain it’s competitive edge, we see this quote (emphasis mine): To make up lost ground, Morgan Stanley is revisiting clients that used to slip through the cracks. “They are courting my business,” says Mr. Atteberry, whose firm manages $13 billion in assets. [...]
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The odd thing about smart meters
April 8th, 2010 · No Comments · Energy Markets, Usability
Smart meters have been hyped as an easy way for consumers to save money by explicitly showing them their energy usage compared to times of peak cost. The theory here is that you’re likely to use less energy at times of peak cost, and shift usage to times of lower cost. This then (one hopes) [...]
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eBay takes another whack at their search UI
February 10th, 2010 · No Comments · Auction Markets, Product Development, Usability
Bits, the NY Times tech blog, calls our attention to something new going on over at eBay: Garden at eBay, a site for testing new tools, features, etc. with users before pushing them out to ebay.com. Our first response is: whatever happened to Project San Dimas, eBay’s earlier attempt to clean up the user interface? [...]
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Forrester’s customer experience index. Useful to investors?
February 9th, 2010 · No Comments · Financial Markets, Usability
Forrester has been putting together a Customer Experience Index for the past few years. The index is a ranking of 133 large companies across 14 industries, and the companies are ranked based on how well customers rated their last experience with the company. It’s not clear to me, at least from their methodology, or from [...]
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The mouse as a crutch (or the story of the Kapitall mouse)
October 12th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Financial Markets, Usability
In the process of designing for traders there is one thing that UX people learn relatively quickly: the mouse is slow. Traders, especially professional ones, rely on keyboard shortcuts to rapidly move around an application and do the thing they’re being paid to do: trade (and hopefully make a profit). The mouse in this environment [...]
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From the file: Oh yeah, I guess it does matter
October 6th, 2009 · No Comments · Product Development, Usability
A recent article from the FT highlights Microsoft’s regret, at least concerning their mobile phone OS, they didn’t focus on the user experience of the dang thing sooner. From the article: Microsoft executives blame their focus on the business market for their failure to relate earlier to the more intuitive interfaces and wave of consumer [...]
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UM on TV
August 31st, 2009 · No Comments · About This Site, Usability
Not sure why I didn’t post this sooner, but the video clip from the panel I was on about user experience for start ups. ~alex
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