May 29, 2003
How do you justify usability testing?
There is no silver bullet. It takes years for software industry to develop methodology to improve software development process. Then it came the debugging skills and understand the important of testing.
It’s always about design choice, nobody is going to be right at the first design. Thus the testing pay off, and the sound methodology ensure the better outcome.
These are the questions asked to Jakob Nielsen:
- How can a design agency convince clients to pay for usability testing?
- What should you say when clients complain that there’s no reason to test the design since they hired you because you supposedly know how to create good websites in the first place?
His answer. Although it basically talk about UI design, I feel it could apply to lot of fields of softwares. So I would know what to answer if boss asking what to justify unit test…
TrackBack auto-discovery problem?
It seem the TrackBack auto-discovery didn’t work properly. I was able to send the ping by just including other MT site’s permalink. I suppose it grab the external link and extract the trackback ping URL, then send the ping. But it didn’t function now. I did turn on and off the features back then to avoid duplicate ping. Would that make it mulfunction? Don’t think so.
Right now, I got to remember to copy other’s trackback URL and paste into the box labeled “URLs to ping”. To me it’s tedious, not friendly.
MSC Trustgate sack its chief scientist
I was reading Start In-tech and went through this article: The pro and his con. To my surprise that is somebody could make up such brilliant credential and thought he could last with that. Isn’t he too smart? The quoted paragraph shows the credential made up by Michael Chong
He had doctorates in digital terrestrial and satellite broadcasting from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); in microelectronics from Cornell University; in manufacturing from the University of Lausanne; and in electrical and computer systems engineering from University of Oklahoma.
This was in addition to MBA and MSc degrees from two Australian universities.
He had worked as executive vice-president for Disney World Technologies, was senior vice-president at Digital Equipment Corp, a vice-president at Aaron Spelling Productions, and a systems coder at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre.
He was then hired as chief scientist by MSC Trustgate to design and develop a DMS. How the fraud was being found? In Tech did a check on his credentials while asking for an interview with him. Then the finding was sent to MDC, which partly owns MSC Trustgate. And at more or less the same time, the company has suspected him while they found his knowledge isn’t reflect what he claimed. To end of the story, he admitted the fraud and surrendered the programming work, yet MSC Trustgate didn’t take legal action against him.
The story sounds pretty familiar. I recalled to read sort-of the same event years ago. First to check on Screenshots, Jeff did blog about this, his reader wrote to him and it seem the guy isn’t doing this for the first time:
The email writer claimed Michael Chong had only one PhD when his Singapore-based dotcom hired the con-artist in 2000 as CTO under similar circumstances: The CTO was leaving. A replacement is needed. IPO was in the works. …
The writer said his company filed a police report in Singapore and admitted that it should have done the same in Malaysia since “he was hired in KL to go to Singapore.”
Wow…it seem there are more stories, but nope, this isn’t what I rememberred. It got to be some cases regarding Singapore dot com company.…later with further searching, I got it:
- Singapore technology whizz sacked for faking credentials
- Post in Usenet: this and this
- And you could still get how the CTO claims their advanced AI technology on Internet
Internet got your footstep. May be company should adopt the habit to do some search on somebody whom they’re going to employ. Or may be they should check if the person got a blog. Would it make sense?
Search Engine of Blogland
Weblogs.com and blo.gs have been center of the blogworld that most of the weblogs would ping them upon a new entry posted or updated. With the ping-centered list, and RSS auto-discovery, the blogland are ready for RSS specified indexing and search engine.
So did Google ready for it? Would there a new tab “RSS” added to the existing search tab in google? Or a “rss:xxxx” searching syntax enhanced in web searching? What made a difference to generally search on Google with searching in Blogland? Think about this: you have just watched the Champions League final of Juventus v.s. AC Milan. Feeling excited and want to talk about it, and you ain’t member of any forum/community, what could you do? Go search on blogs! Find someone who blog about it and some blog with the comment system. That’s the value of a blog-centered searching system, it’s about ordinary people. You got to wonder what ordinary people think about an event after you read or tired of the major news media (well, news.google.com ain’t human at all)…
What’s the choice we have of RSS search engine?
- Scott’s famous Feedster (previously named Roogle). Search on RSS search engine on google would bring you to it most of the times
- rssSearch, as the name said, a RSS search engine
- Daypop Search you could specifically search only for weblogs. Though most people may use Daypop as an index for top news/stories in blogland.
- Similar to Daypop, Popdex got a search feature too, and allowing to search only for blogs, or even to get citation.
- find.fyuze.com, the other search engine for news feed, it’s a bit slow though