Usability.gov's Research Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines is now live.

On Clickz, Kim Brooks talks about how the intrusiveness of advertising encroaches on the usability of Web sites in Advertising: A Cry for Usability, and suggests that ensuring usability in a campaign that includes advertising will benefit advertisers.

VBXML has an article about building usable WAP applications.

[from webword] Need to complain about someone? Don't bother coming up with the words yourself, let the complaint generator do the leg work for you.

John S. Rhodes and Sean Lindsay have posted a Web Usability Bill of Rights on Webword that trumpets the gripes and frustrations that, undoubtedly, some percentage of your audience has probably brought up in the past. Word up Webword.

eweek has an article on wearable devices gaining ground in both vertical and consumer markets.

frontend.com's Usability Information Centre has a nice offering of Usability tips.

[from Computerworld, 1/22/2001] Computerworld talks about the development of the IA practice on goto.com in The Web's Master Builders.

[site of the day on Builder] Huh? That's what I said after seeing the splash page for Spring.One. Then I figured out after reading the tiny 7px black text (in Rotorcap or whatever) that the text on the bottom of the page gets you in. Once I got in, I saw small boxes come out of a large box (like those Russian eggs that are a big prize for tourists). When you mouse over a box, it opens up and more boxes swing out. Huh, again? Play around a little more and you will see that those new little boxes are the navigation. Cute. This is why people hate flash so much.

I wrote up some reflections on the practice of information architecture within organizations, primarily around intranets. I'd love some feedback.

This idiot apparently changed his first name to ".com".

[from elegant hack] Peter Merholz and Jennifer Fleming deconstruct Style.com

Yahoo! Internet Life has an article by and about Marylaine Block, an Internet Librarian, that discusses how a professional searcher uses the Web (or doesn't use the Web) to do research.

The Standard is running an article on Mcafee's virtual assistant. This is another example of natural language processing applications being used for online assistance/call center activities. According to Mcafee, navigation related help desk inquiries has dropped by half since the introduction of "Lori", their virtual site assistant.

UsableiTV. This egroup provides a discussion network for researchers and developers who are interested in the human factors issues relating to interactive TV (iTV) services.

[from CHIWEB] Harvard Business School Working Knowledge is running an excerpt from the MIT Sloan Management Review on evolutionary, iterative prototyping: Why Evolutionary Software Development Works. The article reports the findings of a two-year study by Marco Iansiti and Alan McCormack of the Harvard Business School that observed 29 projects from 17 firms. (You will need to sign in first to read this article.)

IW's Design Survey 2000 is out. Prominent on the minds of many of the firms participating are alternative devices (mobile phones, pda, webtv) and ADA compliance.

With over two years of development and testing through implementation, XML Schema provides an essential piece for XML to reach its full potential. "XML Schema makes good on the promises of extensibility and power at the heart of XML," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "In conjunction with XML Namespaces, XML Schema is the language for building XML applications." View the press release.

Sapient is still warning of losses. It's stock is now at $12.24. Makes me feel comforted that I left -- my strike price for options was like $58 or something.

Wow. Jeffrey Dachis and Craig Kanarick, the founders of Razorfish, resigned from the company. Article in NY Times.