http://thedesignspace.net/ My daily explorations, troubleshooting, solutions and discoveries. en-us ellen@thedesignspace.net Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:46:23 -0500 http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/001028.html I work in a small learning management department in a large Health System. One of the "forever" problems we'd like to solve, is how to get out of the way of our many clinical subject matter experts and make it EASY for them to put trackable learning content online by themselves. Why is this still a problem in this age... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000995.html Just finished reading a fairly devastating review of Windows 8 by Jakob Nielsen. I have to wonder if some of the choices they made in designing the interface were forced because of patent considerations, considering all the air has been sucked out of the room in that regard by Apple. Worth a read, if you are wondering what to expect... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000989.html Something I've been thinking a lot about lately, since we have been looking at learning systems, is the idea of friction. My definition of friction is anything that either lowers our expectations of the results we can get from a particular tool or process to the point that we either change our expectations of the results or abandon them altogether.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000891.html Sometimes a web app hits it square on target for me, and for once, Google Docs has done that with its new Drag to list to upload functionality. It's as direct as dragging something to a folder with no intermediate step. Nice!... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000822.html The search for the perfect WYSIWYG text editor in Drupal goes on. The best I've seen yet is YUI Rich Text Editor, but it still has some serious browser incompatibilities and usability problems. One significant is that there is nothing stopping users from upload a huge image, and not resizing it down using the provided resizing tools. Now that just... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000794.html When browsing certain sites like Flickr on the iPad, you may be frustrated by an apparent bug in Safari that causes scrollbars within elements on the page to disappear. This can make it impossible to perform certain functions. For example without the scrollbars in the photo selection window, it's very difficult to select the right images to add to Flickr's... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000775.html http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000751.html The pagetree plugin for Confluence is a commonly used navigation widget for the popular wiki. There are now 2 versions: the older "pagetree" and the newer "pagetree2" which has several improvements, including a less cluttered look. The older version displays the standard Confluence page icons next to each node of the tree, whereas these can be hidden (and usually are)... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000742.html In trying to gain some understanding of collaboration patterns, I came across an interesting article that proposes a layered ontology or model of collaboration that reconciles the many ideas on collaboration patterns expressed elsewhere. Towards an ontology of collaboration patterns proposes a "collaboration stack" which clarifies the relationship of collaboration patterns to collaborative services and to the underlying communication technologies.... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000736.html Once you've created a shared online space for your coworkers, you may discover with some frustration that it doesn't receive the level of interest you are hoping for. One reason for this reluctance to contribute may be lack of structure. Wikis don't make a lot of assumptions about how you want to structure or navigate through your data, and this... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000667.html Where is the best spot for an educational (or other) intervention? When there is a workforce performance or knowledge gap to fill, trainers understandably think first of using training to fill it. But is more training really always the best answer? Depending on the skills involved and the characteristics of the audience, process improvement, usability improvement, training or performance support... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000649.html http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000565.html Enterprise Search as Learning Technology With the current training industry interest in elearning trends like informal learning, social and collaborative Web 2.0 learning technologies, it's easy to overlook the importance of the humble search box as a learning tool. More important now than ever As companies seek to increase productivity with fewer people and resources, one way to improve efficiency... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000563.html A colleague at work needed to know how to turn on captions in Windows Media Player. I started to write her a note explaining it, but needed to check exactly how to get to the setting since I knew how to do it in older versions but not 11. This turned out to be just another opportunity to experience Microsoft's... http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000299.html From many sessions helping seniors with their computer problems, I've gleaned some idea of how they think a computer should behave. Note that the ideas listed here only apply to the current generation of seniors. It is doubtful that when the current generation of children grow old, they will have the same requirements. My usability wish list: Most important is...