Usability week ending March 27th

Friday, 25th March, 11:17 PM
Customers' needs are more accurately identified through UX #personas than through #demographic data: http://j.mp/hurCz4

Thursday, 24th March, 4:06 PM
Today’s TV apps offer confusing interfaces, make us squint, or don’t have a point at all. How to make #TV #apps work: http://j.mp/if8kiy #ux

Tuesday, 22nd March, 7:48 AM
Is Receivd's real-time filesharing for family and friends better than Droplr and Dropbox? Try it out: http://t.co/v2wQGlj

Monday, 21st March, 11:40 PM
A "bold" new approach to publishing a book with a dramatically different user experience: http://j.mp/gsXRPn

via twitter.com/terretta

Usability week ending February 13th

Thursday, 10th February, 5:28 PM
Involve decision makers and implementers in #UX to give them understanding of the issues and incentive to fix: http://j.mp/g0KDgG

Thursday, 10th February, 7:57 AM
No part of dynamic AJAXy magic requires beating the Web to a bloody pulp with a sharp-edged hashbang. So stop it.: http://j.mp/guN3Fe

Wednesday, 9th February, 4:55 PM
When technical good intentions go wrong -- how Gawker and Lifehacker broke their websites with JavaScript and hash-bangs: http://j.mp/g4xylU

Tuesday, 8th February, 10:59 AM
A definitive guide to Landing Page Best Practices -- with infographics: http://j.mp/fnGNRX #ppc #adwords

Monday, 7th February, 11:43 AM
VOD UI designers take note: families don't want lean-forward involvement from a lean-back medium: http://j.mp/gk6bYq #ux #tv #vod #ui

via twitter.com/terretta

Apple's 0.7 megapixel 4:3 EDTV media viewer

via tuaw.com

Come on, Apple—Jobs needs a new set of glasses. The iPad is only 1024x768. That's miserly for the HD video age.

A widescreen 1280x768 would have been a megapixel, and HDTV means at least 1280x720. Five years ago, Gateway's CX200 Tablet PC offered that, making portrait view perfect for viewing full page documents including the menu bar, taking notes with Microsoft OneNote—and landscape view ideal for watching movies.

With its 9.7" diagonal and 131 DPI, the iPad offers sharper resolution than Apple's 30" cinema display (4 megapixels at 100 DPI), and the same resolution as the 17" Macbook Pro (2.3 megapixels at 133 DPI), but is less crisp than the iPhone at 164 DPI.

Let's hope the pixel grid is oriented for portrait mode so fonts can use subpixel rendering, or reading will be tiring compared to the Kindle. (It's hard to tell from Apple marketing which is the preferred orientation.)

Sadly, this iPad is not the portable Hulu player I was looking for. Aside from the pixel count barely exceeding Apple's iFrame video format, with HDTV shot in 16:9 and most widescreen movies filmed in 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, there will be a lot of letter-boxing on planes and trains this year.

Broadcasters face challenge of armchair revolution

According to analysis seen by The Times, increasingly popular video-on-demand (VOD) is challenging the business model of commercial television.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the accountant and business adviser, suggests that consumers’ growing appetite for VOD could lead to broadcasters losing a further £280 million from annual advertising revenues if they continue to focus their efforts on cost-cutting and fail to cash in on the boom.

via business.timesonline.co.uk

PwC suggests VOD services needs to sell ads at 3x the CPM (cost-per-thousand) of television to break even. Coincidentally, The Simpsons pulls in $20 per thousand on TV and $60 per thousand on Hulu.

Back in June, Bloomberg reported CBS's David Poltrack saying, “The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

After all, the point of video on the Internet isn't to replace TV. It's to have a two way, and measurable, dialog with each viewer.