book: forms that work

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability

There is no html in this book, it's not about programming forms. And that's why I liked it.

This short book clarifies what good form design is about, in plain english. Plenty of images help, too.
I'm still not too good at designing forms but at least now I know the name of the game.

-teo

 

book: don't make me think

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Delightful one-night read. Some good common sense advice on web design and two brilliant chapters on usability testing on a budget.

common sense is underrated

netflix prize contest, a new one

With netflix announcing a new contest, it's time to look back at how the Netflix Prize ended: BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos team (AT&T Research engineers) won over the ensemble (a creek of lower-ranked contestants), just minutes before the deadline.

Both teams blended together different algorithms to improve by 10% the hit rate of existing netflix suggestion engine.

This is a story of monkeys and challenges, interesting beyond bytes and keyboards. Wired has good coverage, but you can google for more.

I'm reading Programming Collective Intelligence, which so far is ranking high: it uses easy-to-read-and-write python to build suggestion engines using many different algorithms. For programmers.

story coverage:

• how the netflix prize was won
• bellkor’s pragmatic chaos wins $1 million netflix prize by mere minutes
• winning teams join to qualify for $1 million netflix prize
• this psychologist might outsmart the math brains competing for the netflix prize

related papers:

• the bellkor solution to the netflix grand prize
• the bigchaos solution to the netflix grand prize
• the pragmatic theory solution to the netflix grand prize
• large-scale recommender systems and the netflix prize competition