Most Usable Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Most Usable. Here they are! All 63 of them:

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.
Anthony Bourdain (The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones)
Where the world comes in my way—and it comes in my way everywhere—I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself. If I show you a cheery air in order to cheer you likewise, then your cheeriness is of consequence to me, and my air serves my wish; to a thousand others, whom I do not aim to cheer, I do not show it.
Max Stirner (The Ego and Its Own)
There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men--many men--unfortunately aren't anything.
Charles Bukowski
In reality, though, most of the time we don’t choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage--oop!--yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more.
Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)
The other thing that I would say about writer's block is that it can be very, very subjective. By which I mean, you can have one of those days when you sit down and every word is crap. It is awful. You cannot understand how or why you are writing, what gave you the illusion or delusion that you would every have anything to say that anybody would ever want to listen to. You're not quite sure why you're wasting your time. And if there is one thing you're sure of, it's that everything that is being written that day is rubbish. I would also note that on those days (especially if deadlines and things are involved) is that I keep writing. The following day, when I actually come to look at what has been written, I will usually look at what I did the day before, and think, "That's not quite as bad as I remember. All I need to do is delete that line and move that sentence around and its fairly usable. It's not that bad." What is really sad and nightmarish (and I should add, completely unfair, in every way. And I mean it -- utterly, utterly, unfair!) is that two years later, or three years later, although you will remember very well, very clearly, that there was a point in this particular scene when you hit a horrible Writer's Block from Hell, and you will also remember there was point in this particular scene where you were writing and the words dripped like magic diamonds from your fingers -- as if the Gods were speaking through you and every sentence was a thing of beauty and magic and brilliance. You can remember just as clearly that there was a point in the story, in that same scene, when the characters had turned into pathetic cardboard cut-outs and nothing they said mattered at all. You remember this very, very clearly. The problem is you are now doing a reading and you cannot for the life of you remember which bits were the gifts of the Gods and dripped from your fingers like magical words and which bits were the nightmare things you just barely created and got down on paper somehow!! Which I consider most unfair. As a writer, you feel like one or the other should be better. I wouldn't mind which. I'm not somebody who's saying, "I really wish the stuff from the Gods was better." I wouldn't mind which way it went. I would just like one of them to be better. Rather than when it's a few years later, and you're reading the scene out loud and you don't know, and you cannot tell. It's obviously all written by the same person and it all gets the same kind of reaction from an audience. No one leaps up to say, "Oh look, that paragraph was clearly written on an 'off' day." It is very unfair. I don't think anybody who isn't a writer would ever understand how quite unfair it is.
Neil Gaiman
I learned long ago that I am not seeing directly, that my subconscious is doing most of the “sponging” and it will be years before any usable impressions surface.
Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing)
Usability, fundamentally, is a matter of bringing a bit of human rights into the world of computer-human interaction. It's a way to let our ideals shine through in our software, no matter how mundane the software is. You may think that you're stuck in a boring, drab IT department making mind-numbing inventory software that only five lonely people will ever use. But you have daily opportunities to show respect for humanity even with the most mundane software.
Joel Spolsky (User Interface Design for Programmers)
CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp’s farm—or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life.
Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs — they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told.
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
We could look at the upcoming day and despair at all the things we don’t control: other people, our health, the temperature, the outcome of a project once it leaves our hands. Or we could look out at that very same day and rejoice at the one thing we do control: the ability to decide what any event means. This second option offers the ultimate power—a true and fair form of control. If you had control over other people, wouldn’t other people have control over you? Instead, what you’ve been granted is the fairest and most usable of trump cards. While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.
Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living)
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
I slip into the seat behind hers and take a mouthful of the coffee, wincing at the heat. “Apologies. I neglected to eat supper.” “I neglected to eat supper,” Pytha repeats, mocking my accent. Born on the Palantine Hill of Luna, I have lamentably inherited the most egregiously stereotypical highLingo accents. Apparently others find it hilarious. “Haven’t we servants to spoon-feed His Majesty supper?” “Oh, shut your gory gob,” I say, modulating my voice to mimic the Thessalonican bravado. “Better?” “Eerily so.” “Skipping supper. No wonder you’re a little twig,” Cassius says, pinching my arm. “I daresay you don’t even weigh a hundred ten kilos, my goodman.” “It’s usable weight,” I protest. “In any matter, I was reading.” He looks at me blankly. “You have your priorities. I have mine, muscly creature. So piss off.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps). In both cases, they force you to operate within a framework of their choosing. This is the main challenge with many productivity systems: They struggle to address the limitless variability and evolutionary nature of our individual needs. Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.
Ryder Carroll (The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future)
had tall windows and a usable, if narrow, balcony, with a view down an alley and straight up a boulevard to a dry fountain that once gushed and sparkled in the sunlight. It was the sort of view that might command a slight premium during gentler, more prosperous times, but would be most undesirable in times of conflict, when it would be squarely in the path of heavy machine-gun and rocket fire as fighters advanced into this part of town: a view like staring down the barrel of a rifle. Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War would soon erode the facade of their building as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade.
Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)
It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
There are a number of advantages to moving yourself, with saving money being number one. I have done professional loading and unloading for countless shippers. Most were looking at savings of approximately fifty percent when all expenses were considered. These were people who were moving mostly 8,000 pound or less of furniture (household goods)-- the weight of the contents of the average small three-bedroom home and the maximum usable (as opposed to advertised) capacity of the largest rental trucks. Moving yourself has other advantages too. Weather and road conditions permitting, the move will go on your schedule. You won’t have to worry about coordinating with your movers for delivery because you are the movers. There is also the security of knowing exactly where your stuff is with no worries about delays, mixed-up shipments or theft.
Jerry G. West
Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are transported from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine parts factory. For ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive forging presses and stack the usable metal in crates to be loaded onto train cars. Unscrewing, sawing, hauling. Most days Frau Elena works close by, wearing a torn ski jacket she has found, mumbling to herself in French or singing songs from childhood. They live above a printing company abandoned a month before. Hundreds of crates of misprinted dictionaries are stacked in the halls, and the girls burn them page by page in the potbelly stove. Yesterday Dankeswort, Dankesworte, Dankgebet, Dankopfer. Today Frauenverband, Frauenverein, Frauenvorsteher, Frauenwahlrecht. For meals they have cabbage and barley in the factory canteen at noon, endless ration lines
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
The English departments were clogged with worthy but outworn and backwardlooking scholars whose tastes in the moderns were most often superficial, random, and vulgar. Students who. wanted to write got little practical help from their professors. They studied the classics as monsters that were slowly losing their fur and feathers and leaking a little sawdust. What one did oneself was all chance and shallowness, and no profession seemed wispier and less needed than that of the poet. My own group, that of Tate and Ransom, was all for the high discipline, for putting on the full armor of the past, for making poetry something that would take a man's full weight and that would bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety. Almost anything, the Greek and Roman classics, Elizabethan dramatic poetry, seventeenth-century metaphysical verse, old and modern critics, aestheticians and philosophers, could be suppled up and again made necessary. The struggle perhaps centered on making the old metrical forms usable again to express the depths of one's experience.
Robert Lowell
Concern for one's political community is, of course, right and proper, and Christians can hardly be faulted for wishing to correct their nation's deficiencies. At the same time, this variety of Christian nationalism errs on at least four counts. First, it unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework. Once again this requires a somewhat dubious biblical hermeneutic. Second, it tends to identify God's norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation's history. Thus, for example, pro-family political activists tend to identify God's norms for healthy family life with the nineteenth-century agrarian family or the mid-twentieth-century suburban nuclear family. Similarly, a godly commonwealth is believed by American Christian nationalists to consist of a constitutional order limiting political power through a system of checks and balances, rather than one based on, in Walter Bagehot's words, a "fusion of powers" in the hands of a cabinet responsible to a parliament. Thus Christian nationalists, like their conservative counterparts, tend to judge their nation's present actions, not by transcendent norms given by God for its life, but by precedents in their nation's history deemed to have embodied these norms. Third, Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God. They make too much of their country's symbols, institutions, laws and mores.They see its history as somehow revelatory of God's ways and are largely blind to the outworkings of sin in that same history. When they do detect national sin, they tend to attribute it not to something defective in the nation's ideological underpinnings, but to its departure from a once solid biblical foundation during an imagined pre-Fall golden age. If the nation's beginnings are not as thoroughly Christian as they would like to believe, they will seize whatever evidence is available in this direction and construct a usable past serviceable 34 to a more Christian future. Fourth, and finally, those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms. Frequently, Christian nationalists see the nation as an undifferentiated community with few if any constraints on its claims to allegiance. 45 Once again this points to the recognition of a modest place for the nation, however it be defined, and away from the totalitarian pretensions of nationalism. Whether the nation is already linked to the body politic or to an ethnically defined people seeking political recognition, it must remain within the normative limits God has placed on everything in his creation.
David T. Koyzis (Political Visions & Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies)
Medsupex | diabetic supplies Chicago Medsupex Our store has a multitude of products to help you get the support for your medical needs without even leaving your own home. If you're searching for the best medical supplies, look no further than our Chicago based company, Medsupex, which fits individual styles well. Believing that the best medical care begins at home, Medsupex has the broad selection of products that can help you get the medical assistance you need, right in your own home. We offer aids for daily living, bath safety, beds and accessory assistance, capital equipment, diagnostics, first aid, gloves, hot and cold therapy, incontinence, nursing supplies, orthopedic soft goods, OTC medicines, pediatrics, physical therapy, respiratory problems, re-usable textiles and skin care. We have the strictest of quality conditions when they are manufactured. This means we can guarantee your satisfaction with the product, with the additional bonus of the desire to fit your budget. Each category, from bariatric to pediatric, has a huge selection of items suitable for all types of patients. When ordering products, you can always register your gift registry, just by clicking on a few buttons diabetic supplies Chicago. If you want your own account, you can also register at My Account on the website. You can find just about anything you need for health wellness and most products can be directly delivered to your home. You can even contact us via the telephone and our support staff is available to answer any questions you may have about your particular condition or what Medsupex products will help you. Medsupex | diabetic supplies Chicago Medsupex right in your own home. Medsupex 3029 E. 92ND ST CHICAGO, IL 60617
Medsupex diabetic supplies chicago Medsupex
How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========
Anonymous
The thing to do, then, is to describe what the user does from the beginning to the end of their experience, remembering that it’s the user’s actions you’re most interested in, not the thing you’re designing.
Giles Colborne (Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design (Voices That Matter))
Nir elaborates in this post: TriggerThe trigger is the actuator of a behavior — the spark plug in the engine. Triggers come in two types: external and internal. Habit-forming technologies start by alerting users with external triggers like an email, a link on a web site, or the app icon on a phone. ActionAfter the trigger comes the intended action. Here, companies leverage two pulleys of human behavior – motivation and ability. This phase of the Hook draws upon the art and science of usability design to ensure that the user acts the way the designer intends. Variable RewardVariable schedules of reward are one of the most powerful tools that companies use to hook users. Research shows that levels of dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward. Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a frenzied hunting state, activating the parts associated with wanting and desire. Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries, variable rewards are prevalent in habit-forming technologies as well. InvestmentThe last phase of the Hook is where the user is asked to do bit of work. The investment implies an action that improves the service for the next go-around. Inviting friends, stating preferences, building virtual assets, and learning to use new features are all commitments that improve the service for the user. These investments can be leveraged to make the trigger more engaging, the action easier, and the reward more exciting with every pass through the Hook. We’ve found this model (and the accompanying book) to be a great starting point for a customer acquisition and retention strategy.
Anonymous
Pages with a clear visual hierarchy have three traits: The more important something is, the more prominent it is. The most important elements are either larger, bolder, in a distinctive color, set off by more white space, or nearer the top of the page—or some combination of the above.
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
five principles of memory: • Make memories more memorable. • Maximize laziness. • Don’t review. Recall. • Wait, wait! Don’t tell me! • Rewrite the past. These principles will enable you to remember more in less time. Combined, they form a system that can insert thousands of words and grammar rules so deeply into your mind that you’ll be able to recall them instantly. Most attractively, this system can take what little spare time you have and steadily turn it into a usable foreign language.
Anonymous
The reality is your bosses or clients never ask for fastest spreadsheets. They ask for most usable, accurate and simple ones.
Purnachandra Rao Duggirala (The VLOOKUP Book - Definitive guide to Microsoft Excel lookup formulas)
The problem is there are no simple “right” answers for most Web design questions (at least not for the important ones). What works is good, integrated design that fills a need—carefully thought out, well executed, and tested. That
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
Product leaders create product plans, but those product plans often (usually!) lack the most important component: What is the technical insight upon which those new features, products, or platforms will be built? A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor.
Eric Schmidt (How Google Works)
When speaking of disabilities, the blind and their needs are most often used as an example. It is deceivingly simplistic since accessibility is something most of the population can benefit from. We all benefit when we are tired, in bright sunshine with a mobile, are forced to use a gaming mouse with too-high sensitivity or receive the text version of video clips when we have forgotten our earphones and are in a quiet environment.
Marcus Österberg (Web Strategy for Everyone)
There are three keys to unlock the door to usability: frequency, sequence and importance. Frequency says that things the customers do most frequently (e.g. next, back, search etc) should have a prominent position in the sequence. Sequence says that activities that occur in sequence should be presented in sequence (i.e. you pay at the end of a transaction, not in the middle). Importance means that important pieces of information need to be given clearly and at the right time (e.g. if you only ship within the EU, then a customer trying to buy from India needs to know this early on – not at the end of a six-page check-out dialogue).
Marc Stickdorn (This is Service Design Thinking: Basics - Tools - Cases)
In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three.” Cutler
G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
The reason . . . is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason is more often that the necessary knowledge has not been translated into a simple, usable and systematic form. If the only thing people did in aviation was issue dense, pages-long bulletins . . . it would be like subjecting pilots to the same deluge of almost 700,000 medical journal articles per year that clinicians must contend with. The information would be unmanageable. Instead . . . crash investigators [distill] the information into its practical essence.30
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do)
Reconstruction revisionism arose in tandem with and provided a usable past for the civil rights movement. More than most historical subjects, Reconstruction history matters. Whatever the ebb and flow of historical interpretations, I hope we never lose sight of the fact that something very important for the future of our society was taking place during Reconstruction.
Eric Foner (Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877)
FOCUS RUTHLESSLY ON FIXING THE MOST SERIOUS PROBLEMS FIRST
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
You’re not interested in what it takes to uncover most of the problems; you only care about what it takes to uncover as many problems as you can fix.
Steve Krug (Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems (Voices That Matter))
Women have complained, justly, about the behavior of “macho” men. But despite their he-man pretensions and their captivation by masculine heroes of sports, war, and the Old West, most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs—they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”—but they do as they are told. They are more compliant than most housewives have been. Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. They have accepted almost without protest, and often with relief, their dispossession of any usable property and, with that, their loss of economic independence and their consequent subordination to bosses. They have submitted to the destruction of the household economy and thus of the household, to the loss of home employment and self-employment, to the disintegration of their families and communities, to the desecration and pillage of their country, and they have continued abjectly to believe, obey, and vote for the people who have most eagerly abetted this ruin and who have most profited from it. These men, moreover, are helpless to do anything for themselves or anyone else without money, and so for money they do whatever they are told. They know that their ability to be useful is precisely defined by their willingness to be somebody else’s tool. Is it any wonder that they talk tough and worship athletes and cowboys? Is it any wonder that some of them are violent?
Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)
Following fascism through five stages, in each of which it acts differently, raises an awkward question: Which is the real fascism? For some authors, usually those most concerned with fascism’s intellectual expressions, the early movements are “pure” fascism while the regimes are corruptions, deformed by the compromises necessary for achieving and wielding power. The regimes, however, for all their pragmatic choices and compromising alliances, had more impact than the movements because they possessed the power of war and death. A definition that does full justice to the phenomenon of fascism must apply to the later stages as effectively as it does to the earlier ones. Focusing on those later stages requires us to give as much attention to settings and to allies as to the fascists themselves. A usable definition of fascism must also, therefore, find a way to avoid treating fascism in isolation, cut off from its environment and its accomplices. Fascism in power is a compound, a powerful amalgam of different but marriageable conservative, national-socialist and radical Right ingredients, bonded together by common enemies and common passions for a regenerated, energized, and purified nation at whatever cost to free institutions and the rule of law. The precise proportions of the mixture are the result of processes: choices, alliances, compromises, rivalries. Fascism in action looks much more like a network of relationships than a fixed essence.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
Here’s how I define “stuff”: anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined what, exactly, it means to you, with the desired outcome and the next action step. The reason most organizing systems haven’t worked for most people is that they haven’t yet transformed all the stuff they’re trying to organize. As long as it’s still stuff, it’s not controllable. We need to transform all the “stuff” we’ve attracted and accumulated into a clear inventory of meaningful actions, projects, and usable information.
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
Instead of calls to action, the most innovative user experiences may be calls to inaction. (Design of default options is exceedingly important and superbly discussed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s excellent Nudge.21) Web usability guru Steve Krug provocatively articulates this design sensibility in his heuristic, “Don’t Make Me Think.” Often the best way to get customers to appreciate an innovation experience is by not making demands on them. Don’t get in the way by offering to help. Engagement sometimes undermines a quality user experience. Eliminating choice frequently proves to be the best possible design choice. Because customers often prefer “mindless choices,” says Krug, minimalism is a virtue.
Michael Schrage (Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?)
The new science of cybernetics has furnished us with convincing proof that the so-called subconscious mind is not a “mind” at all, but a mechanism—a goal-striving “servo-mechanism” consisting of the brain and nervous system, which is used by, and directed by the mind. The latest and most usable concept is that man does not have two “minds,” but a mind, or consciousness, that operates an automatic, goal-striving machine. This automatic, goal-striving machine functions very similarly to the way that electronic servo-mechanisms function, as far as basic principles are concerned. But it is much more marvelous, much more complex, than any computer or guided missile ever conceived by man.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded)
Taking usable notes begins with the four discovery areas: People, Places, Things, and Events in Time. The most disciplined way to do it is how I handle note-taking in a formal interrogation or debriefing. I have one or more sheets of lined notepaper with the headings P, Pl, T, and E-in-T. I make all of my “people” notes always and only on my “people” page. I make all my “place” notations always and only on the “place” page, and so on with the other two areas.
James Pyle (Find Out Anything From Anyone, Anytime: Secrets of Calculated Questioning From a Veteran Interrogator)
Let’s say a million users use an application. And one of the most used features is no longer usable because of the buggy code. After this mess, can you tell the client, “Failures are but mileposts on the road to success”?
Ramakrishna Reddy (Confessions of a Software Techie: The Surprising Truth about Things that Really Matter (Software Career Series))
For most of the past two decades the central goal of energy pricing has been to reduce volatility. Policymakers want to ensure that businesses face a predictable environment, with relatively stable prices for electricity and fuels; in a more predictable environment, businesses are more likely to make large-scale capital investments. The government’s main tools in achieving this stability are state-run firms that convert raw fuel into usable energy: power-generating firms and oil refiners. When fuel prices are high, these companies suffer depressed profits or even losses, because they cannot pass on the full cost increase to their customers. But when prices are low, their profits soar, because they are not required to pass on their full cost savings either. These industries can be thought of as “shock absorbers” that enable the economic car to drive relatively smoothly even when the road is full of potholes.
Arthur R. Kroeber (China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know)
The most usable money will be easily identifiable, because this reduces the work required for the seller to verify that she is receiving the amount of value for her merchandise that she thinks she is.
Andy Edstrom (Why Buy Bitcoin: Investing Today in the Money of Tomorrow)
Eco-friendly stores are those that do not have a negative impact on the environment. These are items created entirely of natural and organic materials. They're also packaged in biodegradable or cotton-based materials. Let's take a look at all of the eco-friendly home products we have used in your home right now to help save the earth. How many times a billion annually would you go looking for different clothes? Do you ever put off wearing new clothes because you don't think they're fashionable? Clarkia Home is a store that sells fashionable clothing, recyclable products, and a lot of trash. Clarkia Home was a well-known brand in the anti-fast fashion movement, providing recyclable and reusable products. This ethical clothing brand offers long-lasting fashion at an affordable price that may be worn throughout the year. With a little attention, the everyday item may be transformed into a remarkable design statement. In the kitchen products, you most likely keep recycling or recycling more than is essential. You've decided to start buying eco-friendly kitchen products in order to save money in your home. It is true that it is not always simple. With a few minor changes, though, it is possible to achieve. Here are some eco-friendly home products to assist you in achieving your goal of a completely green kitchen. Strap with elastic: Cotton Reusable Bags with Large Handles Drawstring These beautiful Re - usable Organic Sacks are one of Clarkia Home's best known Recyclable products.
Autheee
Why people churn Most churn occurs at the time of the sale. In 2017, my churn was over 60%. I signed up customers who were a poor fit for my solution. Many customers thought Connex was an inventory management tool and others thought we built custom software. We had no onboarding process and we expected users to figure out Connex on their own. Many users failed to choose the right settings, since they are small business owners and not accountants. Since the software failed to work as expected, they quickly cancelled. From experience, most users churn in the first 30 days. It is critical that you reach out to them and ensure the software works correctly. My staff performs an onboarding and ensures Connex works to the customer’s satisfaction. Users churned because my software lacked features that it has today. We noticed a dramatic shift in churn, after implementing a sales and marketing process. In the first quarter of 2021, we had only a handful of refunds out of 100 purchases. People churn because they fail to achieve their desired result or experience. People buy Connex because they want accurate financial information, better order fulfillment, or protection from overselling. If the sync were inaccurate and unreliable then we would lose customers. In other cases, your software may become superfluous. For example, I used the excellent meeting automation tool Calendly. When I migrated to HubSpot, however, I no longer needed Calendly because HubSpot offered meeting automation as part of its suite of offerings. Even if your tool works, your customer’s desired situation or desired outcomes may change. I churned from my ticketing system because I was unhappy with the customer service and experienced technical issues with their chat and phone system. Companies often tack on features that are nowhere near as usable as their core offering.
Joseph Anderson (The $20 SaaS Company: from Zero to Seven Figures without Venture Capital)
Progressive Summarization is the technique I teach to distill notes down to their most important points. It is a simple process of taking the raw notes you’ve captured and organized and distilling them into usable material that can directly inform a current project.
Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
About 71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water, and 97 percent of that water is saltwater. Only 3 percent is fresh water, and approximately two-thirds of that is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. That means 1 percent of water on earth is readily usable.
Daisy Luther (The Prepper's Water Survival Guide: Harvest, Treat, and Store Your Most Vital Resource)
mostly dreams reject us lights go up at daybreak no reentry
Deborah Landau (The Last Usable Hour (Lannan Literary Selections))
Services Provided by TRIRID Welcome to TRIRID. Services Provided By TRIRID Mobile Application Development Web Application Development Custom Software Development Database Management Wordpress / PHP Search Engine Optimization Mobile Application Development We offer various Mobile Application Development services for most major platforms like Android, iPhone, .Net etc. At Tririd we develop customized applications considering the industry standards which meet all the customers requirements. Web Application Development Web Application Development technologies include PHP, Ajax, .Net, WordPress, HTML, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Joomla, etc. PHP language is considered one of the most popular & most widely accepted open source web development technology. PHP development is gaining ground in the technology market. Web development using these technologies is considered to offer the most efficient website solutions. The open source based products and tools are regularly studied, used, implemented and deployed by TRIRID. Custom Software Development TRIRID has incredible mastery in Windows Apps Development platform working on the .NET framework. We have done bunch of work for some companies and helping them to migrate to a new generation windows based solution. We at TRIRID absolutely comprehend your custom needs necessities and work in giving high caliber and adaptable web API services for your web presence. TRIRID offers a range of utility software packages to meet and assortment of correspondence needs while including peripherals. We offer development for utility software like plugin play, temperature controller observation or embedding solutions. Database Management In any organization data is the main foundation of information, knowledge and ultimately the wisdom for correct decisions and actions. On the off chance that the data is important, finished, exact, auspicious, steady, significant and usable, at that point it will doubtlessly help in the development of the organization If not, it can turn out to be a useless and even harmful resource. Our team of database experts analyse your database and find out what causes the performance issues and then either suggest or settle the arrangement ourselves. We provide optimization for fast processing better memory management and data security. Wordpress / PHP WordPress, based on MySQL and PHP, is an open source content management system and blogging tool. TRIRID have years of experience in offering different Web design and Web development solutions to our clients and we specialize in WordPress website development. Our capable team of WordPress designers offers all the essential services backed by the stat-of-the-art technology tools. PHP is perhaps the most effective and powerful programming language used to create dynamic sites and applications. TRIRID has extensive knowledge and experience of giving web developing services using this popular programming language. Search Engine Optimization SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. Call now 8980010210
ellen crichton
The key question for any nation is always, “Which system of morals should be followed?” Numerous American leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, thoroughly investigated the answer to this query. For years, Jefferson studied the moral teachings of dozens of history’s most famous moral philosophers, including Ocellus, Timæus, Pythagoras, Aristides, Cato, Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Xenophon, Seneca, Epictetus, Antoninus, and many others.27 After reading and critiquing the writings of each, Jefferson repeatedly praised the preeminence of Jesus’ moral teachings over all others,28 pointing out that Jesus alone “pushed His scrutinies into the heart of man, erected His tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.”29 Jefferson contemplated publishing a personal work to document his findings, explaining how he would cover this subject in such a piece: I should first take a general view of the moral doctrines of the most remarkable of the ancient philosophers of whose ethics we have sufficient information to make an estimate—say Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus. I should do justice to the branches of morality they have treated well, but point out the importance of those in which they are deficient….I should proceed to a view of the life, character, and doctrines of Jesus….[H]is system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers.30 Jefferson eventually did compile a work on the “benevolent and sublime” teachings of Jesus for his personal use. He titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and in it he included 81 moral teachings of Jesus.31 In 1895, Congress purchased Jefferson’s original manuscript from his great-granddaughter,32 and in 1902, the US Congress published it for use by the nation’s federal senators and representatives.33 Nine thousand copies were printed at government expense, and for the next 50 years, every senator and representative received a copy of Jefferson’s Life and Morals of Jesus at his or her swearing in.34 This book is often called “The Jefferson Bible,” which is a substantial misrepresentation of this work on the wonderful moral teachings of Jesus. After all, Jefferson never called it a Bible; he simply created a readily-usable collection of the moral teachings of Jesus.*
David Barton (The American Story: The Beginnings)
I usually call these endless discussions “religious debates,” because they have a lot in common with most discussions of religion and politics: They consist largely of people expressing strongly held personal beliefs about things that can’t be proven—supposedly in the interest of agreeing on the best way to do something important
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
God is looking for people to use, and if you can get usable, he will wear you out. The most dangerous prayer you can pray is this: 'Use me.
Rick Warren
(Back is the most-used button in Web browsers.)
Steve Krug (Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability)
There are mountains written about closing and overcoming objections. Read every book. Listen to every CD. They all contain ways to overcome objections. And most have usable ideas. Your job is to apply those ideas to your style and personality. And the ultimate goal is to make sales in a way that you never have to use them -- by establishing relationships and friendships. Sometimes you're precluded from the relationship or friendship, and the ideas are all that's left. That's why you need to know them all.
Jeffrey Gitomer (The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource)
As an information architect, framing is a vital part of my work, but it’s not what organizations ask me to do. For example, the National Cancer Institute hired me to fix the usability of their website by reorganizing its navigation. The goal was to reduce the number of clicks from the home page to content. But I soon discovered a bigger problem. Most folks searching for answers about specific types of cancer never reached cancer.gov due to poor findability via Google. I only saw this problem because I knew how to solve it. I explained to my client that by aligning the information architecture with search engine optimization, we could improve usability and findability. Together, we were able to reframe the goals. The site went on to win awards and rise to the top of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
Peter Morville (Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals)
The truth is that even the most beautiful, elegant and re-usable architecture, framework or system will only be re-used by people who: a) know it is there b) know how to use it c) are convinced that it is better than doing it themselves
Richard Monson-Haefel (97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know)
The uterus, then, is like a deciduous tree, an oak or a maple, and the endometrium acts like the leaves. When the weather is warm, when sunlight sings, the tree awakes and invests in leaves. The branching pattern of the tree—its trunk, its branches, its twigs—is like the branching of the body’s vascularization, parceling out water rather than blood. The homology of the pattern is no coincidence. Holy water, sacred blood, they are one and the same, and branching is the most hydraulically efficient means of pumping the fluid from a central source—the heart, the trunk—out to all extremities. Thus nourished, the leaves bud, unfurl, thicken, and darken. The leaves are photosynthetic factories, transforming sunlight into usable energy. That energy allows the tree to create seeds and nuts, the acorns that are embryonic trees. The leaves are expensive to maintain—the tree must deliver them water, nitrogen, potassium, the nutrients from the soil—but they repay the tree by spinning sunlight into gold.
Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography)
The problem is not that the information doesn’t exist; rather, it is the way it is formatted. As Atul Gawande, a doctor and author, puts it: The reason . . . is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason is more often that the necessary knowledge has not been translated into a simple, usable and systematic form. If the only thing people did in aviation was issue dense, pages-long bulletins . . . it would be like subjecting pilots to the same deluge of almost 700,000 medical journal articles per year that clinicians must contend with. The information would be unmanageable. Instead . . . crash investigators [distill] the information into its practical essence.30
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes--But Some Do)
Usability plays a much wider role in our lives than most people realize. It’s not just about using a website, a piece of software, or the latest technology. Usability is about setting up a tent, relighting a furnace to heat a home, trying to figure out a tax form, or driving an unfamiliar rental car. Usability impacts everyone, every day. It cuts across cultures, age, gender, and economic class.
Thomas Tullis (Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies))
Setting individual outcomes instead of product-trio outcomes. Because product managers, designers, and software engineers typically report up, to their respective departments, it’s not uncommon for a product trio to get pulled in three different directions, with each member tasked with a different goal. Perhaps the product manager is tasked with a business outcome, the designer is tasked with a usability outcome, and the engineer is tasked with a technical-performance outcome. This is most common at companies that tie outcomes to compensation. However, it has a detrimental effect. The goal is for the product trio to collaborate to achieve product outcomes that drive business outcomes. This isn’t possible if each member is focused on their own goal. Instead of setting individual outcomes, set team outcomes.
Teresa Torres (Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value)