Samanunga

Over 10,000 theses were published on the Internet at DAREnet. The theses were provided by all the universities in the Netherlands.

Approximately 2500 PhD theses are released annually, with which mostly young scientists defend their PhD. Untill now the results of four years of thorough research labour were hard to find.

By publishing through the Internet, both the PhD’s and the universities can show their research topics, according to SURF, the cooperation body of higher education and research concerning network services and Information Technology.

The National Thesis site was developed for the DARE-programme (Digital Academic REpositories), in which all Dutch universities collaborate together with other scientific research organisations and SURF.

Original text @ nu.nl – article

DAREnet in English @ DAREnet.nl – website

Dare Programme in English @ surf.nl – webpage

SURF in English @ surf.nl – website

Norman wrote an article at uigarden that doing user observations first is wrong. Oh deary. Well of course there is some more nuance to that. In a way he is right, we should not ask the user what to design, because he does not know. True, but as soon as you start designing, you will have to make decisions. And that is what this is about. How do you make your decisions. With or without consulting the users. Presenting users with your decisions will evoke reactions. Users will provide you with feedback that in many cases could improve your design.

Therefore I still think that a good contextual analysis of the user helps a designer in coming up with good solutions. The user should still be consulted, on a regular basis and preferably in early iteration too. Nevertheless I agree with the Don that the very first steps into a designproject should be set by the designer.

don norman @ uigarden – article

Noooo way. Microsoft tries to Patent verb conjugation… Wow. Would they have made so much progress in their grammar checker, they need a patent to protect it? I wonder how they would conjugate “Googling”.

Thanks to slashdot
patent description