What is behind entering email twice for registration?
What do you think to ask the email twice for registration?
The context is this:
In the e-commerce checkout/registration process where the email is mandatory to save cart or to proceed to the checkout, it’s better to ask jus…
How make language option easy to find for people speaking another language than the one shown?
As suggested in another question I decided to show the language names in native language itself in the language selector on my page, instead of using country flags.
The dropdown box shows the current displayed language, say …
Should numbers be written in numerals or words?
When writing numbers, should we use numerals (“5,000”) or words (“five thousand”)? I’m particularly interested in how easy each is to read and interpret, and whether it’s an important consideration for dyslexic users.
Intuitive colour pickers for non-expert users?
Does anyone have examples of favourite colour pickers (as UI elements, not dedicated color-picking apps or sites) for common, ‘everyday’ colours – not for RGB or HSL values?
I find traditional colour wheels really unintuitiv…
How to gauge whether customers would use an advanced feature
I am working on a new design for bank reconciliation in a piece of accounting software. We have identified our users’ existing workflows and problems with our current design from an earlier round of customer interviews.
A co…
How to gauge whether customers would use an advanced feature
I am working on a new design for bank reconciliation in a piece of accounting software. We have identified our users’ existing workflows and problems with our current design from an earlier round of customer interviews.
A co…
Linking back to previous webpage?
Currently the company I work for separates their company corporate website and their careers page. What this means is if you go to the parent site and click on the link to see career opportunities, you go to a completely diff…
How to make a user feel secure when using an iframe for payments
I’ve got a site where it’s very difficult for me to add SSL, so I’m using a secure iframe on the payment page to collect credit card details.
Currently it’s set up to appear like it’s the same site. The only issue is that I …
How to make a user feel secure when using an iframe for payments
I’ve got a site where it’s very difficult for me to add SSL, so I’m using a secure iframe on the payment page to collect credit card details.
Currently it’s set up to appear like it’s the same site. The only issue is that I …
What’s the origin of the metaphor “cloud”?
Today we use the term “cloud” without thinking about it. We use it mainly in terms of storage online, far away and unreachable. We can’t plug in a USB memory in the cloud to download data. We plug the USB into our own computer, connect to the cloud and download, as if it was a local storage.
In the two great Wikipedia articles Cloud storage and File hosting service there are a lot of information on architecture, potential threats and costs, but nothing really on the origin of the word cloud.
Searching online you get a lot of answers of the meaning of cloud, some better than others. One of the more fun comes from Rebecca J. Rosen’s article Clouds: The Most Useful Metaphor of All Time?
. . . when engineers would map out all the various components of their networks, but then loosely sketch the unknown networks (like the Internet) theirs was hooked into. What does a rough blob of undefined nodes look like? A cloud. And, helpfully, clouds are something that take little skill to draw. It’s a squiggly line formed into a rough ellipse. Over time, clouds were adopted as the stand-in image for the part of a computer or telephone network outside one’s own.
However amusing, it still doesn’t answer the question – where did it come from? Who coined it? What’s the origin of the metaphor cloud?