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Current usability work is an artifact of an earlier computer ecosystem, out of step with contemporary realities. Usability can no longer keep up with computing: the products are too complex, too pervasive, and too easy to build. These trends demonstrate the "new realities" that are making traditional usability difficult, if not irrelevant.

Een 68-jarige Italiaan was de kuren van zijn computer zo ongelooflijk zat, dat hij bij de zoveelste vastloper zijn pistool tevoorschijn haalde en het apparaat compleet aan diggelen schoot.

The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times - within a quarter of a second - and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language.

The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times - within a quarter of a second - and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language.

Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done 'by rule' rather than 'by thought'. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision

More than anything, Google prefers to make design decisions based on what performs well. And as a company, Google cares about being fast, so we want our user experience to be fast. That's not just in terms of front-end latency-how long it takes the page to download-it's also about making people use their computers more efficiently. A lot of our design decisions are really driven by cognitive psychology research that shows that, say, people online read black text against a white background much faster than white against black, or that sans serif fonts are more easily read than serif fonts online.

The ways people react to robots is teaching computer and robotics scientists valuable lessons about how to make technology more user-friendly -- and more human.

On Twitter, hundreds of updates tagged "iranelection" appeared each hour. A steady stream of photos and witness reports came from one Twitter user, persiankiwi. He sat at his computer in Tehran, as friends fed him information on the protests. "We honour and thank the people of Iran and especially the hackers," he tweeted late on Monday. "Basij [the militia] have guns - we have brains.