The university of Minnessota and the University of Baltimore have both done usability studies on Drupal 6. The University of Baltimores study can be downloaded here (found it through Dries Buytaert's blog):

http://groups.drupal.org/files/DrupalUsabilityResearchReport.pdf

Nick Lewis has a few suggestion based on the above study:

http://www.nicklewis.org/node/973 

One of Nick's suggestions is that more buttons be used. I do particularly like the suggestion as it leaves one less click for users who want to save the blog post instead of just publishing it Kudos/+1 to that idea:

http://www.nicklewis.org/node/973#comment-51795 

(The rest of this post is off topic yet related to the title)

Bookings for the iphone 3G in India has started at Vodaphones Website:
http://www.vodafone.in/existingusers/iphone/pages/book-iPhone.aspx

I foresee 2009 being the year of the Mobile Web were most websites should have at least rudimentary support for the iPhone. Facebook does have an iPhone counterpart.

It shouldn't be too difficult to have RSS styled iphone counterparts of websites with images automatically resized for the iphones smaller screen of 480 by 320 pixels (163 ppi)¹.

1-Official iPhone 3G Specs and Image can be found at:
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone

I've been shopping online in India since September 06 and have used quite a few shopping networks. Quite recently a lightning surge took out my DSL modem and onboard LAN so I bought a new UPS that not only protects my computer better but also allows me to purchase more powerful computer parts knowing they will be protected from power surges and brown outs.

As of now I've been on an upgrade spree and while Ebay India (http://ebay.in) is a reliable and easy to use source of computer parts and non-computer wares (Ebay India seems strong policies when it comes to credibility and does actively facilitate refunds) it may not always have the best prices.

Monsoon season starts about this time of year (May) in kerala. A monsoon is a tropical wind that blos continuously. More information about monsoons can be found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsoon

Its normal practice in India to use surge protectors to protect against power surges during storms and power surges during regular use as well. Within a few weeks of reaching India I purchased a 500VA/200W UPS to protect my computer system. While the UPS couldn't support plugging in a 17 inch CRT (issues were caused during boot up where more power was needed by the system during boot up than the UPS could channel leading to BIOS error,) it was more than enough to protect all the components inside the computer casing and a DSL Modem.

With todays screens being wider than 1024px, many text containers tend to have a width greater than 600 pixels. I had earlier thought that text should have a width of 600 pixels less for faster horizontal eye scanning and did not notice margin sizes also affected readability.

The link on http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/textmargin.html states that its not only text width but also margin sizes that affect readability.

Since most websites have a margin width between 10px to 24 px, a column width of 576px (8 inches on a Windows PC although I find 552px to be more widely used) for text columns seems to be the best option for websites. For margins of 27px onwards, a text column width of 288 px (4 inches) seems to be optimum.

I recently came across 2 posts defining the difference between usability and user experience

The post on The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience by Thomas Baekdal provides an easy to understand difference between usability and user experience using roads as an analogy.

The 9th comment on that post also provides 2 more examples on how usability alone isn't enough for a successful product. One example being the creation of the Betty Crocker cake mixes.

I've been using a Asus EEE 701 PC 4G for about a week now. My initial plan was to purchase the Asus EEE 8G which has a 8 GB SSD and 1 GB of RAM. The SKU for the Indian market is the 4GB SSD unit with 512 MB of RAM and built in webcam so I bought that instead and included 1 GB RAM upgrade in the order.

I decided on a black version to reduce eye strain. I have a white ipod video but unfortunately viewing a LCD screen surrounded on a white background seems to induce more eyestrain than viewing the same on a black background.

The following is a direct quote (with actual images instead of image links) from a post I made on:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10105#comment-34593

In acidfree galleries, having the vertical tabs horizontally laid out above the node content wasn't exactly the best placement.

I re did a theme and inserted vertical tabs to the left of the node content (floating the tabs to the left and the node content to the right with complementary widths.)

The image link displays how vertical tabs can be used to navigate between local tasks (I hope thats what local tasks are) of view and list options in acidfree galleries:

Vertically Tabbed Node Options

Your rating:

0

Average: 1 (2 votes)