August 2007

Ambient Findability and The Future of Search

"At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. Search is the new interface of culture and commerce. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, where we go, and what we buy. In this cyberspace safari, Peter Morville explores the future present in mobile devices, search algorithms, ontologies, folksonomies, findable objects, digital librarianship, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web. Reflect with Peter he challenges us to think differently about the power of search - and findability - to redefine our sources of authority and inspiration in an increasingly digitized and networked information environment." (Peter Morville - Google Video) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on August 31, 2007 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Looking Back on Data-Driven Design Research Personas

"The primary goal of the tutorial was to show people how to work data into developing personas and how they can be used for more than just design.” (Todd Zaki Warfel)

Posted by PJB on August 31, 2007 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Getting A Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Applications (Part 1)

"Although I have focused solely on financial applications, this does not mean that you can't use these strategies to improve the usability of the forms outside of the banking domain. As usability practitioners, we need to first and foremost understand the user’s intentions and expectations, in order to provide an online experience that accommodates them.'” (Afshan Kirmani - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on August 30, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Success Stories

"Designing Interactions gives access to a very detailed and adept summarized history of commercial interaction design. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to know what happened to get us to this point, especially with the computer interfaces. But, again, it does beg the question to be answered, 'Why did these few people have such an effect, something that more designers producing more varying designs could have had?'” (Clifton Evans - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on August 30, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

User Experience: Towards a Unified View 

Proceedings of the 2nd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop (October 2006, Oslo Norway) - "The concept of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI. Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining ground." (COST Action 294)

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

A Call to Arms for Interaction Designers

"Now that the Wii and iPhone have introduced more physical interactions to the public at large, it's time to step up and start making an effort to define and document a common set of movements and motions that could be used for initiating actions across a variety of platforms." (Dan Saffer - Adaptive Path)

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

The Art of the Conceptual Prototype

"Conceptual prototypes are often very interesting projects because the ideas are leading edge. But they also present some unique challenges compared to more traditional projects where we are designing for actual implementation." (Heidi Adkisson - Blink Interactive)

Posted by PJB on August 29, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

CSS at Ten: The Next Big Thing

"Ten years ago, Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos gave us typographic control over web pages via CSS. But Verdana and Georgia take us only so far. Now Håkon shows us how to take web design out of the typographic ghetto, by harnessing the power of real TrueType fonts." (Håkon Wium Lie - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on August 28, 2007 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

XcD

"The scope of human-computer interaction design has widened to include concerns with fun, emotion, beauty, aesthetics and values. There is an increasing emphasis on holistic approaches to user experience and what is now called experience design. A number of frameworks and theoretical approaches to experience design have been developed and a range of methods and techniques have also been proposed. This website is part of the work carried out on the EPSRC grant Theory and Method for Experience Centred Design. This site links to our own work and that of others on theory and method for experience centred design or XcD as we seem to have started calling it." (Mark A. Blythe)

Posted by PJB on August 27, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Design for the Dream Economy

"After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy.The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It's not only about meeting people’'s practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience." - (Pat Jordan - uiGarden.net)

Posted by PJB on August 24, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

All The Knowledge of the World

"A documentary about Paul Otlet, often considered the father of information management, narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, his biographer. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge. In English and French. Produced for Dutch television in 1998." - See also Françoise Levie's documentary film 'The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World' (€ 28 plus shipping and handling) - (Internet Archive)

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

Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age

"Alex Wright showed an astonishing video of how Paul Otlet's distributed telephone-plus-screen sysem worked." (Stewart Brand - Long Now Foundation)

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

Foundations of Interaction Design

"It's also important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It's not Information Architecture, Industrial Design or even User Experience Design. It also isn't user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral - about why and when rather than about what and how." (David Malouf - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on August 23, 2007 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known And Loved

"Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can't take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my would-be answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones." (Bill Buxton)

Posted by PJB on August 23, 2007 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

What is Enterprise 2.0?

"This wonderful slide deck explains what enterprise 2.0 is. It's useful for the executive who's trying to understand these new trends. " (The Workplace Blog)

Posted by PJB on August 22, 2007 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

Conference Review UPA 2007: Part I/II

"This year's theme focused on Patterns and how they serve as 'blueprints for usability'. Conference co-chair, Carol Smith articulated the pertinence of this theme. “As usability professionals, our ability to observe users and to discover their patterns of interaction is integral to our work. By defining these patterns, we can then leverage that knowledge to create usable interfaces that are familiar and useful to our users." - (Joi L. Roberts - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on August 21, 2007 | Classification: Events | Permalink

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

"As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

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

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings

"Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on August 21, 2007 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

2Collab beta

"2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks." (Elsevier)

Posted by PJB on August 17, 2007 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

The Politics of Design by Paul Rand

"It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling." (Dexo Design) - courtesy of usernomics

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

The myth of content and presentation separation

"One of the hallmark attributes of web standards-based design is the concept that proper use of semantic (X)HTML and CSS completely abstracts the presentation of a site from its content. One key real-world benefit of this separation is that come redesign time, one only needs to change or replace the CSS stylesheet, and needn't lay so much as a finger upon the hallowed grounds we call markup. I'm here to say that this mantra isn't much more than a fairy tale." (Jeff Croft)

Posted by PJB on August 16, 2007 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

User Experience and the Analysts

"As part of our ongoing research of the UX environment, we recently took a closer look at the six major analyst firms (Aberdeen, AMR, Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and Yankee). We were hoping to determine if the analysts were paying much attention to user experience, so we searched a variety of UX-related terms (21, to be precise) on their respective web sites. We then looked at which firms paid attention to which UX topics, how these firms stacked up against each other, and how they compared to the web's overall UX consciousness." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on August 16, 2007 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

User Value: Competing Theories and Models

"In design research, the issues of what exactly constitutes user value and how design can contribute to its creation are not commonly discussed. This paper provides a critical overview of the theories of value used in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, business, and economics. In doing so, it reviews a range of theoretical and empirical studies, with particular emphasis on their position on product, user, and designer in the process of value creation. The paper first looks at the similarities and differences among definitions of value as exchange, sign, and experience. It then reviews types and properties of user value such as its multidimensionality, its contextuality, its interactivity, and the stages of user experience dependency identified by empirical studies. Methodological approaches to user value research and their possible applications in design are also discussed. Finally, directions for future research on user value are discussed giving particular emphasis to the need of tools and methods to support design practice." (Suzan Boztepe - International Journal of Design 1.2)

Posted by PJB on August 15, 2007 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Home Page Design

"It is time to review a company home page design. There are a number of stakeholders involved in home page design, and each of them wants a piece of the home page real estate. Are there questions you can ask before approaching home page design that can move it beyond the influence of specific stakeholders in the company toward a common vision? Are there tips to consider when designing a home page? This is article will help you better understand how to approach home page design." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on August 15, 2007 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Using research to end visual design debates

"Have you ever presented visual design choices to a product team only to have the proceedings disintegrate into an argument about the color orange? Visual designer Nick Myers shows how conducting user research with an eye towards visual design can get your audience to objectively evaluate your decisions and keep their subjective opinions out of the discussion." (Nick Myers - Cooper Journal of Design)

Posted by PJB on August 15, 2007 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink