Matthew Oliphant's usabilityworks.org — Design, Usability, Life, & Sagan

New pictures are up. Click the picture above, or the “2004 April” link to the right. This one (above) is my favorite of the bunch. Sagan said, “Daddy, take my picture!” So I did. Lots of them.

Sagan started her new school today. She gets her own locker (the building used to be Bloomington Junior High), and is in the room with the “castle.” They have a ’second story’ of sorts built in the room with stairs up and plexiglass walls so the kids can see and be seen.
Her teacher [...]

Well, today was the last of the Alaska license plates. We are now plated Illinoisians (if that is the correct suffix). To commemorate this occasion, I offer up the following movie: Last of the Last Frontier [9 mb .mov].
It is a large file, so for best results you should view it only on [...]

We’ve recently completed a 12-year study looking at Web sites and Web apps looking to see if doing usability (of any kind) makes a difference in the quality of a product.
Apparently it doesn’t. Usability doesn’t matter. This sucks.
Even projects that didn’t have a designer specifically trained in User-Centered Design did relatively well when [...]