Choosing a cable provider can be confusing. There are several aspects you have to take in consideration, and many technical terms. In this post we will give some tips you can use to choose your cable provider.
The first thing you should look for is what companies are available to you. In the Philadelphia area the following companies provide services: Comcast, DirecTV, Dish Network, RCN and Verizon. However, that doesn’t mean that you can use all of them. Comcast, RCN and Verizon must have cables laid in your neighborhood. DirecTV and Dish Network are technically available everywhere but many buildings and neighborhoods do not allow the dishes. At the end you will have to go each company website and check service availability for your address.
When designing a website or a mobile app it's important to understand how users really behave. A design that adapts to user behavior will allow for more intuitive navigation.
The fast pace of the Internet combined with the very low impact of bad choices —when clicking on the wrong link usually nothing bad happens and you can go back very quickly— have made them impatient and undisciplined.
They Don't Read
Well, they read a little, but it is more a scan, not linear reading. When presented with big blocks of copy they will try to identify key words to validate if it has information they are looking for. Users will behave more like a bug attracted by a bright light: their eyes will be drawn first to what is visually more important, looking for the next thing to click on.
We have grown accustomed to expect a great product launch by Apple every January. Few can argue that products like the iPod and iPhone have set milestones in the evolution of consumer electronics, and we all hope that the saga will continue uninterrupted. But that kind of expectation is simply unrealistic.
And since iPad could not fulfill that expectation Apple seems to be resorting to fanfare and big words to embellish the product and make it look like something it is not. The truth is that a lot of the hype was created by Apple fanatics and some ridiculous comments, but a serious company would have set the record straight.
Happy New Year 2010!
A substantial part of our digital life is stored in our personal and work computers. Photos, music, emails, documents and finances lie in hard discs that can break down, be stolen or destroyed. Files can also be erased by mistake or by viruses.
If you have lost computer files you know the horrible feeling of knowing that memories, information and hours of work are irreversibly gone. By now you should be convinced that you need to backup your files. In this post I will contrast different backup options that are available to any computer user.
CD or DVD
Making a copy of your files in a CD or DVD is one of the first options that users attempt. This is better than nothing but it has major disadvantages: 1) It is a manual process, which means that it is time consuming, therefore requires the user to be disciplined and at the end is not performed very often. 2) Writable CD's and DVD's are less reliable than a hard disc and individual files or the whole disc can be easily damaged. 3) Discs can be lost, stolen or destroyed. 4) Most users need several DVD's to store all their files.
This is the first of a series of posts on Web Usability that I will be writing in the coming months.
If you are involved in the design or development of a website in any capacity, the first thing you should acknowledge and embrace is that you are not the typical user.
Developers, designers, marketing managers, and business owners have the tendency of making web design decisions based on their own taste and browsing style. That is a natural approach.
However, there are two problems: the first one is that you want your website to be impressive, so you come up with lots of ideas about the layout, colors, cool functionality, and fancy words that will make the website original and great… for you. The second problem is that you are an insider — you know too much about the company, and it's easy to think that everybody understands about your products, services, acronyms, and technical terms. And because of that you can end with a website that works well for you but not for the real audience.
The answer is testing. You don't need to spend a lot of money or make it super scientific. One easy way is to find people that have absolutely no interest in your project, like your neighbor who doesn't understand what your company do, or your aunt. If they look at your website and they don't get it you've got a sign that it is not evident enough.
Ask questions about what your test subjects think about your website and then listen to what they say. Don't be defensive or try to explain. Ask them to perform some simple task like finding out who is the operations manager, how long has the company been in business or what is the phone number of the main office, and then observe if the process is smooth or cumbersome.
