hFIDO Blog

“The country selector. It’s there when you create an account for a new Web service, check out of an e-commerce store or sign up for a conference. The normal design? A drop-down list with all of the available countries.

However, when conducting a large session of user testing on check-out usability, we consistently found usability issues with the massive country selector drop-downs. Jakob Nielsen reported similar issues as far back as 2000 and 2007 when testing drop-downs with a large number of options, such as state and country lists.

So, this past summer we set out to redesign the country selector. This article focuses on the four design iterations we went through before arriving at the solution (free jQuery plugin included).”

View the usability problems of traditional drop-down country selectors at Smashing Magazine.

“While much of the brain remains a mystery, progress has been made in understanding and reading electrical brain activity were we can use computers to see how the brain responds to facial expressions, excitement and concentration levels, and the thoughts of a person without them physically taking any actions.

So the idea is to use these electrical synapses to also do everyday activities such as placing a phone call, turning on the lights or even in the healthcare space for rehabilitation. In fact, that is what initially inspired me to look at this field more closely.”

While I expect it’ll happen someday, five years is a pretty bold claim – read the full article.

“To help young designers (along with architects, engineers, planners, and more) understand the needs of their aging clients, MIT’s Agelab has created a suit called AGNES, calibrated to give the wearer the experience of being 70. AGNES dims your sight, stiffens your neck, shortens your gait, and faithfully recreates countless other injustices of aging. It’s the opposite of military exoskeletons like the SARCOS: instead of enhancing physical performance…AGNES is an empathy enhancer.”

Learn more at FastCoDesign.com.

“The subject of optimizing the presentation of content within a domain for discovery by search engines falls into the activities of information seeking and search behavior. SEO’s primary concern is improving the visibility of a website/webpage in search engines via unpaid search results. Flawed navigation, poor information and content organization, and weak information relationships not only confound users, they disengage search engine spiders—preventing them from indexing valuable content on your site. The essence of sound SEO has its roots in and is part of the practice of IA.”

Read the full article at UXmatters.com.