An Interview with Joe Clark
“I use the same definition of accessibility everywhere: accommodating features a person cannot change or cannot change easily.” (Craig Sala – Digital Web Magazine)
All posts from
October 2003
How Much Information? 2003
“We estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years. Information explosion? We estimate that new stored information grew about 30% a year between 1999 and 2002. Paperless society? The amount of information printed on paper is still increasing, but the vast majority of original information on paper is produced by individuals in office documents and mail, not in formally published titles such as books, newspapers and journals.” (School of Information Management & Systems – University of California at Berkeley)
Controlled Vocabularies: A Glosso-Thesaurus
“(…) the glossary is itself a controlled vocabulary, more specifically a thesaurus. So you will find all of the standard features of any thesaurus: broader, narrower, and variant term indicators, as well as scope notes. In this case, however, the scope notes provide the definition of the particular glossary term being presented.” (Karl Fast et al. – Boxes and Arrows)
Don’t Test Users, Test Hypotheses
“I find that by basing hypotheses on a site or application’s goals, I can integrate usability testing into the design process. By thinking in terms of hypotheses based on design goals I can generate relevant, action-oriented findings. In this way, usability doesn’t stifle creativity, it focuses it.” (Avi Soudack – Boxes and Arrows)
From Function to Form
Invited presentation at TU/e Industrial Design, Designed Intelligence Group (2003) (Matthias Rauterberg)
Aero: The Desktop To Come
“The future of Windows is determined by Longhorn, the new operating system that Microsoft is preparing for 2005 that will imply, according to them, the ‘life immersion’ of the customers in this new technology. We review what is known about it up to now.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – Inf@Vis!)
eXperience People
“(…) a specialty recruitment firm with a laser focus on recruiting Experience Design and User Experience professionals for intermediate to senior level executive positons” (Challis Hodge) – courtesy of louis rosenfeld
About Us: Presenting Information About an Organization on Its Website
“Study participants searched websites for background information ranging from company history to management biographies and contact details. Their success rate was 70%, leaving much room for usability improvements in the ‘About Us’ designs.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Web Design and Integrated Marketing
“A big part of that is the lack of understanding that marketing professionals have for the media. For Web designers who do have a deep understanding of the Web, that spells opportunity. Here are some specific strategies and tactics that we can employ to use Web design as a successful component to organizational integrated marketing.” (Dirk Knemeyer – Digital Web Magazine)
Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales
“Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective.” (Ivan Walsh – Sitepoint) – courtesy of lucdesk
AIGA: The Power of Design
Conference notes by Dirk Knemeyer (AIGA)
Commercializing the Semantic Web
“Whether people deny it or not (…) the Semantic Web really is an attempt to reconceptualize and reengineer AI for the Web.” (Kendall Grant Clark – xml.com)
Faceted Classification
“A faceted classification uses clearly defined, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive aspects, properties, or characteristics (a.k.a. facets) of a class or specific subject. The idea for a faceted classification really began with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) in which a standard number representing place (location) was appended to a subject number by a device now known as a facet indicator. However, Dewey did not develop the idea further and in the early 1930s, Ranganathan formalized the use of the fully faceted approach with his Colon Classification. Other classification schemes such as Universal Decimal Classification, now provide facets for places, time periods and forms. More recently, work has been undertaken to develop the Bliss Bibliographic Classification (BC2) into a fully faceted classification scheme.” (School of Library, Archival and Information Studies – The University of British Columbia) – courtesy of james robertson
HITS 2003 Presentation Slides
“Interaction design is, now more than ever, a critical resource for business strategy. A growing gap exists between companies’ increasing knowledge of technology and taking products to market, and their decreasing understanding of people’s everyday needs and wants for interaction with media, services and physical products, all of which are increasingly embedded with digital interactive technology.” (HITS 2003)
Biomedical Illustrations
“Head anatomy, with internal carotid angiogram. Photoshop, shown aprox. 20% of actual resolution.” (Patrick J. Lynch)
The Value of Usability
“Value” is like ‘quality’Ý– no one seems to be able to define it, and yet everyone knows it when they see it. This ATW feature explores the concept of ‘value’ in a Web site and looks at how creating usable Webspace is an integral part of creating valuable Webspace.” (All Things Web)
Sliding Doors of CSS
“It’s time to take back control over the tabs which are continually growing in popularity as a primary means of site navigation. Now that CSS is widely supported, we can crank up the quality and appearance of the tabs on our sites.” (Douglas Bowman – A List Apart 3.0)
Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
“Personas are power tools that give a much-needed focus to interface design projects.” (Alison J. Head – Information Today)
U-Pods: The Business of Usability
“U-Pods focuses on the business of usability and the people charged with the responsibility of managing that business. As a peer-based community, U-Pods brings the right people together within the right scale and structure to foster the right type of dialog, support, relationships, and history. U-Pods’ creation of small-scale pods collectively forming a large-scale organization gives you the best of both worlds. ” (About U-Pods) – courtesy of usability news
Emotion and Product Design 
Presentation slides by Donald A. Norman (IBM Ease of Use Conference 2003)
