May 2007

Peter Morville's Visual Library

"What is the meaning of the Picasso polar bear? What is the Spanish strategy? Is it the art of branding? And, which country will be next? Feel free to upload your version to Flickr, tag it with remixpolarbear and explain your country's unique contribution to information architecture strategy and practice. Just don't tell the folks at O'Reilly." (Peter Morville - findability.org)

Posted by PJB on May 30, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

A Great Leap Forward: The Birth of the Usability Profession (1988-1993)

"My concern is that by embracing new ideas, we will limit our view of our early days as being restricted in scope and naïve in conception. Before that happens, or perhaps, to prevent it, I would like to describe my personal version of our beginnings as a profession and argue that we should be celebrating them, not disparaging them even as we see their limits." (Joe Dumas - UPA Journal of Usability Studies)

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

Evangelizing Outside the Box: Web Standards and Large Companies

"Once enough large web companies use web standards and loudly proclaim that fact, other large companies will start to be afraid of missing the Latest and Greatest (always a source of management panic), mend their ways, and start to demand standards awareness from their employees and freelancers, too." (Peter-Paul Koch - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on May 30, 2007 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

The Myth of the Genius Designer

"Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

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

Sharing Ownership of UX

"The three key members of a multidisciplinary product team—the product manager, UX architect, and system architect—work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form. Each key member of the product team has primary responsibility and decision-making authority for a specific aspect of the product vision." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

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

Catalyze: Creative People Designing Extraordinary Software (beta)

"Catalyze is a member-driven community for all professionals involved in Application Definition and Design. If you are a business analyst, UI designer, information architect, usability professional, interaction designer, product manager, project manager or anyone else involved in the definition process of software applications, this community is for you and will be worth your time." (About Catalyze) - courtesy of bertmulder

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

IxDA Community Site (beta)

"With great excitement, the IxDA Board of Directors announces the availability of the beta version of a new IxDA community experience. Through the efforts of IxDA volunteers, and spearheaded by community member Jeff Howard, we are pleased to launch the beta version. We believe this effort is the start of creating a new kind of professional organization. The new site will allow a significantly better experience for all of us in the community, including tagging of content, customized RSS feeds, browsing by topics and the ability to share information about you with the community." (Interaction Design Association) - courtesy of joannesvandermeulen

Posted by PJB on May 29, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Thin slicing: Inside or outside the world of user experience?

"(...) research showing that users make quick judgments on very little information and how this affects the design of the online experience." (HFI UI Design Newsletter)

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

What is experience?

"In April 2007, I posted five questions about the nature of experience. I asked Total Experience's readers to offer their answers as comments." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted by PJB on May 23, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Anatomy of a Help File: An Iterative Approach

"This article presents an approach to Help file design that focuses on creating a task-centered user experience and accommodates an iterative development strategy." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 23, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Dynamic Help in Web Forms

"Many Web application designers strive to reduce the amount of instructional text that appears in the user interfaces they create. A likely part of their motivation is the perception that, if explaining how to use something requires too much instruction, it probably isn’t that easy to use and, therefore, has room for improvement in its design. (...)" (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 23, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Infographics, design, and visual journalism

"Welcome to my website about infographics, newspaper design and visual journalism. In the English version you will find only the Infographics in the Internet Era document, some articles, examples of my students' projects, upcoming presentations, my portfolio and my contact information." (Alberto Cairo)

Posted by PJB on May 23, 2007 | Classification: Information graphics | Permalink

What Is Holding User Experience Back Where You Work?

"Interestingly, in several cases, 'propelling forward' encompassed 'moving upstream', to use yet another metaphor which, at least on the surface, is moving in the opposite direction!" (Richard Anderson - UX Magazine)

Posted by PJB on May 22, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

An interview with Mike Kuniavsky

"Emotional design is good design. That's what I learned at the Milan Furniture Fair. It had plenty of bad design, but there are some beautiful, beautiful things there. The reason they are well designed is not because there's a lot of splash. It's because they've been thought through and they connect with us on an emotional level in addition to a functional level." (Tamara Adlin - UX Pioneers) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on May 22, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

IA One Sheeters

"One-Sheeters are quick and easy marketing tools for information architects. They're like mini brochures to advertise IA deliverables and promote the IA practice in your company. One-Sheeters help people envision what deliverables you produce and where they fit into a project. They're quick to produce and easy for anyone to understand." - courtesy of elearningpost

Posted by PJB on May 21, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

How chopsticks came to symbolize user experience design

"Lessons learned: A great product keeps customers coming back for more. A great experience makes them bring friends." (Robert Barlow-Busch - chopsticker)

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

Towards Experience-Focused HCI

Videos - "Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, talks about 'Towards Experience-Focused HCI' at the March 2007 BostonCHI meeting." (BostonCHI)

Posted by PJB on May 18, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

About Face 3: Foreword

"Interaction design is a tool for 'Knowing what the user wants.' Armed with that knowledge, you can create better, more successful, bit-empowered products, and you can sell them for more money." (Alan Cooper)

Posted by PJB on May 18, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Information graphics: Challenges of representation

Maps, diagrams, schemes, pictures and others visuals to communicate a message. (The Culture Archive)

Posted by PJB on May 18, 2007 | Classification: Information graphics | Permalink

A Blogger's Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium

"While blogging is piquing the interest of mainstream media, youth, academic researchers, and entrepreneurial Silicon Valley, only a fraction of Internet users read blogs and many do not even know what the term means. (...)" (Danah Boyd - Reconstruction 6.4)

Posted by PJB on May 16, 2007 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

The Periodic Table of the Elements

"When the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published the first version of his Periodic Table of the Elements in 1869, he couldn't imagine that it would become in due time one of the most outstanding information visualisations and that many fields would use it more than one century later as a visual metaphor." (Juan C. Dürsteler - InfoVis)

Posted by PJB on May 16, 2007 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Speedbird: Clean living under difficult circumstances

"To me the Speedbird symbolizes many things: the lost glamour of travel, the high Modernist moment in design and architecture, and above all, a time when Western culture still believed in a future." (Adam Greenfield - About Speedbird)

Posted by PJB on May 16, 2007 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

PLATO People: A History Book Research Project

"Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of instant messaging, chat rooms, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations. This site offers information regarding a book being researched and written about the PLATO system and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s." (About PLATO People)

Posted by PJB on May 16, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

IndieHIG

"The IndieHIG project is an initiative created out of the necessity to document the new look and feel aspects of the Mac OS X experience, outside of the supervision of Apple itself." - courtesy of slashdotorg

Posted by PJB on May 16, 2007 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision

"When you create an experience vision, you try to picture mentally what the experience of using your design will be like at some point in the future. As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future." (Jared Spool - User Interface 12)

Posted by PJB on May 15, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Command Lines

"Application commands can be presented as buttons or as links, which offer more room for explanation. For primary commands, however, buttons are still best." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on May 14, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

David Weinberger in Conversation with Bradley Horowitz

"Categories are now applied to content when it is extracted from the infospace, whereas historically curators of information (such as librarians) have invested immense energy in organizing information on its way in." (Yahoo! User Interface Blog)

Posted by PJB on May 14, 2007 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Zen and the Art of IA

Book review on 'Designing the Obvious' (Hoekman 2006) - "Zen is the art of practicing meditation in everything you do and existing solely in a mental space. Envisioning surroundings as full of peace creates an image of actions as poetry. If information architecture is poetry, it gives just meaning, placement, and timing to an overall message or theme. The flow of numbers, letters, images and sounds together form a medium for the mind, a zen space of constant understanding." (Clifton Evans - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on May 09, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Everything and the Kitchen Sink

Book review on 'The Persona Lifecycle' (Pruit and Adlin 2006) - "Pruit and Adlin use the lifecycle as a metaphor to frame the different stages personas go through, from birth to retirement. To highlight their process, a fictional case study runs throughout the book tying everything together. Because design doesn’t happen in a vacuum, the authors talk about how to ease the adoption and communication of personas at different levels of your organization. In fact, the book covers the two most important facets of personas: making them and getting them used." (Austin Govella - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on May 09, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

When ROI Isn’t Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design

"Making the case for user-centered design (UCD) is a topic of recurring discussion for UX professionals. Much of the discussion has centered on strictly objective approaches such as cost-benefit or return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. However, recent commentary suggests proving ROI is not always enough. For example, Dray, Karat, Rosenberg, Siegel, and Wixon have raised concerns about significant weaknesses of the ROI argument, including their concern it ties UCD to tactical, not strategic initiatives." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 08, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Different

"There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user experience document," Donald Norman recalls. Rolston elaborates: Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is how people like to do things." (Daniel Turner - Technology Review)

Posted by PJB on May 08, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

(Not) Everything is Miscellaneous

"It's not that I disagree with David about the power and potential of user participation in the creation and organization of knowledge. But, I do believe that the old serves as foundation for and coexists with the new (...)" (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2007 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

UX Pioneers

"The UX Pioneers project aims to reveal the motivations and perspectives of key players in the User Experience industry through in-depth interviews and discussions with the site's publisher (...)" (Tamara Adlin)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow

"David and Cory discuss the advantages and pitfalls of explicit and implicit metadata, tags and the rules governing the use and re-use of content in commerce and culture." (David Weinberger - Epicenter Wired)

Posted by PJB on May 02, 2007 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink