June 2007

Interview with Brenda Laurel

"What do Aristotelian poetics have to do with human-computer interaction? Quite a bit, if you think about it like Brenda Laurel does. From an early interest in interactive theatre and interactive fiction, through falling in love with computer graphics and learning to code, and a long career designing computer games, Brenda has kept the cultural aspects of HCI at the forefront of her work. In this interview she talks about her work designing games for girls, and about working with others who inspired her (including Timothy Leary)." (Tamara Adlin - UX Pioneers)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

"Whether the emergence of a self-conscious experience design community reflects a canny land-grab on the part of a few visible and reasonably influential practitioners, an underlying recognition that our technosocial practices have transcended the rather limited model of the 'user' ultimately derived from old-school human-computer interaction studies, boredom with a thoroughly mapped landscape, or something else entirely, it’s undeniably been a successful way of framing things." (Adam Greenfield - Speedbird)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Google's Marissa Mayer on The Future of Search

"The highlight of the Searchnomics 2007 conference was a keynote, at the very end, by Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She covered eight areas Google is focusing on now and in the near future." (Nitin Karandikar - Read/WriteWeb)

Posted by PJB on June 28, 2007 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Audio and the User Experience

"For most people, sound is an essential part of everyday living. Sound can deliver entertainment—like our favorite music or the play-by-play call of our hometown baseball—and vital information—like the traffic and news reports on the radio as we drive to work." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Audio interview with David Sless

"Here in conversation with Conrad Taylor, he explains how for him information only has a meaning within a context; how information designers improve data collection and presentation by redesigning pathological forms and statements; the historical roots and ethical stance of the information design movement; how the automated production of text layouts from computer systems (bank statements, dynamic Web pages) calls for a closer relationship between professionals in IT and design; and how all designers of information systems have an obligation to use benchmarking and testing to prove that they are making things better. David also explains his philosophy of design with reference to an approach to linguistics that emphasises pragmatics rather than semantics and syntactics; the later thought of Wittgenstein; an understanding of language as a collaboratively designed artefact; and Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about the relationship between reader and text." (Radio KIDMM)

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

Should Designers and Developers Do Usability?

"Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

LEMtool: Understanding, researching and integrating emotion in the design process

"The LEMtool will help you to improve the user experience and build relationships based on form, function, usability and emotions!" (About LEMtool)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Interview with Marc Hassenzahl

English language interview and video registration of Marc Hassenzahl's keynote address at the conference. (HCI methods: way to go? - Chi Nederland)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Minister of Information

"If this messy world is becoming easier to understand, thank Edward Tufte." (New York Magazine) - courtesy of kottke

Posted by PJB on June 14, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Design is Not Art, Redux

"That's a big difference between design and art. We can measure the results of design because it's meant to solve a problem. We can see if the problem has been resolved or lessened in some way. With Art we can't do that… other than some subjective 'Do you like it?'." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted by PJB on June 14, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

ASIS&T Bulletin Jun/Jul 2007: Special Section Information Archtecture

"(...) a bi-monthly news magazine packed with developments and issues affecting the field, pragmatic management reports, opinion, and news of people and events in the information science community." (ASIS&T)

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

Form Development Best Practice Slides

"As a number of people have asked about form development best practices in the comments on this site. I thought it would be useful to include Aaron Gustafson's 'Learning to Love Forms' talk from WebVisions 2007. The big news is that Aaron has agreed to lend his expertise to my upcoming book and will be writing a 'perspective' on Web form development best practices." (LukeW - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines

"A remarkable 80% of findings from the Web usability studies in the 1990s continue to hold today." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Improving Accessibility through Typography

"Typography has many facets which go beyond font faces, sizes, or the color of text. Taking typography into consideration at every step of the way can enable you to prepare a much more readable, accessible document." (Joe Dolson - Accessites) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted by PJB on June 11, 2007 | Classification: Accessibility | Permalink

Mobile Social Play

"So I've been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB)." (Kars Alfrink - Leapfrog)

Posted by PJB on June 07, 2007 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

What Does Rich Mean?

"Amid the hype of Web 2.0, 'rich' has become the prime buzzword for fresh, sexy digital products, marked by glossy buttons with AJAX actions. But what does rich really mean? Using the concepts of Classical rhetoric as a framework, Uday Gajendar looks to transcend the hype and dig into the value of richness for digital products." (Uday Gajendar - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

What if Jakob Nielsen had a blog?

"Some have criticised Jakob Nielsen for having an ugly site and people have wondered if useit.com would benefit from a design makeover. Well I have got tired of waiting for Jakob to start a blog version of useit.com so I decided to build it myself." (Chris McEvoy) - Appears to be a little outdated though, but still interesting enough to be mentioned.

Posted by PJB on June 06, 2007 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

Four Factors of Agile UX

"Drawing lessons from my experience with this kind of agile approach, I can state that its advantage is certainly the ability to produce a satisfying result despite time and budget constraints—even though the result is not perfect and will certainly need refinement later on. Another advantage of this kind of project is that both our team and our client's team got to know each other better and learned how to exploit each person’s know-how, improving the overall ability of the design team." (Luca Mascaro - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Walking Through Your Product Design With Stakeholders

"This article provides some basic tips to help you better prepare to walk through your product designs with stakeholders." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

The Intranet Maturity Framework

"Over the years, Avenue A | Razorfish has designed and built enterprise wide intranets for industry leading companies across the United States. In defining the strategy, designing the user experience and building these solutions leveraging enterprise strength software packages, Avenue A|Razorfish has been able to observe not only how enterprise intranets are being implemented and used but also how they are maturing over time. These insights have been encapsulated into a proprietary framework, that shows how, why and with what business benefits intranets grow over of time. The Intranet Maturity Framework, which is described in this report, summarizes best practices along the dimensions of intranet sponsorship, governance, user needs, experience design, technology implementation, training, adoption, and ROI metrics." (Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions)

Posted by PJB on June 05, 2007 | Classification: Content management | Permalink

12 Theatrical Tools

"Everyone is talking about the experience economy, customer experience management, and experience design these days. The big idea is, in a world where all products are pretty good and all services are fairly decent, any one of them do the job well enough. So offerings become interchangeable - or commoditised - and can only compete on price." (Adam Lawrence - Experience Design .de)

Posted by PJB on June 01, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink