April 2007

Location is Irrelevant for Usability Studies

"You get the same insights regardless of where you conduct user testing, so there's no reason to test in multiple cities. When a city is dominated by your own industry, however, you should definitely test elsewhere." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 30, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Conference Review: IA Summit 2007 (I/II)

"On the whole, IA Summit 2007 was an excellent conference. Though, because of the deficiencies of the venue, it was less successful than last year’s Summit. Next year’s IA Summit looks promising. It will take place at the Hyatt in Miami, Florida, on April 10–14, 2008. Its theme: Experiencing Information." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 26, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Interfaces That Flow: Transitions as Design Elements

"Actively influencing a person's emotional state throughout an experience—in particular, his or her sense of anticipation, involvement, and desire for a certain outcome—is still an evolving concept in the realm of user interface design." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 26, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Personas and Storytelling

"Personas work because they tell stories. Stories are part of every community. They communicate culture, organize and transmit information. Most importantly, they spark the imagination as you explore new ideas. They can ignite action." (Whitney Quesenbery) - courtesy of craig marion

Posted by PJB on April 26, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Methods of Understanding and Designing For Mobile Communities

"Society is increasingly on the move, mobile devices are commonly being used to coordinate group actions, and group communication features are rapidly being added to existing technologies. Despite this, little is known about how mobile groups act, or how communications technologies should be designed to augment existing behaviour. This is partially due to minimal research being done on the topic, but also to the lack of research methods available to study the topic with. Mobile groups are challenging to study because of frequent and long-duration movement, frequent distribution, and the rapidly changing environments they operate within. To address these issues, this research focuses on methodological issues surrounding the development of mobile devices for mobile groups and communities. More specifically it addresses backpackers, who are a relevant example of this type of community. The research primarily explores the convergence of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and the field of mobile device development. This enables the combination of emphasis on designing technologies for groups, social implications, mobile device design, and mobile settings." (Jeff Axup - Mobile Community Design)

Posted by PJB on April 26, 2007 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

Web Form Design Best Practices

"Forms broker the most crucial online interactions: checkout (commerce), registration (community), data input (participation and sharing). This book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions." (LukeW - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on April 25, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Measuring the success of a classification system

"When working with government and large private organizations on complex information systems, project managers and business representatives often demand early-stage validation that the proposed classification system provides the user-friendly solution they are charged with delivering. They also require this validation in a format that will be engaging for senior business stakeholders." (Iain Barker - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on April 24, 2007 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Yes, you should be using personas

"Personas communicate the user centred process like no other method." (Leisa Reichelt - disambiguity) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted by PJB on April 24, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Information architects on communicating to IT managers

"Our final source suggested asking the provocative question 'what would happen if someone simply pulled the plug on their website. Would their organization become stronger or weaker?' He also cautioned against talking about information architecture specifically; people are interested in the ends, not the means." (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted by PJB on April 19, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Show Numbers as Numerals

"It's better to use '23' than 'twenty-three' to catch users' eyes when they scan Web pages for facts, according to eyetracking data." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 19, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Enterprise IA Methodologies: Starting Two Steps Earlier

"Information architects working within enterprises are confronted by unique challenges relating to organisational culture, business processes, and internal politics. Compared to public website or interface design projects, key aspects differ in the application of IA discipline relating to uncertainties around the exact nature of the business problems being solved." (James Robertson - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on April 18, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Women in IA - Indy Young

"In this interview, we talk about a great IA and UX method of doing this very efficiently. It was developed by Indi Young (...). After attending her seminar during the PreCon of the IA Summit 2007, where visitors learned how to create a Mental Model (during the teamwork that needs to take place between IAs and their clients), I had the chance to interview her. One of the things I really like about her is her great ability to describe complex things in an understandable way, using metaphors such as 'the hallway test' to help communicate methods like the Mental Model to the business world." (IA Voice)

Posted by PJB on April 17, 2007 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design

"Interaction design is a broad term inflected in different ways in different communities. To us, interaction design comprises all efforts to understand human engagement with digital technology and all efforts to use that knowledge to design more useful and pleasing artifacts. Within this arena, the main audiences for this book are those who conduct work in the fields of human–computer interaction, computer–supported collaborative work, computer–supported collaborative learning, digital design, cognitive ergonomics, informatics, information systems, and human factors." (Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi - First Monday 12.4)

Posted by PJB on April 15, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Information Architecture & Ethical Design

"My presentation at the 2007 IA Summit, in Las Vegas, covering professional ethics, ethics of user experience and cultural ethics. Subjects include privacy and trust, evolutionary psychology, virtual status and ubiquitous altruism, applied to social networking and the mobile internet." (Olly Wright)

Posted by PJB on April 12, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Advertising is Broken

Brandon Schauer interviews Clement Mok - "I see the opportunity to marry Experience Modeling with the smarts of the Information Architect to structure a powerful model in the user's world, whether that be through cell phones or tagging systems. The opportunity is to create a model that ties together the deep ethnographic understanding of the user, the system engineering understanding, and the brand/marketing understanding. Tying these three things together is quite powerful." (IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference 2006)

Posted by PJB on April 11, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments

"Observing a user perform a task provides more reliable information than simply asking the user how easy it would be to perform the task." (Isabelle Peyrichoux - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Envisioning the Future of User Experience

"What is the future of user experience as a practice, as a philosophy of design, and as a research topic?" (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Using Technical Communication Skills in User Experience

"User experience professionals can also learn some lessons from and find potential recruits in technical communicators as they have skills that can be applied directly to the design process." (Theresa Putkey - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Reaction to NextD

"I would recommend one thing for the IA Community to consider: invite someone from the NextDesign Leadership Institute to speak at the 2008 IA Summit (Miami, Florida, USA, April 10-14). We have a history of giving our biggest critics a voice at our main event - Mark Hurst and Mark Bernstein are just two examples. Time to find our long-lost twins." (Keith Instone)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA

"Web 2.0 applications often have accessibility and usability problems because of the limitations of (X)HTML. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites." (Martin Kliehm - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: Accessibility | Permalink

Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful

"Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page's location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is increasingly beneficial to users." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 10, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Framework of Product Experience

"In this paper, we introduce a general framework for product experience that applies to all affective responses that can be experienced in human-product interaction. Three distinct components or levels of product experiences are discussed: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience. All three components are distinguished in having their own lawful underlying process. The aesthetic level involves a product’s capacity to delight one or more of our sensory modalities. The meaning level involves our ability to assign personality or other expressive characteristics and to assess the personal or symbolic significance of products. The emotional level involves those experiences that are typically considered in emotion psychology and in everyday language about emotions, such as love and anger, which are elicited by the appraised relational meaning of products. The framework indicates patterns for the processes that underlie the different types of affective product experiences, which are used to explain the personal and layered nature of product experience." (Pieter Desmet & Paul Hekkert - Int.'l Journal of Design 1.1) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on April 04, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Interaction Design Style

"It's been a little less than a week since my IA Summit presentation. To my great surprise, it went really well. In the next day or so I will be posting a summary of my experiences preparing and discussing my topic, which was, in a word, style. Many people came to me after my presentation asking me not only to post the slides themselves, but also to post the reading list since I did discuss a lot of books and sites that deeply influenced my thinking. So here's all the stuff: (...)" (Christopher Fahey - graphpaper.com)

Posted by PJB on April 04, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Information Design Conference 2007

"Here is a very short summary of the contents of the conference. (...) It is likely that audio recordings and slides of several of these talks will soon be available from the IDA website." (Information Design Association)

Posted by PJB on April 03, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Thoughts on Interaction Design

"It is the primary goal of this text to better define Interaction Design: to provide a definition that encompasses the intellectual facets of the field, the conceptual underpinnings of Interaction Design as a legitimate human-centered profession, and the particular methods used by practitioners in their day to day experiences" (Jon Kolko et al.)

Posted by PJB on April 02, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink