human interaction

usability news

A Heuristic Evaluation of the Usability of Infants:

Consistency and Standards: Most infants have similar requirements and error messages, and the same troubleshooting procedures work for a variety of infants. Cuteness is also an infant standard, ensuring that users continue to put up with the many user interface difficulties.

A retrospective on the Xerox Star Information System. If there ever was a single software that shaped the way human interaction would be handled on computers, it was this.

information flow

Last week, Kapil and I prepared a collection of all the programs we needed for our practicals this semester, and Kapil sent them out to all the members of our class. Yesterday, I got the same zipfile we sent back as an email, from a person outside our college. Also, someone uploaded the file to the BITBIS community filespace. Soon after that, I got two copies of the same 604 Compilers notes from two different people.

It's extremely interesting to see how information flows through which such high redundancy.