I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'usability'

October 14, 2008

Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research

Spoiler: OpenID usability SUCKS MASSIVE DONKEY COCKS IN HELL FOREVER. The mental model is completely broken. Its one use that I can see: an open backend for “Login to this site with your foo.com account” style buttons

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July 24, 2008

Silverback: guerrilla usability testing

Pretty damned nifty usability-testing app for OS X. With an *awesome* icon. Similar to (and considerably cheaper than) the Windows app Morae.

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February 20, 2007

Tantek's Thoughts: Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

Nothing earth-shattering or new, but food for thought.

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February 17, 2007

Don Norman's jnd.org / UI Breakthrough-Command Line Interfaces

Don Norman on search boxes being the command lines of today.

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December 18, 2006

Usability in the Movies -- Top 10 Bloopers (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

Uncle Jakob has officially run out of things to write about.

November 13, 2006

shell: revealed - Can't drag quicklaunch toolbar to top of desktop

I’m playing with Vista on my laptop, and this “improvement” from Microsoft was pissing me off. Thankfully there is a “solution”. One that is a usability nightmare waiting to happen (drag a folder too close to the edge of the screen, and it becomes a toolbar that is hard to work out how to close).

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September 20, 2006

Joel on Software: Amazing X-Ray Glasses from Sprint!

Joel rips into the craptacular experience of the new Sprint phone. I bet the PR bod who figured sending free phones to bloggers was a great idea is regretting it.

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September 4, 2006

Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors

Track where users are clicking on your webpages so you can slap in advertising/tune your site’s usability (delete as appropriate)

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July 13, 2006

flow|state: Insert key safely disarmed in Microsoft Word 2007

Hitting the ‘Insert’ key in Word 2007 will no longer enable the inexplicable document-eating mode. It had never occurred to me just how horrendous a usability experience the Insert key could be.

March 16, 2006

Call Me Fishmeal.: This Post is Microsoft Enhanced (TM)

Awesome post about the brokenness of “MIcrosoft Enhanced” cable company PVRs.

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March 9, 2006

Picture This: A New Look For Office

MS unveil their new UI for Office. Curious to see how this works in real life, but the photos look like usability could go either way.

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September 15, 2005

Apple breaks the iPod UI a little more

Number of button presses required to see/change the rating of a track on the iPod nano: Three, Four or Five, depending on whether you have Lyrics and Cover Art attached to the track. Hey Apple! Remember “consistency”?

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.