January 2007

Simplicity: The Distribution of Complexity

"Achieving simplicity is not that simple when you are dealing with complex modern device design. Rob Tannen mused on lazy shortcuts, artificial constraints and Maeda's crusade on the complex." (Rob Tannen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on January 31, 2007 | Classification: Complexity | Permalink

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

"Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: "Google." Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100." (Charles S. Knight - Read/Write Web)

Posted by PJB on January 29, 2007 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Wishlists, Gift Certificates, and Gift Giving in E-Commerce

"Although gift features leverage the online medium and draw new users to a site, they also introduce many usability pitfalls. Among them are poorly designed email notifications, which many users simply ignore." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on January 29, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

User Experience Teams & Information Architects

"User Experience is critical for the success of products. Consumers/end users have come to expect an integrated, easy to use experience of web sites and applications. No single individual can perform all tasks necessary for user experience and a team needs to be created that takes corporate politics into consideration and properly balances the goals of the individual team members." (Mike Oren - Shiny Happy People)

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

What If Our Systems Could Do The Rest?

"What if, in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) managing content types, templates, and taxonomies, our CM systems managed stakeholders, goals, audiences, information, and publications. What if instead of simply automating Web site creation, our systems managed the full domain of issues involved in collecting and distributing information? Systems these days are quite good at making the details of CM easier, but are no help at all with the big picture. In fact, they leave most organizations with the mistaken idea that they have confronted their CM problems simply be installing a CMS. In this talk, I'll lay out the contours of the full CM domain of issues and discuss what you can do to confront them with or without software." (Bob Boiko - Plone Conference 2006)

Posted by PJB on January 25, 2007 | Classification: Content management | Permalink

KeyContent: Unlocking communication

"Our mission is to provide a place where expert content developers, technical communicators, information architects, and web designers can come and express their views about the profession. Whether you are publishing an article or commenting on someone else's, or collaborating with others to write an article, or submitting one you have already written, we have a place and the tools for you. These collaborations and resources are created for and by professionals who want to keep up with the important issues in the transformation of technical communication." (KeyContent.org blog)

Posted by PJB on January 24, 2007 | Classification: Content management | Permalink

Interview with Adam Greenfield

"Language is also a domain of user experience. Shouldn't the words we use to describe a tool be as carefully crafted as the tool itself?" (Régine Debatty - WeMakeMoneyNotArt) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on January 23, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Interview with Doug Bowman

"My general interest (and without a doubt, my current position at Google) is pushing me to think about scale more often. Small scales and large scales. One of the components of my talk at Web Directions North will deal with scale of impact. Using our skills and innovation in technology and design to impact the greater good. The web reaches approximately one billion people now, and that number grows every day. Put one page or one application out there for the world to see, and, given the right factors, millions of people could potentially see it, experience it, or be inspired by it within days. How can we use that power for good? Can we harness our collective knowledge and skills to impact and make a difference both locally and in remote parts of the world?" (John Allsopp - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on January 23, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Developing user-centered tools for strategic business planning

"User experience professionals continue to attempt to move their work and impact 'upstream' -- to play an earlier and more strategic role in their workplaces' business. But exactly what does that mean? What is it that user experience practitioners or groups thereof should be doing differently or working towards doing (more)?" (Richard Anderson - riander)

Posted by PJB on January 21, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

SpiekerBlog 2.0

"All new in 2007, except the old materials in the archives. Those will eventuelly either be refreshed or delted. New stuff will be added whenever called for. The German text will no longer interfere with the process of reading English. It now has its own site." (Erik Spiekermann)

Posted by PJB on January 21, 2007 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent

"Readers of UXmatters probably know that user-centered design (UCD) and usability activities have the most positive impact when they're carried out early in the ideation, design, and development cycle. Probably, many of you have worked in organizations that weren’t very experienced in UCD or usability engineering. You may have experienced something like the following the interchange with a development manager (...)" (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on January 21, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Applying Color Theory to Digital Displays

"This article is Part III of my series 'Color Theory for Digital Displays'. It describes how you can apply color theory to application program user interfaces and Web pages and provides many guidelines for the effective use of color." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on January 21, 2007 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Giving You Fitts

"One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law. Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control which predicts how long it takes to move from one position to another as a function of the distance to and size of the target area. Papers outlining what became known as Fitts' Law were published in 1954 and 1964." (Jensen Harris - An Office User Interface Blog)

Posted by PJB on January 21, 2007 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

So You Think You Want to be a Manager

"Every designer faces a choice at some point in their career — to manage or not to manage. Erin Malone helps you walk through the questions you need to make that choice." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on January 17, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The iPhone User Experience: A First Look

"A collective gasp was heard around the world following the January, 2007, MacWorld Conference, when Steve Jobs pulled the wraps off the long-rumored iPhone. He proclaimed it a revolutionary product with a brand-new 'multi-touch' interface as breakthrough and breathtaking as the mouse interface of the 1960s. Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let's take a look." (Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted by PJB on January 17, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2007 Conference Progam

"The Information Architecture Summit is a premier gathering place for information architects and for discussion about information architecture. Everyone who touches on IA is welcome to share and learn. Last year's IA Summit attracted over 500 attendees, including beginners, experienced IAs, and people in a range of related fields." (IA Summit 2007)

Posted by PJB on January 15, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

10 Best Intranets of 2007

"This year's winners emphasized an editorial approach to news on the homepage. They also took a pragmatic approach to many hyped 'Web 2.0' techniques. While page design is getting more standardized, there's no agreement on CMS or technology platforms for good intranet design." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on January 15, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Taking personas too far

"(...) although personas are essential design tools, we think some people may be losing sight of the fact that they're just tools, and tools with a specific purpose, at that. Lately, we've been seeing a lot of gold-plated hammers - unnecessarily elaborate communication about personas - and some fundamental misunderstandings about the relationships among research, personas, and scenarios." (Kim Goodwin - Cooper newsletter)

Posted by PJB on January 15, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Early and often: How to avoid the design revision death spiral

"One lesson we've learned over the past several years here at Cooper is that on the vast majority of our projects, intimate client collaboration is a critical ingredient for success. This is a lesson that we have sometimes learned the hard way; collaboration can be messy, unpredictable and has often forced us to compromise what we thought was a supremely clear and elegant vision. Despite these growing pains, we have now come to embrace the unpredictability and compromise; through well-managed client collaboration, our designs are stronger and are more likely to serve our clients' needs and satisfy the goals of end users" (David Cronin - uiGarden.net)

Posted by PJB on January 13, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Jon Bosak Closing Kenote XML 2006

"It's hard to remember now just how different this community was ten years ago. There were only a few hundred SGML experts in the world, a goodly number of whom came to this conference every year. Very few groups in existence today could boast the level of intelligence, the breadth of interest, and the depth of independence, not to say downright weirdness, evidenced by the SGML community of a decade past." (XML 2006 Proceedings) - courtesy of timoreilly

Posted by PJB on January 13, 2007 | Classification: TechCom | Permalink

The Key to Simplicity: Questions for Donald Norman

"Technology can help only if it can adopt a simple structure so that controls for different devices are as similar to one another as possible, making the learning much easier. Multiple purpose controls are an abomination. It is possible to have a single device transform itself into independent devices for controlling different tasks. But here the key is to make the switch from the support of individual technologies and individual devices to the support of cohesive, organized activities." (Eddie Lopez - User Centered)

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

How to Grok Web Standards

"To grok something is to achieve an intuitive understanding of it. To grok web standards, we have to understand them as more than a means to an end, more than simply an alternative method of producing a visual design." (Craig Cook - A List Apart) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on January 11, 2007 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Usability in China: Encore

"Our objectives were simple yet bold: The leaders of the China chapter wanted to raise the profile of usability engineering and user-centered design in China and create the biggest usability conference in the region. We also wanted an event that the China usability industry could call its own. We figured that the best way to do this was to target people who are passionate about integrating usability into their products and give them a chance to meet, network, and attend talks and tutorials by leaders in user experience." (Daniel Szuc and Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

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

User Assistance in the Role of Domain Expert

"This article explores the role of user assistance in providing domain-centric online Help - rather than Help that simply explains obvious user interactions with well-designed user interfaces - and provides a pattern for and examples of expert guidance." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on January 10, 2007 | Classification: TechCom | Permalink

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Interactive map covering areas such as Data, Information, Concept, Strategy, Metaphor, and Compound Visualization. (visual-literacy.org)

Posted by PJB on January 08, 2007 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Documenting Interaction Design: Wire Frames with Visio and Word

"There are many ways to document an interaction design and the level of details needed is dependent on what your documenting and for what purpose. There has also been a lot of discussions on what the best tool for creating interaction designs and/or prototypes is (...). The tool you choose is of course also dependent on what you are documenting and for what purpose. It is also much of a personal taste what tool one prefers to work with." (interakt.nu) - courtesy of Anders Björk

Posted by PJB on January 05, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Experience design is not about brands

"The problem is that 'brand' will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an 'inside-out' proposition - a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company. Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. 'Experience' is outside-in." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path blog)

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

Understanding hypertext cognition: Developing mental models to aid users' comprehension

"This paper uses literature on hypertext theory to evaluate our reading strategies in an online environment. Assessing the impact of digital technology on our educational environment and culture, the paper recommends a new form of pedagogy for hypertexts based on Walter Ong's concept of 'secondary orality'." (Andy White - First Monday 12.1)

Posted by PJB on January 04, 2007 | Classification: Hypertext | Permalink

Pervasive fun

"Fun is a pervasive feature of software development, not only for open source programmers but in the area of commercial software development too: Open source developers that are paid for their work are observed to be very motivated and prepared for future effort, especially if they enjoy their development time. Furthermore, the fun that programmers experience functions as a good proxy for their productivity. Therefore, employers that want to enhance the programmers’ productivity can safely invest in an environment of fun for developers in their company." (Benno Luthinger and Carola Jungwirth - First Monday 12.1)

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

The Line Between Clarity and Chaos: An Interview with Barry Schwartz

"Adding options is bound to make somebody better off, and further, it won't make anybody worse off. The more choice people have, the better they are. So how could it not be true? It's not true." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on January 02, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Notes from the IA Retreat in Chile

"(...) I'd rather leave more detailed commentary to the other participants. Here are some excerpts from comments that have been published online (...)" (Javier Velasco - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on January 02, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Fast, Cheap, and Good: Yes, You Can Have It All

"The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process. Slower methods should be deferred to an annual usability checkup." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on January 02, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink