March 2008

Finding is the new advertising

"Don't they get it? Don't they understand that a great and growing number of us hate traditional advertising? That we find it at best annoying and irrelevant, and at worst insulting and manipulative? By 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990 (...)" (Gerry McGovern)

Posted by PJB on March 31, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Middle-Aged Users' Declining Web Performance

"Between the ages of 25 and 60, people's ability to use websites declines by 0.8% per year — mostly because they spend more time per page, but also because of navigation difficulties." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 30, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience

Louis Rosenfeld's workshop slides on site search analytics - "During the workshop, I'll also be demoing and leading three hands-on exercises. So I hope you UXers out there will take me at my word; there's something to site search analytics." (Louis Rosenfeld - Bloug)

Posted by PJB on March 28, 2008 | Classification: Search | Permalink

What Adaptive Path Thinks When It Thinks About Eyetracking

"(...) you rarely hear about eyetracking leading to crucial insights. Eyetracking is helpful when you need to know something extremely tactical at a very precise level of detail. But we should think very hard about the payoff. There's a great deal of overhead and it's difficult to make this a flexible, nimble process." (Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on March 27, 2008 | Classification: Design research | Permalink

Extreme User Research

"What is the biggest problem I face almost every time a client hires me to do something about a web project going awry? They don’t know a thing about their users. They don’t have a clue, whatsoever. Unbelievable but true!" (Daniel Lafreniere - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 27, 2008 | Classification: Design research | Permalink

Form Follows Function and Achieving Thereof

"Forms can be dreadfully tricky to style and structure properly. Several articles that are out there focus on best practises for building forms using HTML en CSS. This article focusses in a non technical fashion on the use of meaningful nomenclature and how form semantics relate to elements that current markup standards have to offer. It may help you recognise structural patterns and to compose forms properly." (Cornelis Govert Adriaan Kolbach - cornae.org)

Posted by PJB on March 26, 2008 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

"Although Findability had a closely knit family, he felt like an orphan, because his siblings always seemed to get the lion's share of time and attention from the folks in the web design agency." (Aarron Walter - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on March 25, 2008 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Placing Value on User Assistance

"User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don't get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on March 25, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Role of Design in Business

Kate Rutter interviews Nathan Shedroff - "(...) I think Marketing was the big thing long before IT departments rose to the prominence they have. Most IT departments have a grip on senior management that is not healthy, simply because most senior managers don’t understand enough of the details of IT to disagree, haggle, and know when they’re being snowed. However, EVERYONE is a designer, so everyone thinks that they know enough to override design decisions, budgets, and processes. Organizations, however, are discovering that they aren’t managing the design development process well enough and are listening more and judging a little less." (Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2008 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Webstock Recordings

"Here are all the recordings from Webstock 08 and Webstock 06. These recordings will be permanently archived at the following links. Where there is no recording for a particular session, that was the decision of the speaker and we fully respect that. (...) We'd love to hear from you if you find these recordings useful. Please drop us a line and let us know, especially if you weren't at Webstock and/or are from locations other than New Zealand. Enjoy!" (Webstock)

Posted by PJB on March 21, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

We Tried To Warn You: The Organizational Architecture of Failure

"There are many kinds of failure in large, complex organizations – breakdowns occur at every level of interaction, from interpersonal communication to enterprise finance. Some of these failures are everyday and even helpful, allowing us to safely and iteratively learn and improve communications and practices. Other failures – what I call large-scale – result from accumulated bad decisions, organizational defensiveness, and embedded organizational values that prevent people from confronting these issues in real time as they occur." (Peter Jones - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Cues, The Golden Retriever

How our natural responses to stimuli can inform the design process - "I'd like to frame a discussion of cues by touching on a mixture of topics including memory, a few theories from cognitive psychology, and multimedia research. It may get a little dry, but stick with me. The integration of these three areas not only affects how information is encoded and retrieved, it influences how and when cues might best be used." (Jamie Owen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

E15

"E15 is a research project. Imagine an internet where you (not the site designer) were able to decide how to view and experience web content. Imagine an internet where web servers didn't just give you a static chunk of html, css, and javascript, but exactly the content you asked for. Imagine navigating an internet where the content maintained a degree of spatial relevance. E15 is a platform that enables end users to experience this internet, an internet beyond the browser." (MIT Media Lab)

Posted by PJB on March 19, 2008 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Gregorian Date Input Diversity

"One of the most common interaction patterns one can find on forms is the date input group. They appear in all shapes and sizes in various applications and sign up forms on websites. Certain forms of appearance seem to be more popular in certain geographical areas than other. But other than that it is hard to find any pattern or rationale why one website has chosen for model X while the other has chosen model Y. The suspicion would rise that the date input method is often dictated by the way the backend would 'like' it. This is a situation which neither we, as interaction designers and consultants, nor the end user should settle for." (Cornelis Govert Adriaan Kolbach - cornae.org)

Posted by PJB on March 19, 2008 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Tap is the New Click: Designing Gestural Interfaces

"Even though the technology has been around for decades, only now are we starting to see mass production and adoption of touchscreen and gestural devices for the public. Jeff Han's influential 2006 TED demonstration of his multitouch system, followed by the launches of Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone, and Microsoft Surface, have announced a new era of interaction design, one where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking." (Dan Saffer - O'Reilly ETech 2008)

Posted by PJB on March 18, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Closing the Communication Loop

"When our online service channels fail to meet the needs of our customers, if we’re lucky, customers will resort to an alternative channel to get the assistance they need. In doing so, our customers offer us the potential of gaining rich insights into their needs and mental models. Feedback forms, complaints, call center logs—all of these tell us valuable information about customers' failed interactions. It's in the nature of user experience work that we really begin to understand the success of our designs only after a project goes live. We minimize the risk of a complete failure by using iterative design methods and carrying out usability testing at various stages of the implementation. Whether we follow user-centered design or activity-centered design or even agile development methods, there is a certain element of uncertainty about the quality of the finished result until it hits the production servers." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Bridging the Designer–User Gap

"Depending on how representative designers are of the target audience, a project might need more or less user testing. Still, usability concerns never go away completely." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 17, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Creating Killer Services

"(...) user experience design pales in comparison to experience design. Most digital encounters aren't designed to be memorable events. Users are impatient and carry a healthy sense of entitlement. Give me what I want and then get the hell out of my way." (Jeff Howard - Design for Service)

Posted by PJB on March 07, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Externalities of Search 2.0

"Web search engines have emerged as ubiquitous and vital tools for the successful navigation of the growing online informational sphere. As Google puts it, the goal is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and to create the “perfect search engine” that provides only intuitive, personalized, and relevant results. Meanwhile, the so–called Web 2.0 phenomenon has blossomed based, largely, on the faith in the power of the networked masses to capture, process, and mashup one’s personal information flows in order to make them more useful, social, and meaningful. The (inevitable) combining of Google’s suite of information–seeking products with Web 2.0 infrastructures – what I call Search 2.0 – intends to capture the best of both technical systems for the touted benefit of users. By capturing the information flowing across Web 2.0, search engines can better predict users’ needs and wants, and deliver more relevant and meaningful results. While intended to enhance mobility in the online sphere, this paper argues that the drive for Search 2.0 necessarily requires the widespread monitoring and aggregation of a users’ online personal and intellectual activities, bringing with it particular externalities, such as threats to informational privacy while online." (Michael Zimmer - First Monday 13.3) - courtesy of petermorville

Posted by PJB on March 05, 2008 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience

"This article is the fifth in a series sharing a design framework for dashboards and portals. In this article, the author describes ways to enhance the long-term value and user experience quality of portals created with the building blocks by encouraging portability and natural patterns of dialog and interaction around aggregated content." (Joe Lamantia - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 05, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Measuring satisfaction: Beyond the usability questionnaire

"Most usability tests culminate with a short questionnaire that asks the participant to rate, usually on a 5- or 7-point scale, various characteristics of the system. Experience shows that participants are reluctant to be critical of a system, no matter how difficult they found the tasks. This article describes a guided interview technique that overcomes this problem based on a word list of over 100 adjectives. We also include a spreadsheet to generate and randomise the word list." (David Travis - Userfocus)

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Company Name First in Microcontent? Sometimes!

"Typically, you should deemphasize your company's name in links, but a new guideline recommends frontloading the name for search engine links under certain conditions." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink