A- A A+

Back in the late 80s, I remember reading a book by Stewart Brand titled "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT." (I just checked the title on Amazon and discovered that it's currently available from Amazon MarketPlace for 1 penny!). A lot of the projects described in the book seemed far-fetched at the time, probably because the web hadn't been invented so it was hard to envisage how these projects would be delivered. Reading over the book now, it's astonishing how many of these research projects are now part of the fabic of our daily lives.

There was one project I remember — "Personal Newspaper" — that predicted a future with electronic newspapers personalised to each individual's tastes and interests. Stewart Brand called this, "The Daily Me". With the advent of RSS, we're getting closer to this vision, but RSS isn't the most usable of technologies. However, combined with customisable Web 2.0 home page/portal solutions like Netvibes and Pageflakes, I think the future may have arrived.

Here at Userfocus Towers, we've been using Netvibes to keep up to date with various RSS feeds in usability — a usability supplement to our daily newspaper. We thought that others might be interested in using this as a way of keeping up to date in usability, so we decided to publish it.

View the Usability Daily Me on Netvibes. (Netvibes is free to use and you don't need to register).

Screenshot of the usability RSS news feeds on Netvibes.

Add to Netvibes

About the author

Anna-Gret Higgins

Anna-Gret Higgins holds a BSc in Psychology and a PhD Counselling Psychology. She is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Anna-Gret manages the usability testing team at Userfocus and has logged hundreds of hours in usability tests of public and private sector web sites.


Foundation Certificate in UX

Gain hands-on practice in all the key areas of UX while you prepare for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. More details

Download the best of Userfocus. For free.

100s of pages of practical advice on user experience, in handy portable form. 'Bright Ideas' eBooks.

If you liked this, try…

There is no shortage of accessibility tools on the web. The problem is identifying the ones that are really useful. Here is a collection of on-line tools that we use in our day-to-day consultancy work to support accessibility reviews. Web Accessibility Tools.

Related articles & resources

This article is tagged tools.

User Experience Articles & Videos

See all videos

Filter articles by keyword

  1. accessibility •
  2. axure •
  3. benefits •
  4. careers •
  5. case study •
  6. css •
  7. discount usability •
  8. ecommerce •
  9. ethnography •
  10. expert review •
  11. fitts law •
  12. focus groups •
  13. forms •
  14. guidelines •
  15. heuristic evaluation •
  16. ia •
  17. iso 9241 •
  18. iterative design •
  19. layout •
  20. legal •
  21. metrics •
  22. mobile •
  23. moderating •
  24. morae •
  25. navigation •
  26. personas •
  27. prototyping •
  28. questionnaires •
  29. quotations •
  30. roi •
  31. selling usability •
  32. standards •
  33. strategy •
  34. style guide •
  35. survey design •
  36. task scenarios •
  37. templates •
  38. tools •
  39. usability testing •
  40. user manual

Our services

Let us help you create great customer experiences.

Upcoming courses

We run regular training courses in usability and UX.

Training courses

Join our community of UX professionals who get their user experience training from Userfocus. See our curriculum.

copyright © Userfocus 2021. The Usability Training Centre is a trading name of Userfocus limited.

Dr. Anna-Gret HigginsAnna-Gret Higgins holds a BSc in Psychology and a PhD Counselling Psychology. She is a Chartered Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Anna-Gret manages the usability testing team at Userfocus and has logged hundreds of hours in usability tests of public and private sector web sites.