Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Year: 2004

  • Get Ready to Rumble

    Guru's vs. Bloggers

  • The Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!

    My first article, The
    Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!    , went up over at Digital Web today
    (or rather yesterday, while I was asleep). This first article is part of a series
    of columns entitled Art
    of Interaction    .

    Everyone agrees that a good user experience is important but many miss the
    fact that design plays an integral role. In current and future columns I will
    assess the importance of aesthetic quality (or attractiveness) in user interface
    and web design, examining an assortment of topics.

    In this first publication I discuss why aesthetics is important when it comes
    to designing a web site, or any interface for that matter. Some
    people on the web have argued
    that “making things pretty” is irrelevant. Function and usability
    first, design second, so it seems. I disagree. In this column I will go as far
    as stating the contrary: design comes first, usability second.

    It’s about time we put design back on the agenda! Read
    more    .

  • ATM Contingency Design

    Everybody needs to use an ATM at some point. Personally I would like all money
    to be virtual, no coins, no paper, nothing. Of course there are some reasons
    to why that’s not the case, but I will not discuss those here. Rather
    I will have a look at an ATM machine I recently used and in my opinion has some
    design issues.

    ATM machine 1

    (more…)

  • Weekend Reading (14)

  • I Lost My Password

    How usable is security? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself
    lately. One of the courses I attended last semester was about cryptography and
    secure design. What got me thinking is the fact that security is just 20% technology—80%
    is organizational. Security is about people—about trust.

    The thing is, the more you try to make a system secure the less usable it becomes—and
    as a result, the system actually becomes less secure than its designers intended.
    Do you use different passwords for an assortment of accounts you are subscribed
    to? Do you change your passwords frequently? I certainly don’t. Security
    is always a trade-off between convenience and complexity. People don’t
    like complexity, and definitely not at 8:30 in the morning when they need to
    log in to start working.

    If you ask users to memorize too many passwords they will start sticking post-it
    notes on their screen to make sure they don’t have to call tech support.
    How secure is that? You just spent 6 months and a few million bucks to end up
    with bright yellow post-it notes all over the place with confidential information.
    That’s why security is about people, not technology.