Four short links: 7 January 2011

User Experience, Big Data Case Study, DimDim Acquired, Secret to the Web

  1. Users Can Self-Report Problems — users self-report 50% of the problems that professional usability testing uncovers, and they find problems that usability testers don’t. (The other way to look at this is: self-reporting only finds half the actual problems in a site)
  2. The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox (PDF) — challenges faced by Gmail Priority Inbox and how they beat them. Priority Inbox ranks mail at a rate far exceeding the capacity of a single machine. It is also difficult to predict the data center that will handle a user’s Gmail account, so we must be able to score any user from any data center, without delaying mail delivery(via Hacker News)
  3. DimDim Acquired by Salesforce — congrats to the founder, who was an OSCON speaker, and his team. The open source remains, but will not be contributed to by Salesforce. DD Ganguly, the founder, is a good smart chap and I look forward to his next project.
  4. WWIC — As Tim said when he forwarded this around: This is absolutely brilliant. Think deeply on it. Act on it. (via Alex Howard in email)
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