June 2002

While Nathan Slept, What Rich, Powerful Technologists Know About Their Customers

"(...) the first paradox of software development: users are not software designers, nor are software engineers users." (Charles L. Mauro - TaskZ)

Posted by PJB on June 28, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Design: What is it? Who needs it?

"What distinguishes information design from other types of design?" (Terry Irwin - AIGA Design Forum)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Three Down and Yet More to Come

A Report from the IA Summit 2002 (Andrew Dillon - ASIS&T Bulletin 28.5)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Bill Moggridge of IDEO presents User-Centred Design at One Remove

"(...) Moggridge gave a presentation to explore where interactive design had come from and where he hoped it was going." (Usability News)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Placeless Documents

"(...) documents that are organized and managed according to their properties, rather than according to their location." (Jim Thornton - Xerox Parc)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2002 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Improving Usability Guideline Compliance

"Not only does the U.S. have a stronger and longer usability tradition, but most usability guidelines are published in English." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Computer Human Values

"Designers need to understand the context of use and include the whole of a user's experience into the solution when creating a computer interface." (Nathan Shredoff - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2002 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Why Is Software So Bad?

"For years we've tolerated buggy, bloated, badly organized computer programs. But soon, we'll innovate, litigate and regulate them into reliability." (Charles C. Mann - MIT Technology Review)

Posted by PJB on June 24, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Drag-and-Drop versus Point-and-Click: Mouse Interaction for Children

"Today's children will be the adult computer users of tomorrow and their interactions with computers today will shape their future relationship with technology." (Kori Inkpen et al. - The University of British Columbia)

Posted by PJB on June 21, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Foreseeing The Future: The Legacy of Vannevar Bush

"This article presaged the idea of the Internet and the World Wide Web and was directly influential on the fathers of the hypertext and the Internet as we know it today." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2002 | Classification: Hypertext | Comments (0) | Permalink

Best of CHI-Web & SIGIA-L (1996.4-2002.6)

"(...) a list of the summary postings from useful threads, and a few personally selected favorite postings." (Scott Berkun - UIWeb.com)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Generating Simple URLs for Search Engines

"Dynamic URLs, with question marks and other punctuation, tend to put off search engine indexing robots, as well as humans looking at URLs." (Avi Rappoport - Search Tools)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2002 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

The 6th Annual Make IT Easy 2002 Conference

"User Engineering applies the principles of human-computer interaction and related disciplines within a framework of processes and methods inspired by software engineering." (IBM Ease of Use)

Posted by PJB on June 20, 2002 | Classification: Events | Comments (0) | Permalink

Re-Architecting PeopleSoft.com From The Bottom-up

"It took 11 months and more than 60 people (...)" (Chiara Fox - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 19, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Measuring the Value of Usability Engineering

"(...) why usability engineers don't measure the value of usability efforts, rebuttals to each argument, and suggestions for how to remedy them." (Carol Righi Ph.D. - TaskZ)

Posted by PJB on June 19, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Extending Motion Into Interactivity

A curriculum for interaction design (Ron Saito - LOOP 2002.5)

Posted by PJB on June 19, 2002 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability Testing: You Get What You Pay For

"About half that time is spent planning the test, a quarter running it, and a quarter analyzing and interpreting results and generating recommendations." (Deborah J. Mayhew - TaskZ)

Posted by PJB on June 19, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Pixelsurgeon Interviews Jakob Nielsen

"Usability principles are rooted in the human experience and not in technology." (Pixelsurgeon)

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Your Website Should Encourage People To Act

"Developing an action-oriented website begins with your homepage." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on June 17, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Don Norman, Usability Expert

"His goal is to humanize technology, to make it disappear from sight, replaced by a human-centered, activity-based family of information appliances that are easy to learn, easy to use." (Steven Heller - Typotheque)

Posted by PJB on June 17, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

User Interface Design

"(...) good design always involves a process of compromise." (University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign)

Posted by PJB on June 14, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Evolution, Alienation and Gossip

The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century (Kate Fox - Social Issues Research Centre)

Posted by PJB on June 14, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Typography of News

"The online newspaper, despite the seemingly limitless possibilities of type on the Internet, slavishly apes the appearance of its printed sibling." (Peter Hall - Font Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 13, 2002 | Classification: Typography | Comments (0) | Permalink

ChartsMapsDiagrams

An Information Graphics Portfolio (Rose Zgodzinski)

Posted by PJB on June 13, 2002 | Classification: Information graphics | Comments (0) | Permalink

Interactional Digital Libraries

Introduction to a special issue on Interactivity in Digital Libraries (Anita Coleman and Maliaca Oxnam - Journal of Digital Information 2.4)

Posted by PJB on June 12, 2002 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Designing the User Interface for the Físchlár Digital Video Library

"(...) we derive a design space to compare existing browser interfaces and to specify new interface ideas in a more systematic way." (Hyowon Lee and Alan F. Smeaton - Journal of Digital Information 2.4)

Posted by PJB on June 12, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Challenging the Status Quo: Audi Redesigned

"This case study focuses on three aspects of particular interest: the approach to schematics (i.e., wireframes), an automated page layout technique referred to as 'jumping boxes', and a user test that compared the performance of a left-hand navigation to a right-hand navigation." (James Kalbach - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability Cult Sacrifices Innovation

"No users (...) were researched when Sony chief Akio Morita invented the Walkman." (James Woudhuysen - ITWeek)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability Implications for 1-to-1 Marketing

"In order for companies to maximize the value they receive from their Internet marketing campaigns, it is critical for human factors practitioners to participate." (Marc Resnick - Internetworking)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability and Privacy: A Study of Kazaa P2P File-Sharing

"Users who accidentally or unknowingly allow their private or personal files to be shared risk disclosing their private information to other users on the network." (Nathaniel Good - Information Dynamics Lab HP Laboratories)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Start Now: Develop with Users

"(...) a starting point for including your users in all phases of site development, including strategy and design." (Jared Braiterman - Macromedia Designer & Developer Center)

Posted by PJB on June 10, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Aqua Human Interface Guidelines

"This document describes what you need to do to design your application for Aqua, the Mac OS X user interface." (Apple Developer Connection)

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Action, Interaction, Reaction

"Many of the concepts now discussed as interaction design have been around for years, but they tended to be embraced by disciplines such as ergonomics, psychology and human factors, which had other fish to fry." (Nico Macdonald - Spy)

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2002 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Publications by Nigel Bevan

"All these documents are downloadable. To read these documents you must have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader." (Serco Usability Services)

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability Engineering

"How we perceive, interpret and use information; applying human factors research to product design." (Cherri M. Pancake - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Live Help Systems: An Approach to Intelligent Help for Web Information Systems

"(...) more and more Web site users are having problems accomplishing their tasks, and it is increasingly important to provide them with support." (Johan Aberg PhD Thesis)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2002 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability Toolkit

"(...) a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews." (STC Usability SIG)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Fear of Design

"(...) IA is surely design as much as Interaction Design is design, Architecture is design, and Engineering is design." (Christina Wodtke - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Building Brand into Structure

"If you followed usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen blindly, brand would have little to no place in information and interaction design." (Dan Saffer - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2002 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

What I Learned as a Writer from Doing Usability and Interface Testing

"Involvement with our users provided a great deal of expected and unexpected feedback to the group, and helped us tremendously to learn more about our users, and ourselves as writers and information designers." (Anne F. Jackson - Usability Interface April 2002)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

J.R.R. Tolkien was an Information Architect

"If you want to master information architecture you need to acquire the type of skills Tolkien exhibits." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on June 03, 2002 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Flash Critic to Coach Macromedia

"Macromedia plans to announce a partnership (...) with Jakob Nielsen, a leading Web design guru and one of the most prominent critics of the company's Flash software for Web animation." (David Becker - c|net news.com)

Posted by PJB on June 03, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Unmasking Interfaces: Archeological Moments of Knowledge

"Does knowledge become simply information when cultural techniques turn technological?" (Wolfgang Ernst - The Digital Cultures Project Conference 2002)

Posted by PJB on June 02, 2002 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Handheld Usability

"(...) take advantage of the resources available here." (Scott Weiss - Usable Products)

Posted by PJB on June 02, 2002 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Ergonomics: The Donald Norman Interview

"A 'cantankerous visionary' strives to put consumers first in a wireless world." (John Geirland - The Feature)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2002 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Standard Data Vocabularies Unquestionably Harmful

"Adhering to standard vocabularies has recently meant all too often that an item properly labeled and conforming to an expected form is naively accepted as being actually what it purports to be." (Walter Perry - xml.com)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2002 | Classification: Technology | Comments (0) | Permalink

eXchangable Faceted Metadata Language

"(...) an open XML format to publish and share faceted metadata for websites." (Peter van Dijck)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2002 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Physical and Virtual Space. How to Deal with Their Interaction?

"We are more familiar with physical than with virtual space both as users and as practitioners." (Paul Drewe - The Journal of Design Research)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2002 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink