justaddwater.dk

Rolf Molich has done a lot to make the usability profession what it is today. He keeps asking questions to what we thought would be common wisdom 5 years ago, and he keeps asking questions. Now, addressing the fact that usability test results can be very diverse (and often are). “If you have 500 problems […]

Thomas and I are interviewed in Danish newspaper “Børsen” today. The article is a 10,000 feet business overview on the productivity gains and possibilities with Ruby on Rails. I really like the picture (by Reimar Juul) and the fact that the article mentions both Justaddwater.dk and Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. Woot! Click image to view larger […]

Just a quick note. Jakob Nielsen mentions Bad Usability Calendar in his latest newsletter, and links to our Norwegian friends at NetLife Research that originally published it.

With the help and encouragement of Claude Almansi, I have now transcribed the web 2.0 video “We are the web” (my notes from yesterday). Full text transcript available right here below. Also, Claude is working hard making a transcribed video available on Mojiti. See the work (in progress) here below: Complete transcript below Web 2.0 […]

Today justaddwater.dk got spam comment number 100,000. But actually the real number is much higher since we have incorporated a couple of measures to catch the spam even before it reaches WordPress or Akismet. We have for example been blocking certain keywords that we found where common in spam that slipped through Akismet, or we […]

2 years ago I wrote a small javascript to view, edit and delete cookies. The really cool thing about this user interface is the inline editing of cookie names and values. I really like the principle that you hover the value that you inspect, can see that it’s editable. Then click directly and the text […]

As long as Jesper and I have written this blog we have both been working for Capgemini in Denmark. Personally I’ve been here for over two and a half years now – some very good years! It has actually been some of my most interesting and educational years ever. So it is with great sadness […]

… and other members of the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade. We just received the transcript that I ordered and I have made it available here on Justaddwater.dk in the different formats: HTML Transcript Ruby on Rails podcast 041 (HTML version 28KB) (recommended) Transcript Ruby on Rails podcast 041 (Text version 17KB) Transcript Ruby on Rails podcast […]

Recently I was recommended taking a look at CrazyEgg which could be a possible candidate for creating heatmaps of user navigation. Rather than to be specific to CrazyEgg, I would like to comment on the general principles and pitfalls when using the methodology that CrazyEgg uses. Heatmap (from CrazyEgg demo site) As I understand, it […]

At Justaddwater, we’re introducing a new category: “Best of Justaddwater“. Alexander, the Chief Happiness Officer, came up with a “best of”-category, that I think any blog could benefit from. Absolutely a brilliant idea. At the moment, we want this to completely replace our experiment with a wordpress plugin for measuring popular posts. (Popularity Contest has […]

Joseph Cooney found a fantastic example of a confusing user interface. (via Jeff Atwood). In a comment on Atwood’s blog, Aaron G adds: The people saying that the UI is good “for people who know wget” are only reinforcing my original point that it provides no useful abstraction to wget and is hence useless as […]

I might be stating the obvious here, but it’s sometimes good to be able to back it up by real research. Via Jakob Nielsen’s “Productivity and Screen Size“: The distinction between operations and tasks is important in application design because the goal is to optimize the user interface for task performance, rather than sub-optimize it […]

Recently I contacted Frank Spillers (of experience dynamics) in order to update wikipedia with citations in an article he originally crafted. In the article on progressive disclosure, I added two sources for Jakob Nielsen’s quotations. Frank had originally only provided one source for both quotations, and a Google search couldn’t even help me finding the […]

Today is World Usability Day. Here on Justaddwater.dk, we have celebrated with finally scrapping our blog archive. Instead we are now just showing the latest 50 articles on the front page, followed by a link to the previous 50. Those are in turn followed by a similar link and so on. The concept of archives […]

Part of our “blog usability” series. IBM’s frontpage focus on blogging inspired me to dig into their blogging policy and guidelines (created by the bloggers in an internal forum): Guidelines for IBM bloggers: executive summary Know and follow IBM’s Business Conduct Guidelines. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate […]

Via Keith Instone I learned that IBM’s US frontpage story today is about blogs. There are several points here worth noting: Blogs are an important factor of IBM’s public face. Blogs give a human face to the big company Focus on participating and sharing insight with clients Screenshot of the landing page: Also worth mentioning […]

Today is our anniversary! One year ago, on this day, Jesper and I sat down in the office to chat. It was Friday and we quickly started talking about our favorite subject: What could we do to raise awareness of usability and web standards inside Capgemini? We discussed the ups and downs of newsletters, meetings, […]

[Jesper’s note: It will be interesting to see how this maps to Jakob Nielsen’s old ideas about reputation managers.] Netflix example: Wall-Mart went head to head with Netflix and lost. They are now linking to Netflix * 4 million subscribers 10 months ago * 60,000 titles, 40,000 of which are rented every day * 2/3 […]

[Live notes from UI Conf] Luke Wroblewski Management “i hate purple” – the visceral side with immediate reaction. look-and-feel level. But there is a deeper Structural, visual side. Structure underlining level. Example: airport map. This example i use over and over again. * no airplanes * every single color is as saturated as can be […]

David Malouf and Bill Scott: Designing Powerful Web Apps with Ajax From UI 11 Conference, Cambridge, Boston October 9, 2006. David’s and Bills presentation notes available. Macromedia coined the term “Rich Internet Application” originally because they wanted to create buzz around Macromedia Flash MX. Usability tests often raise the Q: “Why doesn’t this work like […]

Update: All notes collected in the category “UI11“. Next week I will be in Cambridge, Massachussets attending User Interface 11 Conference. I plan to post my notes here on the blog, but don’t expect them to be as extensive as the ones I posted from RailsConf. Maybe more like my notes from Jesse James Garret’s […]

Technique for using the toolbox: Locating problems in HTML. I decided to make a little toolbox that’s easy to apply on web pages, when investigating problems with web pages. Basically, it’s the tools I used when investigating the case I described in “Why web standards matter (case study)” I split this into two posts. This […]

I asked for numbers confirming my thoughts recently in “Design for Browser Size — Not Screen Size“. First Jakob Skjerning (mentalized.net), and now Thomas Baekdal published his preliminary results. Great to see some thorough work done in this highly important area where pretty much no stat tool or measuring service have ever been. For years […]

Today, ten months ago, Thomas and I started Justaddwater.dk. Our purpose then was to share our thoughts about usability and web standards. It’s time to review our profile after ten months with 135 posts, 420 comments (not to mention 10,000 spam comments) and over 500 links from 250 websites (according to Technorati). Here is our […]

According to Jakob Nielsen’s top ten design mistakes on weblogs the 7th worst thing is irregular publishing frequency. So with no further ado I would just like to thank you guys for keep reading our blog while Jesper and I have been on vacation (Jesper still is by the way). I’ve been totally disconnected for […]

You may have noticed the updated photos of the authors on this blog. Recently Thomas and I met up with Michael Bothager (colleague) to do a photo session. Apart from being a skilled Java developer and business analyst, Michael Bothager is working hard as a spare-time photographer. We really enjoyed the photoshoot, but it turned […]

WordPress uses /wp-comments-post.php as the receiving URL when posting new comments. Spammers exploit this and automatically send their spam directly to that URL (without actually filling out the comment form on the blog).

Here I explain how to deal with this kind of spam attacs.

Since yesterday, the volume of spam comments has gone up even more. Now we get 150 spam comments every 12 hours. (Yesterday it was 21 hours). I promised to tell about what countermeasures we have taken against spam comments. What has that to do with usability? Well, in my opinion, irrelevant comments removes focus from […]

The last days, we’ve experienced a lot more spam comments than usual. For some months now, we have removed about 50 spam comments each day here at Justaddwater.dk. Now, that number has more than tripled. We removed 150 spam comments just in the last 21 hours. Thanks to Akismet (wordpress plugin to remove spam comments), […]

After reading “Pick a Format (Any Format)” by Nick Bradbury (tip by: Jeremy Voorhis on Octoblog) we must say that we totally agree. The point in the post is simple: I keep running across sites that offer the same exact content as an RSS feed and an Atom feed. What’s the point of this? Making […]

This morning we’re speaking in about corporate weblogs in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s hosted by the Danish IT Industry Association, and We’ll be speaking on the experiences with this blog and how it relates to our jobs at Capgemini. The presentation is in Danish. More info on previous blog post “Speaking on Corporate Weblogging event“. Powerpoint […]

Earlier I wrote about Pogosticking and why it should be avoided. I mentioned that pogosticking is: Unnecessary navigation and extra clicks that occurs because pages do not match the information users need to find what they are looking for. Then I’m reading this book from 1999. It’s a classic: Web Site Usability (a designer’s guide) […]

We can now finally reveal the venue for the Ruby on Rails meetup in Copenhagen: After a bid of research we have found the very central Café Selina in the central Copenhagen (just next to The Rock and “Gammel Torv”). To sign up for the meetup and for detailed address info, see our original meetup […]

Last weeks reboot8 conference in Copenhagen is over, and it’s time to get back to work. There were some very good talks but it’s the audience that makes reboot a special event. The highlights of my reboot were the talks from Ben Hammersley, Jesse James Garret, Doc Searls and Jeremy Keith (who was asked by […]

Sometimes I run into a sign that I just don’t understand or sometimes they are just plain funny. I was skiing in Hemsedal in Norway a couple of months ago and took this picture of an in-case-of-fire sign next to the hotel elevator at Skogstad Hotel: It all starts out very informative: In case of […]

From a former colleague I just learned that Capgemini started our first official corporate weblog: CTO Blog by corporate CTO Andy Mulholland and Northern Europe Asia Pacific CTO Ron Tolido. There are two things I think are really excellent: Their biographies — extremely well written, and that the weblog has a corporate commenting policy Example […]

June 13, Thomas and I are invited to speak at an event about corporate weblogs in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s hosted by the Danish IT Industry Association, and We’ll be speaking on the experiences with this blog and how it relates to our jobs at Capgemini. Also, there will be a chance to hear Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, […]

Are you going to JavaOne in San Francisco this year? I’m attending with 6 of my coworkers flying over on Saturday. I just wanted to let you know about a blogger meetup arranged by SunMink (beer included!). See his post for more details and sign up here (only name and e-mail address required). – See […]

I’ve created a bunch of WordPress plugins for our justaddwater.dk blog. In the spirit of sharing I’ve made a couple of them available for download. My plan is to make all of them available as soon as they are ready for the public. I’ve created a page called “WordPress Plugins” under justaddwater.dk where you always […]

As a followup to my post 25% of all web users are disabled, I saw that Microsoft commissioned Forrester to make research about accessibility and assistive technologies.

They found that 57% are likely to benefit from assistive technologies.