Category: technology

Ms. Dewey: search goddess or time-wasting temptress?

I’ve just discovered the Ms. Dewey search engine (thanks to Gideon Strauss, who calls the site the anti-Google), and I can’t decide whether I like her or not. Ms. Dewey is certainly more entertaining than those other plain vanilla search engine interfaces.

Ms. Dewey, Search Goddess

In the words of Adrants:

She’s saucy, she’s sexy, she even poses provocatively from time to time with a cute little notepad – but beware, like most hot chicks she is chatty as hell and gets a little needy when neglected (along the lines of “Hel-loooo? Type something here!”). Also, sometimes she sings. We don’t get embarrassed often, but we got embarrassed then.

In the end, Ms. Dewey is yet another Internet black hole to suck away your time. Not as highly addictive as the ultrainteractive kung fu remixer (thank goodness), but a nice diversion when you’re needing a break from ignoring all those media queries.

Update: fellow blogger brownpau suggests we see what happens when we ask Ms. Dewey about Janina Gavankar.

Happy World Usability Day

Today is World Usability Day. If you do nothing else about usability today, the least you can do is to observe a minute of silence (at noon EST) “as a means of sending out the hope that there be a greater respect for all users and their ability to make the world a better place, through the time won by greater usability.”

Maybe during that minute of silence, you could also heed designverb‘s suggestion and “think about everything that you use, touch, see, or hear and ask, how can I make it better? Is something broken, confusing, too complex, or just not working?” I know of one guy who thinks about that stuff, and then blogs about his frustrations with unusable products.