February 2007

Nathan Shedroff on Making Meaning

Interview by Steve Portigal - "Experience design is an approach to design, and you can use that approach in pretty much any discipline—graphic design or industrial design or interaction design, or retail design. It says the dimensions of experience are wider than what those disciplines normally take into account. And if you think wider—through time, multiple senses and other dimensions - then you can create a more meaningful experience." (Core77 Design Blog)

Posted by PJB on February 28, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

The Elements of Typographical Style Applied to the Web

"For too long typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, particularly in body copy. In years gone by this could have been put down to the technology, but now the web has caught up. The advent of much improved browsers, text rendering and high resolution screens, combine to negate technology as an excuse." (Richard Rutter)

Posted by PJB on February 27, 2007 | Classification: Typography | Permalink

Design Improv

"A new approach to designing interactive experiences that is more empathetic to the consumer, and helps designers work effectively and creatively with their customers and user groups." (Nathan Waterhouse)

Posted by PJB on February 27, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Wikipatterns

"Wikipatterns is not an instruction manual, it's a set of tools. It's examples of techniques that have helped people, and of situations that people have found themselves in that they wished they hadn't. We want to help to identify a nail, and know you might want to hit it with a hammer." - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2007 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

Doing Today's Job with Yesterday's Tools

"In the same way the user interfaces are much more consistent because applications all use the same toolkits, then having a common information management framework that other applications can build upon will go a long way towards a more consistent set of interactions. I'd like to outline what I think are the key requirements for such a framework to be successful." (Patrick Dubroy - Boxes and Arrows)

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

When tags work and when they don't: Amazon and LibraryThing

"This is an extensive post, revealing the results of a statistical comparison between Amazon and LibraryThing tags, and exploring why tagging has turned out relatively poorly for Amazon. I end by making concrete recommendations for ecommerce sites interested in making tagging work." (Thingology - LibraryThing) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2007 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 2

"(...) we'll cover how moving into product management will change your focus, responsibilities, and challenges; what you will gain and lose leaving user experience work; and some ways to prepare yourself for the move." (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

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

Envisioning the Whole Digital Person

"Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not. As a human society, we're quite possibly looking at the largest surge of recorded information that has ever taken place, and at this point, we have only the most rudimentary tools for managing all this information—in part because we cannot predict what standards will be in place in 10, 50, or 100 years." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 21, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Selection-Dependent Inputs

"As arbitrators of checkout, registration, and data entry, forms are often the linchpins of successful Web applications. But successful Web applications tend to grow—both in terms of capability and complexity. And this increasing complexity is often passed on to and absorbed by a Web application’s forms. In addition to needing more input fields, labels, and Help text, forms with a growing number of options may also require selection-dependent inputs." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 21, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

European LIS Curriculum Project

"The European LIS Curriculum Project (...) was an innovative exploration of views and practice regarding library and information science (LIS) curriculum in Europe. The Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark, was the contracting agency for the project, which involved more than 100 European educators." (ASIS&T Bulletin Dec/Jan 2006)

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

Building IA Means Building Local Groups

"The IA profession is growing, but a large proportion of IAs still work in relative isolation. Few organizations can boast an internal IA practice, so many rely on individual contractors – IAs who have to work on their own. Even companies with IAs on staff often lack managers who understand and care about information architecture. (...) But local groups are more than just a nice thing to have – they're the key to the future. Building IA as a profession requires building IAs as professionals. This process happens one person at a time." (Stacy Merrill Surla - ASIS&T Bulletin Dec 2006 - Jan 2007)

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

Long Live the User (Persona): Talking with Steve Mulder

"You've tried it all. User personas as posters, ala Alan Cooper, hanging on the office walls. User personas as cardboard cutouts, sitting at the conference table with you and your client. User personas as glossy deliverables. As paper mâché projects. As collages, comics, mood boards, Word documents, lists, charts, and just regular conversations. Through all your attempts to bring user personas into your project, one thing remains consistent: user personas are hard to get right. And even if you get them right, they’re even more difficult to integrate into your day-to-day process." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on February 14, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 1

"User experience professionals are increasingly becoming interested in the business aspects of what they do. At their core, the user experience roles focus on understanding user needs and creating useful and easy-to-use products that address those needs." (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on February 14, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The human factor in gadget, Web design

"Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA's Mission Control." (Stefanie Olsen - C|net news.com)

Posted by PJB on February 13, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability

"Although the gains don't fall into traditional profit columns, there are clear arguments for improving usability of non-commercial websites and intranets. In one example, a state agency could get an ROI of 22.000% by fixing a basic usability problem." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Namahn Talks

"Joannes Vandermeulen conducts interviews with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners and researchers on a wide range of topics that may be of interest to the HCI community." (Namahn)

Posted by PJB on February 09, 2007 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

Feng-GUI: Feng Shui for Graphic User Interfaces

"Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap."

Posted by PJB on February 09, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Book Preview: Information Foraging Theory

"Most books on human-computer interaction (HCI) and usability give recommendations based on empirical research, guidelines fit to observed user behavior, and cognitive models after the fact. Peter Pirolli, the father of information foraging theory, has written a new book that models and predicts what users will do before they navigate a website. Using mathematical models of human behavior, Pirolli lays out the foundation of information foraging theory, a relatively new field based in part on optimal foraging theory in animals (Stephens & Krebs 1986). The result is a seminal work in Oxford University Press' series on Human-Computer Interaction. We were fortunate to review a proof of Pirolli's new book Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information, due out April 2007." (Website Optimization) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Ensuring Accessibility for People With Color-Deficient Vision

"This article is Part IV of my series 'Color Theory for Digital Displays'. It describes how you can use color in applications and on Web pages to ensure that they are accessible to people who have color-deficient vision. If you do not consider the needs of people with color-deficient vision when choosing color schemes for applications and Web pages, those you create may be difficult to use or even indecipherable for about one in twelve users." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2007 | Classification: Accessibility | Permalink

The Holy Grail of Information Architecture

"It all comes down to creativity: Our documents need to support our creativity. They need to be able to radically change at any time to permit new and unique project demands. The simpler the document format or template, the more likely it is to be able to be adaptable to new and innovative ways of thinking about our products." (Christopher Fahey - graphpaper.com) - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on February 06, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

DevSource Videos

Interviews with Lou Rosenfeld, Jesse James Garrett, Danah Boyd, Steve Krug and Marti Hearst (DevSource)

Posted by PJB on February 05, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Pew Internet Report on Tagging

"Just as the internet allows users to create and share their own media, it is also enabling them to organize digital material their own way, rather than relying on pre-existing formats of classifying information. A December 2006 survey has found that 28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content. The report features an interview with David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society." (Pew Internet & American Life Project) - courtesy of tagsonomy

Posted by PJB on February 01, 2007 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink