July 2006

The Library 2.0 Folksonomy Gang

"Listen to conversations with thought-leaders at the interface between Web 2.0, Libraries, and the Semantic Web (...) In this Library 2.0 Gang discussion, members talk about folksonomies and the role of user-generated tagging alongside more formal methods of classification such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Dewey." (Talking with Talis)

Posted by PJB on July 31, 2006 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

Findability with tags: Facets, clusters, and pivot browsing

"For a while I have been thinking of different ways of supporting finding information with tags that go beyond tag-clouds. There are three trends that are worth pointing out. The first is faceted browse interfaces, the second is algorithm driven approaches like clustering and recommendations (often driven by collaborative filtering), and the third possibility is one that is native to tag based systems - and can be termed 'pivot browsing'." (Rashmi Sinha)

Posted by PJB on July 28, 2006 | Classification: Search | Permalink

What is RDF?

"The SemWeb enables computers to seek out knowledge distributed throughout the Web, mesh it, and then take action based on it. Take an analogy: the current web is a decentralized platform for distributed presentations, while the SemWeb is a decentralized platform for distributed knowledge. Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the W3C standard for encoding knowledge." (Joshua Tauberer - O'Reilly XML.com)

Posted by PJB on July 28, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

The 7 (f)laws of the Semantic Web

"This entry should be regarded as constructive criticism of the Semantic Web - I still believe in it, but need to bring the flaws (as I see them) in to the open, in the hope that discussion and communication is the first step towards resolving problems." (Dan Zambonini - O'Reilly XML.com)

Posted by PJB on July 28, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Designing for Interaction

"Designing for Interaction is informed, intelligent, and inspiring. Dan Saffer delivers practical advice on today's interaction design challenges, and smart insights on tomorrow's. - says Jesse James Garrett" (Dan Saffer)

Posted by PJB on July 27, 2006 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Experience Design: Principles & Practices 

A course taught at the IIID Summer Academy in Chicago (July 18-19, 2006) "What characterizes Experience Design as a distinct field of professional endeavour is the holistic focus on all of the myriad elements that encompass an experience which disruptively cross traditionally perceived barriers between artifacts and disciplines." (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted by PJB on July 27, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Icon Analysis: Evaluating Low Spatial Frequency Compositions

"An icon search task that lasts longer than anticipated can result in user annoyance or even premature abandonment. I once changed the mouse settings on my laptop to be overly sensitive, and had a colleague use it to show me a data analysis technique she had been working on." (Matt Queen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on July 25, 2006 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Brand Experience in User Experience Design

"Much has been written in the past decade about the importance of usability and the user experience to customers’ perception of an organization’s brand. Jared Spool's 1996 article 'Branding and Usability' correctly identifies the importance of Web site usability to brand experience and provides evidence that a positive user experience has a direct correlation to positive brand perception. More recently, authors such as Dirk Knemeyer have expanded on this theme." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 25, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

International Usability Evaluation: Issues and Strategies

"Like many UX practitioners, I'm often involved in designing products that will be sold across the globe. Half of the challenge is acknowledging there is no one-size-fits-all set of design criteria. The other half is knowing the tradeoffs when choosing between usability methods for requirements gathering and evaluation. What many may find surprising is that our tried-and-true methods themselves can have limitations, depending on the context in which we apply them." (Michele Marut - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 25, 2006 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information we Consume

"To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers." (Josef Kolbitsch and Hermann Maurer - Journal of Universal Computer Science 12.2)

Posted by PJB on July 24, 2006 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

UXPod

User Experience discussions by Gerry Gaffney. (libsyn) - courtesy of webword

Posted by PJB on July 24, 2006 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

How and Why Wikipedia Works

"This article presents an interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko. All three are leading Wikipedia practitioners in the English, German, and Japanese Wikipedias and related projects. The interview focuses on how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working." (Dirk Riehle)

Posted by PJB on July 23, 2006 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

A Conversation with Steven Johnson 1/2

"The one constant online (...) is that linked text is still central to the medium and its interface innovations." (Jesse James Garrett - Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on July 21, 2006 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Usability through Fun

"Never underestimate the power of fun, (...) you can still have 'fun' without 'funny'. It's about the user's experience (i.e. cognitive seduction). And even if you aren't in a position to introduce more fun into your actual product, you can still add it to documentation and support!" (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted by PJB on July 21, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Information Design Watch

"The weblog of Dynamic Diagrams, Consultants in Visual Logic." (Dynamic Diagrams)

Posted by PJB on July 19, 2006 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

A re-examination of information seeking behaviour in the context of activity theory

"Activity theory is not a predictive theory but a conceptual framework within which different theoretical perspectives may be employed. Typically, it is suggested that several methods of data collection should be employed and that the time frame for investigation should be long enough for the full range of contextual issues to emerge. Activity theory offers not only a useful conceptual framework, but also a coherent terminology to be shared by researchers, and a rapidly developing body of literature in associated disciplines." (T.D. Wilson - Information Research 11.4)

Posted by PJB on July 19, 2006 | Classification: Search | Permalink

User Interface Design: Taking the Good with the Bad

"The key to any successful marriage is compromise. While things may not always go the way you want them to, in the end, coming to an agreement helps you to achieve a greater good. The same holds true for user interface (UI) design. After all, what else is the user interface if not a marriage of form and function?" (Mike Padilla - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on July 18, 2006 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Approaches to classification in publishing and knowledge management

"Classification of knowledge, and of the objects which contain it such as books and journals, has a long history, but is also a hot topic in the modern world of electronic collections and the World Wide Web. Indeed Tim Berners-Lee argues that the building of ontologies and software agents that can deal with them is central to the vision of the Semantic Web." (Electronic Publishing Specialist Forum)

Posted by PJB on July 18, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Graffletopia

"As a web designer, I've been using OmniGraffle for years. It's fantastic for designing interfaces — miles better than Adobe Illustrator for most tasks. Stencils are a big part of why Graffle is great. So, hopefully, this website will make it easier to find cool stencils. Let the sharing begin!" (About Graffletopia)

Posted by PJB on July 18, 2006 | Classification: Wireframes | Permalink

The Organization of Information about Information Organization

"Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods - some more than others - and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well." (Bob Glushko - Doc or Die)

Posted by PJB on July 16, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

A new framework

"Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods - some more than others - and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well." (Todd Wilkens - Adaptive Path blog)

Posted by PJB on July 16, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Proceedings of the 2005 International Symposium on Wikis

"The 2005 International Symposium on Wikis brings together wiki researchers, implementers, and users for the first time. The goal of the symposium is to find a voice for the community. The symposium has a rigorously reviewed research paper track as well as plenty of space for practitioner reports, demonstrations, and discussions" (WikiSym 2005)

Posted by PJB on July 13, 2006 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

What are microformats?

"(1) Microformats enable the publishing and sharing of higher fidelity information on the Web. (2) Small bits of (X)HTML that identify richer data types like people and events in your webpages. (3) Building blocks that enable users to own, control, move, and share their data on the Web." (Tantek Çelik - An Event Apart)

Posted by PJB on July 13, 2006 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

Frontiers of Interaction II

Presentations by Christian Peters, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Matteo Penzo, and Fabio Sergio. - (idearium)

Posted by PJB on July 12, 2006 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team

"Teams need to avoid the role of evangelist for user centered design." (Christine Perfetti - UI11: Enriching the Experience)

Posted by PJB on July 12, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint (1/4)

"One of the great things CHI offers to both practitioners and academics is an opportunity to reconnect with people from their respective communities. Though the intermingling between these two separate communities is not what it might be. Over the many years since this conference began in 1982, conference attendees have forged and annually - or at least from time to time - renewed friendships with their peers from around the world. Unlike conferences focusing on a particular UX specialty, attendees represented the diversity among practitioners - including designers, usability specialists, user researchers, and UX managers." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 12, 2006 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Label Placement in Forms

"In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my previous article (...), we discovered much interesting data. I'll provide an in-depth analysis of that data here." (Matteo Penzo - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 12, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Getting Emotional With Donald Norman

"I believe that we now do understand how to design so that the result truly fits people. By 'we', I mean the design community, the design theorists (which is where I fit), and the university community of design." (Marco van Hout - Design & Emotion)

Posted by PJB on July 11, 2006 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

The Next Web: Kevin Kelly's Keynote

"(...) if you've been feeling jaded, skeptical, or even cynical about the hype surrounding Web 2.0, you should take advantage of any opportunity to hear Kelly's perspective. It's optimistic, refreshing, and downright uplifting; and he's a great speaker, with a good sense of humor, too." (The Yourdon Report)

Posted by PJB on July 10, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Stories are the human experience

"Stories are a way of communicating that goes back to before recorded history–and are just as important in modern culture. They are how we put information into a memorable and compelling form. Every culture has its stories–some say that a culture is a group of people who share a common set of stories about who they are and how they live." (Whitney Quesenbery - uiGarden.net)

Posted by PJB on July 10, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Traffic Log Patterns

"The relative popularity of a site's pages, the number of visitors referred by other sites, and the traffic from search queries continue to follow a Zipf distribution." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on July 10, 2006 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Understanding Design 3.0

"This material was created by NextD Research in collaboration with UnderstandingLab and as part of the NextD Futures series. This was part of a larger presentation originally made by GK VanPatter at the AIGA national design conference in September 2005." (NextD)

Posted by PJB on July 10, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Simplicity demands difficult choices

"Too much web management suffers from trying to be all things to all people. Apple and Google have triumphed from targeting common tasks." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on July 10, 2006 | Classification: Complexity | Permalink

The reinvention of information design

"And every generation has to reinvent things in their own idiom. But it would be nice if a little history and an awareness of past work was added to what we do now, rather than continually reinventing it as if it were NEW. So wasteful, and at times quite boring to old farts like me. (...) it is difficult to see anything genuinely new in the excitable and shallow research about web sites which was not already established know-how in document design long before digital technology." (David Sless - CRIA) - Comments are closed.

Posted by PJB on July 07, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Knowledge Communities: Online Environments for Supporting Knowledge Management and its Social Context

"Knowledge management is often seen as an information problem: how to capture, organize, and retrieve information. Given this perspective, it isn't surprising that knowledge management evokes notions of data mining and text clustering and databases and documents. This is not wrong, but it is only part of the picture. We suggest that knowledge management is not just an information problem, but that it is, as well, a social problem." (Thomas Erickson and Wendy A Kellogg)

Posted by PJB on July 06, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Putting the Strunk Back in Strunk and White

"The real secret of E.B. White is listening, incorporating, translating, and finally accepting pundits into our practice. We aren't at war at all. We all want the same thing. We all want more great work in the world." (Christina Wodtke - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on July 05, 2006 | Classification: Writing | Permalink

Dan Saffer Interview

"Dan Saffer, senior interaction designer at Adaptive Path, has a new book coming out called Designing for Interaction. We met up at the AP offices when I was in town last and had a great chat about what makes for great interaction design, how you allow for (encourage?) hackability, and much more. The book was an excellent introduction for me (the non-designer software dabbler) into the current thinking about user experience and interaction." (weblogswork)

Posted by PJB on July 04, 2006 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

A conversation with Lou Rosenfeld about search analytics, information architecture, and designing for usability

"(...) topics including information architecture, search analytics, print and online publishing, designing for usability, tagging, and microformats. We had a great conversation!" (Jon's Radio - InfoWorld)

Posted by PJB on July 02, 2006 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Designing for Bridge Experiences

"The practice of user experience lacks the historical pedigree of many of its constituent elements, including human/computer interaction, library science, social-science research methods, product-development methodology, and, most of all, design. What it does enjoy, however, is a pragmatic, multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the intertwined social, economic, and technological forces it engages. It's a contingent amalgamation - an assembly of what works - and a set of perspectives and problem-solving techniques that define how we, as practitioners, think about creating products and services." (Joel Grossman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 02, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Faceted Metadata for Information Architecture and Search

"The course, while originating in an academic environment, acknowledged the needs of practitioners by showing us how faceted metadata provides a solution that answers real users’ information-foraging problems and demonstrated two real-world applications of this solution..." (Jessyca Frederick - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on July 02, 2006 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design (I)

"This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products." (L. Ravi Krishnan and Venkatesh Rajamanickam - uiGarden.net)

Posted by PJB on July 02, 2006 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Complexity delivers short-term gain but long-term pain

"Complexity sells (sometimes). Customers are often impressed by all the extra features. The mood can change when they have to use the product." (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on July 02, 2006 | Classification: Information design | Permalink