All the people complaining about how bad CAPTCHA is are right.
Letting bad actors into the system then squashing them later if/when they act bad is what should happen. But it'll never happen because engineers don't want to spend time designing systems that have that ability. Easier for them to treat humans like a raw material, like something to mine and refine. And we let them get away with it. Tragic really.
Ugh, hungover Sunday. I meant to say anything that tells you what happened is orders of magnitude less useful in making a better product than something that tells you why it happened.
"If you idiots were able to record every synapse firing in my body while I use your web site, you still could not make a functional web site."
Designer here (currently termed "User Experience Designer"), mainly involved in interpreting research and coming up with interaction designs for software interfaces. I mainly work for large companies.
Everywhere I've worked over the past 10 or 12 years has had some system that tracks mouse movements, page scrolls and whatnot. Sometimes per session, sometimes aggregated into "heat maps", or both.
As a means of making supportable, or even particularly useful design decisions, these system are next to useless and I don't know anyone in my field who gives them the time of day. The budgets used to pay for these systems are not typically those of the design department, and the sales droids know this so tend to target CPOs, CTOs and customer services. I really wish all such "session tracking" would die in a fire, but they have a trivial attraction for those who want to "know" about "customer behaviour" so they keep hanging around like a bad smell. Worse, their existence is used as an excuse not to spend money and time doing proper customer observation and testing. I even considered leaving a job I once had because everyone kept staring at these damn things and interpenetrating them however they wanted.
My best guess for why this phenomenon of mouse tracking gets held up as "user research" is that it comes from a sort of mythology born of eye-tracking. Eye tracking is useful as a tool in psychological research to do with visual attention and perception. That kind of research is quite different to the kind of research carried out in the field of UX/design. But that didn't stop various marketing droids pushing the idea of eye-tracking on gullible C-levels to help with their UX. Here's a nice summary of the issues from somebody in my field, if you're interested. Fundamentally though, anything that doesn't help you work out why something happened is orders or magnitude less useful in making a better product than something that tells you what happened. The only real way you're going to get that is task-based observation in talk-aloud research sessions. There is no real alternative to that.
All this probably means that I and others in my field have failed in our duty to persuade those in non-design management positions about these issues. And I'm reduced to venting about them on
" it has degenerated into email with a shitty client interface"
This.
Incredibly, the *only* thing keeping Slack from being the same as some 1995-era proprietary email system is the fact that it has multiple inboxes by default. Which makes it worse than email. And even worse when you look at the stats for just about any organisation, and see that over 80% of messages are either private chats or DMs, Heck, it wasn't until last year that you could even CC anyone not in a channel. You had to first invite them to a channel, then wait for them to join, then when everyone you wanted to talk to had joined, you posted your message. That's INSANE!!
Agree completely on both of these counts. iTunes has for years be a stunning disaster in terms of usability and even function (which is saying something - normally you get one without the other).
As an aside, it seems Apple has never been any good at software design.
The "just leave and sort it out from there" vision of no deal attempts to frame the debate as being about wider issues of freedom and sovereignty, and downplays economics and trade deals as being things we can just get done on the side form a position of freedom from the EU.
The trouble with that is that you cannot disentangle trade and economics from freedom and sovereignty. Just ask North Korea.
For many people, a no deal Brexit will mean job losses and less money. And money, is unfortunately, freedom. A no deal Brexit will be case of "be careful what you wish for".
"The hard border is a particularly cynical bit of Remain propaganda - there was never a hard border and there never will be."
What?? "There never was a hard border"? Let me guess, you're not from Ireland are you, or even the UK, and know jack all about the history of the region.
FFS. Say what you like about the Brexit debate, but it sure is full of fools.
People think they know what the EU is and what it does, but everything they know is a lie.
So now we have an entire movement, headed by a party called "The Brexit Party", which is concentrating huge energies, blood pressure and flag-waving rage on
The question then is, what happens when all these people realise they were barking up the wrong tree?
There are literally eight countries where there is a movement to leave the EU.
Really? Which movements? What support do they have? Not even Le Pen wants to leave the EU now:
For instance the French are expressing a desire to leave. A poll in 2016 showed 61% unfavourable view of the EU, with 33% expressing a desire to leave. Other nations have similar or even higher numbers of dissatisfaction with EU membership.
Care to cite that poll? Because there's a sheload of evidence to the contrary:
The plan was to exit the EU
Because this is
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
See that blue bit that says "European Union"? There are a number of areas that are not part of it, aren't there? Look! There's the EU Customs Union! Oh, and the EEA! And what's that up the top left? EFTA! There's even CFTA over to the right!
So many choices that are OUTSIDE THE EU. Which one did we vote for I wonder?
Set its own trade deals with the world.
OK. So for any potential FTA partner, what is something the UK is currently prevented by a foreign government policy from selling competitively? Has that country indicated it might remove that barrier for the UK? Has that country ever removed that barrier in an FTA with someone else? What do you envision the UK trading for these concessions?
Don't tell me - you don't know, and anyway it's not about trade, it's about freedom, isn't it? That, I'm afraid, is tripe. Trading on good terms goes hand in hand with freedom and social benefit. Just ask North Korea. The probability is that we'd get worse (possibly FAR worse) trading terms with other countries compared to what we have now, because we'd be negotiating from a worse (and possibly desperate) position - particularly if we left without a deal.
The economy will be free of EU regulations. Thats a plus for imports and exports.
Great! So you can name an EU regulation that’s currently damaging UK productivity and innovation! Which one(s)? What does it do, and why is it there? Did the UK oppose its implementation? If the UK diverges from EU regulations, will UK firms still be able to sell into it?
I look forward to your reply!
Look - this isn't that complicated really. There are no significant advantages to leaving the EU, and a hell of a lot of disadvantages, some of which are potentially extremely scary in the long term.
Don't worry, Google single sign-on isn't going away. It's just their social network that's being deleted.
I have a variable height standing desk at work. I asked for a desk inspection (which the company gives for free as it's scared of litigation for things like carpel tunnel). The inspector told me how to configure the desk correctly for both standing and sitting, and said that I should neither stand nor sit too much during the day. Mix it up. I sometimes do the morning sitting, the afternoon standing or whole days on either, and other combinations. There are also operational pros and cons of each (when standing you can see people coming from further away, but have less desk space to use).
I'm not too bothered about my mortality, just my short-term musculoskeletal health. I should point out though that I've heard about the varicose veins thing and so I secretly wear compression socks to work now.
"specifically the aftermath of the nuclear test site collapse seemed to be a key turning point"
Yes, although China had quietly and quite suddenly pulled the plug on them a couple of months prior to the collapse by reducing amongs other things their gasoline exports by 97%.
China's action is thought to have prompted Kim's trip to Beijing, where he was perhaps told how things would now play out by his only ally and provider of the vast majority of his foreign trade. So much for self reliance then.
Whether Trump had anything much to do with this is... Doubtful.
"Well hello there Charlie Brown, you blockhead." -- Lucy Van Pelt
