November 2008

Computers: Changing from power to experience

"(...) people are starting to make decisions based on other criteria than pure performance and that the overall user experience is becoming a bigger differentiator. - User experience is the primary battlefield and everything else is a distant second." (TG Daily) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted by PJB on November 28, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Service Design takes centre stage

"We need to spend less time talking to ourselves and each other. There is still too many fruitless conversations spent defining disciplines and labeling people; it doesn't matter how we define it." (Redjotter) - Sounds familiar.

Posted by PJB on November 28, 2008 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Deep Search: The videos

"Deep Search wants to look at the social and political dimensions of how we navigate the deep seas of knowledge. We want to examine the pursuit of categorizing that data and what it means to relate to the world through digital search technologies. Futuristic applications and computational complexity aside, cognitive technologies deliberately designed to yield results in a limited frame of reference, imbed political philosophy in seemingly neutral code. In the daily reality of information overflow it is crucial to acknowledge both arbitrariness and willful designation, and that hierarchies are not miraculously produced by nature itself. Innocent utilities that blend into the routine of everyday work and leisure subtly bend our perception, and weave threads into the fabric of cognitive reality." (World-Information Institute)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2008 | Classification: Search | Comments (0) | Permalink

Book Review: The User is Always Right

"(...) an entertaining and clearly written book that is also filled with great insight into the process, both qualitative, and quantitative, of creating user personas based on real research and how that can help interaction designers, product designers, and other user experience professionals make more usable and useful software." (Will Evans - The Designer's Review of Books)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2008 | Classification: Personas | Comments (0) | Permalink

Europeana User Inexperience

"(...) the Europeans should have known that if they put up a website about The Europeans, that lots of people would want to go look at it. That's just Lisa's common sense website visitor analysis." (Lisa Welchman)

Posted by PJB on November 27, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

EuroIA Network Initiative

"The EuroIA Network Initiative aims to facilitate the development of a stronger network between European information architects. An large effort is already being made through international orginasitations such as the Information Architecture Institute, it's European chapter and the local groups. The initiative wish to contribute to this effort, pushing the objectives even further, among other things, by the formation of a legal entity which can contain and support a range of important activities to strengthen our industry and it's position in Europe." (Ning network)

Posted by PJB on November 24, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Wireframeworks Manifesto

"Over the last ten years, the Internet has gone from being the product of technology to the media channel of choice for much of the general public. Designers and developers have forged together innovative, entertaining and essential landmarks that can be accessed by computer, mobile and TV. As the importance of access, effectiveness and ergonomics of the web has become self evident, the role of the user experience professional has become the missing link between technology and people. We aim to make the web more usable, accessible, findable and practical." (Hammad Khan - Wireframeworks)

Posted by PJB on November 24, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture - Wireframes | Permalink

IDFA's DocLab

"Doclab is a new programme section at IDFA, investigating the relationship between new media and documentary. The main theme this year is data visualisation." (Int.'l Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)

Posted by PJB on November 24, 2008 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Service Design: Perspectives on turning-points in design 

"The aim of this article is to outline overall understanding of the changes taking place in the field of design. In addition, it tries to determine how service design is linked to developing tourism and the tourist industry." (Jari Koskinen - servicedesign.tv)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2008 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Conceptology

"The Web is evolving. From an emerging but static, passive library of information to a sharing, talking, recommending, networking, creating, customized, personalized community with a long tail to a more relevant, measurable, helpful, fun, trustworthy, mobile and social place. The industry needs people that are multi-skilled and versed in strategy, creative and technology." (Karri Ojanen)

Posted by PJB on November 21, 2008 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

This is How the Web Gets Regulated

"If a deaf person has a legal right to watch TV or movies with captions, that person has a legal right to watch online video with captions. The voluntary approach has done practically nothing to make that possible. Laws or human-rights regulations are necessary and inevitable. You should get behind them." (Joe Clark - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on November 20, 2008 | Classification: Accessibility | Permalink

Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work

"(...) a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products." (Jacob Burghardt - Flashbulb Interaction)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Web 3.0, User Experience and Intelligent User Interfaces

"If Web 2.0 was all about fostering social interconnectivity, then the loosely termed Web 3.0, appears to be about the intelligent web. It’s about, amongst other things, contextually aware user interfaces (UI's), hyperconnectivity, the semantic web and intelligent agents. These are all concepts which have existed for a very long time." (Chris Khalil's Musings)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

A Universal Declaration of Users' Rights

"We're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. I'm a big supporter of this, and of Amnesty International, which works to protect these rights. Which got me to thinking: why isn’t there a list of users' rights anywhere? What is the baseline that all users of every product everywhere should expect? So using the UDHR as a starting point, I drew one up." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio)

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

Future Practice Interview: Indi Young

"Instead of thinking in terms of the organization and all the services and support this organization offers people, think in terms of real life. Look past the clinical kind of data and get to the warm, fuzzy, human heart of how people are making decisions and justifying actions and having emotional reactions to things that get in their way." (Victor Lombardi - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on November 18, 2008 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

PDF Manuals: The Wrong Paradigm for an Online Experience

"I'm not down on every use of PDF files online. Campus maps, article reprints, and my aunt's Christmas letters all work quite well as PDF files. What I want to challenge in this column is the use of PDF files for distributing user assistance online, in the form of large books." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

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

Agile Development Projects and Usability

"Agile methods aim to overcome usability barriers in traditional development, but pose new threats to user experience quality. By modifying Agile approaches, however, many companies have realized the benefits without the pain." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

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

User Research Friday

"One thing I was really listening for was how people actually use research to do design. In my practice as an interaction designer, I find user research to be extremely important. I'm a strong advocate of ethnographically-inspired fieldwork (...) because it helps me understand how people really work and think." (Lane Halley - Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on November 17, 2008 | Classification: Design research | Permalink

People Are From Earth, Machines Are From Outer Space

"Norman's law: The number of hours per day spent maintaining our equipment doubles every 18 months." (Donald A. Norman) - courtesy of thehotstrudel

Posted by PJB on November 17, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Today is World Usability Day

Welcome message by Bill Gates - "It's about making our world work better. It's about 'Making Life Easy' and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use. A cell phone should be as easy to access as a doorknob. In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first. World Usability Day was founded in 2005 as an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that services and products important to human life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of November, over 225 events are organized in over 40 countries around the world to raise awareness for the general public, and train professionals in the tools and issues central to good usability research, development and practice."

Posted by PJB on November 13, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

The Design Manifesto

"Here is the 'manifesto' of our Global Agenda Council/Design group that came out of an amazing day of discussion in Dubai about the financial/economic crisis and what design thinking can do to help reshape the big issues of the day. It is an excellent summary of the state of art of design and innovation." (Bruce Nussbaum) - courtesy of marcelzwiers

Posted by PJB on November 13, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Grounded versus Speculative Reasoning in HCI

"If HCI wants competence in the cultural dimensions of interaction design, it must first have literacy in the intellectual disciplines that specialize in them." (Jeffrey Bardzell - Interaction Culture)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design

By Klaus Krippendorff (2006) - "It is difficult to summarize this book or give it proper treatment. But, it should be known that this will probably become one of the founding writing's in the field of interaction design. A must-read for practitioners." (Christian Beck)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2008 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

DD4D: Data Designed for Decisions

"Data tells the stories of our lives and societies, but it needs intermediaries to find it, to visualise it, to communicate it, to help understand it and act on it. In a joint conference the International Institute for Information Design and the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development take up the subject from their respective positions, exploring how people interact with (statistical) data. How can data help people understand, and how does understanding help people to take action?" (International Institute for Information Design)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2008 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

Newspaper Website Design: Trends And Examples

"News websites can be intriguing to examine from a design perspective. Regardless of what type of news they cover, they all face the challenge of displaying a huge amount of content on the home page, which creates plenty of layout, usability and navigational challenges for the designer. The lessons that can be learned from examining how news websites address these challenges can be valuable for designers who work with other types of websites, including ones with blog theme designs." (Steven Snell - Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on November 12, 2008 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Bruce Sterling preaching in the Red Hat

"In this nearly 27 minute video Bruce Sterling, a leading futurist, speaker, columnist and science fiction writer, shares his vision on where mobile is heading. Preaching his story from a somewhat unconventional place, the pulpit instead of the stage, he managed to silence the audience. Check the video to see what he had to say to the Mobile sinners." (Mobile Monday Amsterdam)

Posted by PJB on November 10, 2008 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

Future Practice Interview: Luke Wroblewski

"In my view, Web form design should be a part of any Web designer or developer's toolkit. Because of the impact good form design can have, I think it behooves anyone making Web applications to know the ins and outs of Web form design." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on November 10, 2008 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

London Underground Tube Map Video Documentary

"A 25-minute documentary on the visual design of the London tube map, which is also coined as "The pinnacle of London Transport's modernist design", invented by an unemployed engineering draftsman, Harry Beck." (information aesthetics)

Posted by PJB on November 07, 2008 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

IA News Network

"This News Network is designed to help people track and share news about IA." (Jan Hot Strudel Jursa)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

How It Really Happened

Interview with Robert Cailliau (1997) - "(...) essentially America has completely wiped out all computing industry in Europe." (IEEE Computer Society)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2008 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Does User Experience Need a Department?

"(...) user experience is not best thought of as an activity or function, but as a mindset. " (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

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

Demand a better ballot

"(...) as I review my sample ballot in preparation for my visit to the voting booth, I am discouraged to find that it includes many of the design flaws that the AIGA's Design for Democracy project has been working to expose and eliminate over the past eight years." (Suzy Thompson - Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

First Fictions and the Parable of the Palace

"Welcome to the inaugural installment of 'Everyware: Designing the Ubiquitous Experience", a column exploring user experience and design in the era of ubiquitous computing. Through this column, interested readers can investigate the expanding wavefront of the ubiquitous experience as it impacts design, covering topics ranging from ubiquitous computing to near-field communication, pervasive computing, The Internet of Things, spimes, ubicomp, locative media, and ambient informatics." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

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

Common Visual Design Misconceptions

"Recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on common misconceptions about the role of visual design that are still prominent in the beliefs of executives, product leaders, engineering managers, and marketing professionals. Is there anything team members can do to illustrate certain beliefs are wrong? What could they do to demonstrate the truth about visual design to coworkers and stakeholders?" (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on November 05, 2008 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Aspects of Design Quality

"Usability scores for 51 websites shows some correlation between navigation, content, and feature quality, but no connections to other usability areas." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

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