This is what I find so great about webword. I am currently working on a project that is managing this exact problem. A secondary window is sometimes used because its a cool developer trick. I always ask about the *justification/need* (business or technical) for using a secondary window? I also wonder if users are now starting to associate secondary windows with "pop-up advertising", independant of the secondary window's function?

Posted by: daniel szuc on September 30, 2002 11:52 PM

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This is kind of indirectly related to your queries. (From HFI emial newsletter)

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Bob Bailey, Ph.D., Chief Scientist for HFI

In last month's HFI e-newsletter I tried to illustrate how difficult it can be for practitioners to use the Web to find current usability articles.

In the article, researchers and practitioners were asked to respond with where they published and how they found up-to-date articles.

Researchers:
The researchers who responded provided no one place to publish that seems to be the most desirable. There was no consensus on
a favored place to publish so that practitioners would be sure to read their study. Almost all responses included the proceedings of the three major usability conferences in the United States
(CHI, HFES and UPA), and four major journals including Human Factors, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, Technical Communication, and the Communications of the ACM.

Most of these articles are not readily available to practitioners on the Web.

Practitioners:
The practitioners who responded provided additional interesting information. Over half indicated that the first thing they do is an
Internet search, usually with Google. About one-third of the respondents accessed the archived newsletters at humanfactors.com, useit.com and uie.com. About 20% stated that they used the
ACM Digital Library.

Other sources of information that were frequently mentioned included retrieving information from the
four major organizations (UPA, SIGCHI, HFES and STC), and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. Other sources included Wichita State University's usability newsletter,
two daily digests (UTEST, CHI-WEB), and three websites (usability.gov, hcibib.org and usableweb.com).

Based on this limited exercise, it is fairly clear that usability information is being published in a variety of different locations.
Most of it is still paper-based, and most current, full articles are not readily available on the Internet.

This makes it very difficult for many (most) practitioners to use this information in a timely way.

>From a practitioner's perspective, I suspect that those articles that can be found using a Google search will have much more impact
on their design decisions than those that are much more difficult to find and retrieve.

For links to all the organizations, journals, etc. listed here please see the online version of this newsletter:

http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/sep02.asp

Posted by: JB on October 1, 2002 02:08 PM

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Thanks JB.

Posted by: daniel szuc on October 2, 2002 12:14 AM

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