Having been involved in the development of web interfaces since 2000, I have become acutely aware of the usability of the sites that I work on. It is one of my main concerns. So much so that I find myself evaluating just about everything that I come into contact with, often quietly for which my wife is thankful. This carefully cultivated habit has become more pronounced since I moved to Derry from New York in July of 2009.

YouTube has had an enormous impact over the five years it’s been going. One thing it’s highlighted is that if the content of a video is good, then the picture/sound quality doesn’t matter so much. In other words, poorly filmed clips have massive audiences because everyone wants to see them. There are a couple of simple(s) things which ...

Over the past ten years we’ve seen unparalleled growth in communication and interaction online. Sentiment mining has evolved.  The number of blogs, personal web pages, audio, video and other forms of content has given us information from what restaurant someone ate at (and what they thought of it) to the movement of swine flu. The information on the ...

New tribes are evolving in technological realms that are hungry for fresh ways to learn. Digital natives are people for whom digital technologies already existed when they were born, and so have grown up with digital technology such as computers, the Internet, mobile phone and iPods [1]. Generation X, as one tribe is known, uses technology such ...

Did you know that the average game player on social networking sites is a 43 year old woman? There are over half a billion (yes billion!) players of the video game Little Big Planet; and there are tools available that enable children to create their own video games in just 20 minutes? I learnt this and a ...

All the services that Learning Pool provides these days are online. We do this because it is the obvious thing to. Plus, it means that our customers don’t have to worry about buying and maintaining server hardware, be concerned about security issues or handle complicated issues about data storage. We’re lucky that we have such a great technical team ...

In Part One of this blog, we featured how best to plan your migration to Google Mail. Here, in Part Two, you can find out what issues we encountered during the move and helpful tips on how to overcome these problems. Once you have switched all Outlook accounts to use the Outlook connector for Google, performance of ...

Just after the Christmas 09 break, Paul approached me with the idea of migrating our email service to Google Apps before the end of the financial year. Initially I was a little dubious about the move for two reasons. One, the last quarter of the financial year at Learning Pool is normally pretty hectic and two, ...