September 2004

Making Your Content Management System Work for You: An Interview with Jeffrey Veen

"(...) I find that businesses don't treat their web site as a publication, especially those organizations developing standard content, such as product and service descriptions. Instead, they view their site as a software project -- a product that undergoes a development process and needs to be 'released'." (Christine Perfetti - User Interface 9 Conference)

Posted by PJB on September 30, 2004 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Interview with Andre Haddad (eBay)

"Andre Haddad is the Vice President of eBay's Design Labs. He's in charge of the user experience for eBay's 114 million registered users. (...) During our interview, Andre listed five major tradeoffs, and why eBay's decisions within those tradeoffs necessarily make the seller's experience somewhat complex." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of uidesigner

Posted by PJB on September 30, 2004 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Interactive Annual 10 Winners

"This year's winners were selected by our distinguished jury from a group of entries including Web sites, Kiosks, CD-ROM projects and PDA's. The 43 winning projects are showcased, and in further detail in the September/October 2004 issue of Communication Arts magazine." (Communication Arts) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on September 29, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Panadol 24 Pack: New instructions for consumers

"This case history demonstrates how information design research and practice can bring about useful social change on a large scale. It is a lightly edited version of a report prepared for GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in August 2002 following our work on redeveloping the consumer instructions for Panadol, the most widely used paracetemol analgesic in Australia." (David Sless - Communication Research Institute of Australia)

Posted by PJB on September 29, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

IA Summit 2005 - Call for Papers

"Proposals are being solicited for presentations, panels, posters, and pre-conference workshops for the 2005 Information Architecture (IA) Summit. We encourage submissions from practitioners, academics, students, developers, business analysts, managers, and others who are IAs, work with IAs, or deal with information architecture." (ASIS&T 2005 Information Architecture Summit) - courtesy of brett lider

Posted by PJB on September 28, 2004 | Classification: Events | Comments (0) | Permalink

BayDUX

"The emerging field of user experience (UX) design is inherently interdisciplinary and synthesizes the methods, techniques, and wisdom of many design disciplines. UXnet (User Experience Network) is a new organization whose mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. BayDUX is a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area professional organizations that grew out of our joint participation in the DUX2003 (Designing for User Experiences) conference. Since UXnet and BayDUX share a common purpose, BayDUX is now the local presence for UXnet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our co-chairs also serve as UXnet Local Ambassadors." (About BayDUX)

Posted by PJB on September 28, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Ergonomic Soft Mouse and Armrest Mouse Pad

"In this paper, it is shown that a teddy bear skin spongy mouse is a better option than a conventional plastic mouse design and that a portable arm rest mouse pad platform is far better than the conventional mouse platform placed to the side of the keyboard tray." (Bhaskar Gupta - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on September 28, 2004 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

"Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the 'Semantic Web' are finally paying off." (Mark Frauenfelder - Technology Review)

Posted by PJB on September 27, 2004 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons

"Even prominent websites make elementary errors in the use of basic user interface controls. The main guidelines are clear, but there are ten other things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on September 27, 2004 | Classification: HCI | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Pattern Which Connects

"How we perceive our experiences, indeed how we learn to think, are significantly shaped by years of education. These patterns of perceiving and thinking are deeply influenced by the underlying structure of education, or the assumptions embedded in the design of curriculum, instruction and evaluation. And this underlying structure originates largely in analysis, or the breaking down of information into a variety of parts we refer to as subjects, disciplines, courses and the like." (Brian Alger - Experience Designer Network)

Posted by PJB on September 27, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Knowledge management: Are you too busy to think?

"There are certain words you need to ban the use of, and 'busy' is one of them. In knowledge-driven economies, 'busy' is an outdated word that reflects a manual labor approach to work. Instead of 'busy' you need to use words such as 'effective' and 'productive'." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on September 26, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Culture and Websites

"Internationalization has become a very popular topic around web design. Designers are becoming more aware of the global scale of websites and are taking into account different language character sets, date formats and currencies. The more subtle effects of culture, however, are less evident. In an attempt to study these factors, Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould discuss how Hofstede's cultural dimensions of power-distance (PD), individual vs. collectivism (IC), masculinity vs. femininity (MAS) and uncertainty avoidance (UA) and long term vs. short term orientation (LTO) may apply to global web sites. As an exercise, I looked at several corporate and consumer websites that might illustrate - or perhaps contradict - the patterns Marcus and Gould described." (Kevin Cheng - OK/Cancel) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted by PJB on September 26, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

What is a digital document?

"The question 'What is a digital document?' is seen as a special case of the question 'What is a document?' (...) Old confusions between medium, message, and meaning are renewed with digital technology because technological definitions of "document" become even less realistic when everything is in bits." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted by PJB on September 26, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

What is a document?

"Ordinarily the word 'document' denotes a textual record. Increasingly sophisticated attempts to provide access to the rapidly growing quantity of available documents raised questions about which should be considered a 'document'. The answer is important for any definition of the scope of Information Science. Paul Otlet and others developed a functional view of 'document' and discussed whether, for example, sculpture, museum objects, and live animals, could be considered 'documents'. (...) New digital technology renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted by PJB on September 26, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information as thing

"Three meanings of 'information' are distinguished: 'Information-as-process'; 'information-as-knowledge'; and 'information-as-thing', the attributive use of 'information' to denote things regarded as informative. The nature and characteristics of 'information-as-thing' are discussed, using an indirect approach ('What things are informative?'). Varieties of 'information-as-thing' include data, text, documents, objects, and events. On this view 'information' includes but extends beyond communication. Whatever information storage and retrieval systems store and retrieve is necessarily 'information-as-thing'." (Michael K. Buckland)

Posted by PJB on September 26, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Digital Libraries and User Needs: Negotiating the Future

"The purpose of this special issue is to consider the spectrum of approaches being used by different libraries and service providers as they negotiate the future with their user communities. At a time when a digital information future is increasingly certain, this timely and much needed collection of articles explores, documents and reflects on the theories, practices, and experiments focusing on digital library users." (Anita Coleman et al. - Journal of Digital Information 5.3)

Posted by PJB on September 24, 2004 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Worst Interface Ever

"Never, ever, ever let systems-level engineers do human interaction design unless they have displayed a proven secondary talent in that area." (Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted by PJB on September 24, 2004 | Classification: Interaction design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Splitting Books Open: Trends in Traditional and Online Technical Documentation

"While technical publishers strive to adapt to new online media and formats, online efforts at self-education by computer users are becoming a form of true grassroots documentation. This talk discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each side -- traditional books and user self-education -- and suggests how they may converge. It offers suggestions for improving the educational effects of mailing lists, computing project web sites, and other community documentation." (Andy Oram - O'Reilly Open Source)

Posted by PJB on September 24, 2004 | Classification: TechCom | Comments (0) | Permalink

Twin Media: Hypertext Structure Under Pressure

"This essay explores issues that arise in composing a long argumentative hypertext that is connected with a book on the same subject. (...) Although the situation of the hypertext being discussed is somewhat unique, in fact hypertext structure is always under pressure from print habits of reading and writing, especially in scholarly writing, so the issues discussed here are widely relevant." (David Kolb)

Posted by PJB on September 23, 2004 | Classification: Hypertext | Comments (0) | Permalink

Refining the Search Engine

"The vast amount of information on the Internet is growing every day - it's enough to gag a Google search. Researcher Ramesh Jain offers up new strategies for information retrieval." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on September 21, 2004 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Cost of Frustration

"It's difficult to find someone who doesn't believe it's beneficial to make a more usable design. However, in today's design environment, it's often difficult to justify the expense of usability work against other business priorities." (Jared Spool - webpronews.com) - courtesy of john rhodes

Posted by PJB on September 21, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

CM Pros

"(...) content management is essential to organizations of every type. It harvests and promotes both financial and human value for the companies and organizations that can tap its potential. CM Pros is a membership organization that fosters the sharing of content management information, practices, and strategies." (About CM Pros)

Posted by PJB on September 20, 2004 | Classification: Content management | Comments (0) | Permalink

Introduction to Structured Content Management with XML

"At the heart of managing content for re-use, however lies the job of exposing the underlying structure of that information. This article is meant to serve as an introductory primer on how to define and use information structure when managing content." (Kay Ethier and Scott Abel - CMS Watch) - courtesy of columntwo

Posted by PJB on September 20, 2004 | Classification: Content management | Comments (0) | Permalink

Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated

"Both candidates for president of the United States offer email newsletters with much good content to excite supporters, but miserable subscription interfaces and several other usability problems." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on September 20, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

User Experience Resource Collection

"An annotated collection of links to articles, tools, templates, guidelines and other resources for user experience designers." (Dey Alexander)

Posted by PJB on September 20, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Less is more for university websites

"Many university websites are poorly organized, and filled with out-of-date content that has been directly published from print. Delivering a better service to students and staff faces challenges because of decentralized management structures and concepts such as academic freedom." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on September 19, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

User Research Abroad: Handle Logistics in Four Easy Steps

"(...) there are simple, clear ways to accommodate linguistic, cultural, and monetary differences when conducting user research. Follow these four easy steps for a successful interview abroad." (Indy Young - Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on September 19, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Simplicity

"Simplicity may be the most important usability design principle as well as being the common thread through many other design principles." (Jeff Brace)

Posted by PJB on September 16, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman

"Alexander is presenting his basis for the New Paradigm in Architecture at the same time as Eisenman presents his competing, diametrically opposed, deconstructivist claim for such a Paradigm. The importance of the debate has been widely recognised." (Katarxis 3) - courtesy of designobserver

Posted by PJB on September 16, 2004 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Integrating CSS with Content Management Systems

"Building CSS editing features into our content management systems allows us to make style changes as easily as we make content changes. In the future, managing the design of a Web site at the tactical level will be as easy and efficient as managing content." (Victor Lombardi - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on September 16, 2004 | Classification: Content management | Comments (0) | Permalink

Extending a Technique: Group Personas

"So we decided to see if we could make group personas. At first, there was some apprehension - what if the groups are so varied as to be impossible to characterize? But as soon as we started making them, only several different kinds of personas made sense and it became a straightforward extension of Alan Cooper's original persona technique. Here's how we did it." (Mike Kuniavsky - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on September 15, 2004 | Classification: Personas | Comments (0) | Permalink

Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design

"Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design. Lots of professionals create them, yet too often the personas end up being too vague to guide a product’s focus. They often lack the detail to be useful in guiding low-level design trade-offs." (George Olsen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on September 15, 2004 | Classification: Personas | Comments (0) | Permalink

A Conversation between Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen

"Jay and Dan sat down recently to discuss the current state of journalism and the impact technology is having on traditional media." (O'Reilly Network)

Posted by PJB on September 15, 2004 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

Internet time and the reliability of search engines

"Search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record. This unreliability is not caused by sudden instabilities of search engines. On the contrary, their operational stability in systematically updating the Internet is the cause. We show how both Google and Altavista systematically relocate the time stamp of Web documents in their databases from the more distant past into the present and the very recent past. They also delete documents. We show how this erodes the quality of information. The search engines continuously reconstruct competing presents that also extend to their perspectives on the past. This has major consequences for the use of search engine results in scholarly research, but gives us a view on the various presents and pasts living side by side in the Internet." (Paul Wouters et al. - First Monday 9.10)

Posted by PJB on September 14, 2004 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

Lost in gallery space: A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites

"This article reports on a study which used results from 119 scenario-based evaluations of 36 museum Web sites to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites. It identifies 15 unique dimensions, grouped into five categories, that exemplify usability problems common to many museum Web sites. Each dimension is discussed in detail, and typical examples are provided, based on actual usability flaws observed during the evaluations. The availability of this conceptual framework will help the designers of museum Web sites improve the overall usability of museum Web sites in general." (Paul F. Marty and Michael B. Twidale - First Monday 9.9)

Posted by PJB on September 14, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Experiences of Educators Using a Portal of Aggregated Metadata

"The paper documents a pilot user test with a small group of K-12 teachers-in-training. The users were asked to use the portal to locate primary source materials for use in the classroom. The results highlight the challenges posed by aggregations of heterogeneous metadata for both users and service providers. Areas for further investigation and approaches for more in-depth studies are suggested." (Sarah L. Shreeves and Christine M. Kirkham - Journal of Digital Information 5.3)

Posted by PJB on September 14, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Credibility of Online Health Information

"Kris Freeman (University of Washington) let me know her thesis research got published. A while back I gave Kris a tiny bit of help, for which she graciously thanked me. I'm always happy to see new research about web credibility and expect more good things from Kris. Congrats!" (Captology Notebook)

Posted by PJB on September 14, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Data, Information, Knowledge, and Wisdom

"What follows is the current level of understanding I have been able to piece together regarding data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. I figured to understand one of them I had to understand all of them." (Gene Bellinger et al.)

Posted by PJB on September 13, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Use of Faceted Classification

"Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension." (Heidi P. Adkisson - Web Design Practices) - courtesy of reloade

Posted by PJB on September 13, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

The Need for Web Design Standards

"Users expect 77% of the simpler Web design elements to behave in a certain way. Unfortunately, confusion reigns for many higher-level design issues." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on September 13, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Usability and UCD Methods for Mobile Devices

"A good overview coming out of IBM research of some usability issues of mobile devices in the context of User Centered Design." (Mobile Community Design)

Posted by PJB on September 12, 2004 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Less is more for government websites

"Many governments have so far approached the Web with a rather crude strategy of getting every service online. This has resulted in a proliferation of often poor quality websites. The strategy should be to identify the most appropriate government services for the Web and to do them really well." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on September 12, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Moving from Theory to Practice

"This article describes the journey from the conception of and vision for a modern search-engine-based search environment to its technological realisation. In doing so, it takes up the thread of an earlier article on this subject, this time from a technical viewpoint. As well as presenting the conceptual considerations of the initial stages, this article will principally elucidate the technological aspects of this journey." (Friedrich Summann and Norbert Lossau - D-Lib Magazine) - courtesy of chris mcevoy

Posted by PJB on September 10, 2004 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

Honing Your Usability Testing Skills: An Interview with Ginny Redish

"My philosophy of usability testing has always been that it is the best way to find out how well a draft or prototype or product is doing for its users. I've always believed that usability is about helping designers and developers create products where users can quickly and easily find what they need and understand what they find." (Christine Perfetti - User Interface Engineering)

Posted by PJB on September 09, 2004 | Classification: Interviews | Comments (0) | Permalink

When it comes to homepages, it is polite to stare

"If it's your job to design the homepage for a newspaper website, you already deserve sympathy. The organization chart may show you have one boss. But you know better. You must drive traffic from that one page to everything else on the site. So everyone else at your company whose job depends on that traffic becomes your boss when design decisions affect his or her interests." (Jay Small - Eyetrack) - courtesy of jakob nielsen

Posted by PJB on September 09, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Architecture Research

"It was hard work. When it comes to information architecture research, the knowledge environment is highly fragmented. But I was able to extract a few gems and gain some new insights. So, for all those information architects who didn't spend their summer in a research library, here's a brief summary." (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted by PJB on September 07, 2004 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia

"If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip. A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities." (Cory Doctorow)

Posted by PJB on September 07, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Information Architecture Conference

Presentations by Peter Morville of Semantic Studios - "Information Architecture is an intensive 2-day conference about how to design and organise information systems that enable better search, navigation, and collaboration within organisations." (Information Today)

Posted by PJB on September 06, 2004 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Preparing for the Holiday Shopping Season

"Reduce the bounce rate for organic landing pages, collect data to manage PPC for maximum ROI, and take five other steps to maximize your site's holiday sales potential before it's too late." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on September 06, 2004 | Classification: Usability | Comments (0) | Permalink

Web writing: How to judge a good website from a bad one

"How a website has written its links is an excellent way to judge its quality. Good websites tend to have a rich and intuitive link structure. Good web writers think clearly about how each piece of content links up with the rest of the content on the website." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on September 06, 2004 | Classification: Writing | Comments (0) | Permalink

Organization in the Way: How decentralization hobbles the user experience

"Contrary to all the books, articles, Web sites, and workshops that suggest otherwise, the biggest problem in user experience design today is not one of practice. Any competent practitioner can dip into the current toolbox of methods and create a satisfactory product." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on September 06, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

Study: Facets on the web

"This is the project homepage for the preliminary study: 'Adventures in faceted classification: A brave new world or a world of confusion?' presented July, 2004 at ISKO in London, England." (Kathryn La Barre)

Posted by PJB on September 03, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

Topic Map Design Patterns for Information Architecture

"This paper presents the arguments for developing and publishing topic map design patterns and a proposed notation for diagramming design patterns based on UML. Finally, by way of examples, the paper presents some design patterns for representation of traditional classification schemes such as thesauri, hierarchical and faceted classification." (techquila)

Posted by PJB on September 03, 2004 | Classification: Metadata | Comments (0) | Permalink

How to Become the VP of Customer Experience

"Don't leave the company to get a degree in usability or human factors. Instead, start your customer experience career in the organization where you are, in your current position." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of uidesigner

Posted by PJB on September 03, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink

IA Heuristics for Search Systems

"(...) these search heuristics are really geared to semi-structured text, not data; looking for ideas and concepts is a different undertaking than hunting for facts and figures (more on why they're different)." (Louis Rosenfeld - Bloug)

Posted by PJB on September 02, 2004 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Intranet Trends to Watch For

"Cultures and priorities vary, but there are some common issues for organizations as intranets continue to evolve." (Shiv Singh - Line56)

Posted by PJB on September 02, 2004 | Classification: Information design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Forging a partnership between designer and user

"The Web is a flexible medium, and designers and users share responsibility for its design. The Web designer still must make design decisions and attempt to accommodate user needs and expectations." (Sarah Horton - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on September 02, 2004 | Classification: UCD | Comments (0) | Permalink

Why Is That Thing Beeping? A Sound Design Primer

"While a composer or sound designer's concerns can seem esoteric to the visually oriented design world, we can engage these team members on some familiar territory when we need to work together. In composing sounds, the basic parameters of good design and process always apply." (Max Lord - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on September 02, 2004 | Classification: Audio design | Comments (0) | Permalink

Site Diagrams: Mapping an Information Space

"To successfully communicate the characteristics of an information space, I needed an approach for creating easily understood diagrams. To be useful to my audience, the diagrams must communicate the 'big picture' of the website to stakeholders, while providing enough detail to be useful for the development team." (Jason Withrow - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on September 02, 2004 | Classification: Information architecture | Comments (0) | Permalink

Interfaces for Staying in the Flow

"Psychologists have studied 'optimal human experience' for many years, often called 'being in the flow'. Through years of study, the basic characteristics of flow have been identified. This paper reviews the literature, and interprets the characteristics of flow within the context of interface design with the goal of understanding what kinds of interfaces are most conducive to supporting users being in the flow. Several examples to demonstrate the connection to flow are given." (Benjamin B. Bederson - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on September 01, 2004 | Classification: User experience | Comments (0) | Permalink