April 2008

Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability

"Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 28, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Interview with Alex Wright

"Alex Wright, New York Times information architect and author of the book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, takes questions from Namahn on what we can learn from the Web's precursors about globally accessible information repositories, taxonomies, hierarchies and the evolving dance between oral and literate cultures." (Joannes Vandermeulen - Namahn Interviews)

Posted by PJB on April 28, 2008 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

What is Design?

"Since the word 'design' means many things to many people, let's define design as seen from a usability consultant's perspective." (Frank Spiller - Demystifying Usability)

Posted by PJB on April 28, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Recycle These Pixels: Sustainability and the User Experience

"Whether we're designing the user experience for a digital product or a physical one, as UX professionals, we are uniquely positioned to influence the behavior of other people, for good or ill. Our employers or clients charge us with responsibility for not only defining a design problem from multiple perspectives, but also finding solutions that are better than the ones that came before." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 23, 2008 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

So You Want to Be a UX Manager—Seriously?

"This is my first column on the management of UX. In my column, I'll articulate what I've learned from my experience as a manager, senior manager, and director and three years in intensive senior leadership development programs. Have you ever known a manager you felt shouldn't manage people? Maybe you've worked for one. Most of us have at one point or another. On the other hand, most of us have also had great managers. What sets great managers apart from bad ones? That's one of the questions I'll explore in this article." (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 23, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About

"I tried to add a comment there with some blogs I subscribe to (some already mentioned, some not) but I suspect the spam filter thought I was nuts to try posting 20 links. So here are a few other blogs/feeds you might like, if you like Flowing Data (...)" (Random Etc.)

Posted by PJB on April 23, 2008 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Information Design = Complexity + Interdisciplinarity + Experiment

"Information design is the transfer of complex data to, for the most part, two-dimensional visual representations that aim at communicating, documenting and preserving knowledge. It deals with making entire sets of facts and their interrelations comprehensible, with the objective of creating transparency and eliminating uncertainty." (Gerlinde Schuller - AIGA)

Posted by PJB on April 22, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

25 years in usability

"Since I started in 1983, the usability field has grown by 5,000%. It's a wonderful job — and still a promising career choice for new people." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 21, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

inspireUX

"(...) a blog that posts quotes relating to user experience (UX). Every quote on inspireUX focuses on the impact that user experience has on people, business, or the world." (Catriona Cornett - About inspireUX)

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

TagPipe: IA Summit 2008 

This TagPipe covers all found and uploaded user-generated content tagged as 'IASummit2008' on Google BlogSearch (blogposts), Flickr (pictures), Technorati (links), Del.icio.us (pages) and SlideShare (presentations). Just download the OPML-file and import the file into your RSS Reader. Enjoy!

Posted by PJB on April 18, 2008 | Classification: Tagpipe | Permalink

TagPipe: CHI 2008 

This TagPipe covers all found and uploaded user-generated content tagged as 'CHI2008' on Google BlogSearch (blogposts), Flickr (pictures), Technorati (links), Del.icio.us (pages) and SlideShare (presentations). Just download the OPML-file and import the file into your RSS Reader. Enjoy!

Posted by PJB on April 18, 2008 | Classification: Tagpipe | Permalink

Swimlanes for the Win!

"Swimlanes are a great tool for helping clients understand users, business needs and technology all at once. They help bridge the differences between multiple stakeholders by showing all the 'moving parts' of an experience in one document." (Gene Smith - nForm)

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

Linkosophy

"Giving this talk at the IA Summit was a blast; I'm so grateful for the positive response, and the patience with these still-forming ideas. I'm looking forward to seeing where the conversation goes from here! NOTE: You need to view this in 'Full Screen' mode, which you can only do from the SlideShare page itself. Otherwise, the narrative text isn't readable." (Andrew Hinton - inkblurt)

Posted by PJB on April 17, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

IA Summit 2008 Tagged Pix at Flickr

A growing number of pictures from the Information Architecture Summit 2008 (April 10-14, 2008 - Miami Florida)

Posted by PJB on April 17, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

IA Summit 2008 Tagged Slides at SlideShare

A growing number of presentations from the Information Architecture Summit 2008 (April 10-14, 2008 - Miami Florida)

Posted by PJB on April 17, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

The Interaction Museum

"(...) an on-line resource aimed at HCI practitioners, teachers and researchers that will collect a wide variety of interaction techniques and systems and make them available to the HCI community." (About The iMuseum)

Posted by PJB on April 16, 2008 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe

"In this companion to last year's EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC again calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011. IDC also explores new dimensions of the digital universe (e.g., the impact of specific industries on the digital universe; your digital shadow) and discusses the implications for individuals, organizations, and society. The tools are in place - from Web 2.0 technologies and terabyte drives to unstructured data search software and the Semantic Web - to tame the digital universe and turn information growth into economic growth." (EMC)

Posted by PJB on April 16, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The Super Bowl and Information Design?

"The truth is, really effective design should leave people wondering what the big deal is. Here’s the irony, clients expect things that cost lots of money and take lots of time to seem like they did. To look complex or shiny. But the really great designs, the ones that break through and solve the real problems, will often be the most underwhelming. If there are lots of fancy bells and whistles and animations, be very concerned. That’s probably novelty. Not good design. Look at the iPod, basic box, right? However, the simplest designs are often the most difficult to design. How many sites get the basic things wrong?" (Stephen P. Anderson - poetpainter)

Posted by PJB on April 16, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Inspiration From The Edge

IA Summit presentation by Stephen Anderson - "I've often believed that the best designers don't get their ideas and inspiration from the place they work. As a designer that works in the social web space, I do look at a large number of new sites that come through the pipeline for inspiration. However, I also am a big advocate of experimenting with things that are seemingly unrelated and trying to connect those experiences to my work on the web." (kev/null)

Posted by PJB on April 16, 2008 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Bill Buxton's Bad Ass CHI 2008 Keynote

"In 1997 you yelled out that you would never come to CHI again because they just didn't get it. What changed your mind to come back? Ultimately I can't figure out a better community to work on these problems. It surprised people that I went to IBM, and that I came back here I guess. I had some time to think. I'm glad I came back. I was younger and wilder then and not so calm and cool and collected. I also stopped blaming you and CHI for not getting what I need. Instead, it's my fault. I can say what can I do to get fulfilled." (Bolt|Peters User Experience)

Posted by PJB on April 15, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Video Interviews with IA Pioneers

"At the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas, IAKM worked to gather video interviews from the top and pioneering professionals in the Information Architecture-related fields. Through the course of the Summit, many interviews were collected to be used in IAKM courses as well as in an effort to create a video history of the discipline. Following are some clips from the interviews. A video repository is currently under development." (Information Architecture and Knowledge Management Kent State University) - courtesy of bloug

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Four Bad Designs

"Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages... which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web

"The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines. This is nonsense, and it is time to embrace a unified view. I subscribe to the vision of the Semantic Web as a substrate for collective intelligence. The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes is large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the 'people power' of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web. In this presentation I will show several ways that this can be, and is, happening." (Tom Gruber)

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

IA Summit 2008 Slides

"There have been some absolutely phenomenal presentations at the IA Summit in Miami so far. If you didn't happen to make it out to the conference or you'd like to revisit the material, I've amassed a list of IA Summit podcasts and PowerPoint slides. Not all presentations have been made available online yet so I'll make a follow-up post in a couple of days to capture any new presentation links." (NLC Internet Marketing Blog)

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Experience Partners: Giving Center Stage to Customer Delight

"Today, the design industry is at the threshold of a new epoch—a point of theoretically limitlessness potential for expansion. We must decide just how, going forward, we will relate to the people who use our designs—as people who are “busy and eager to get on with it” yet “alert and caring” or, much less constructively, as people who are merely “simple-minded and stupid.” Therefore, I want to propose the concept of experience partners as a whole new way of thinking about our customers as partners in holistic product experiences. We need new terminology to describe this concept, because the term users limits us to old ways of thinking about the world we live in and the products we develop. The term experience partners reflects an emerging paradigm shift from a focus on product features to instead conceptualizing holistic product experiences and embodies our best understanding of how to design products that create delight and become integral, harmonious parts of people’s lives." (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon

"The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on April 14, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Co-creation and the new landscapes of design 

"Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the roles of the designer, the researcher and the person formerly known as the 'user'. The implications of this shift for the education of designers and researchers are enormous. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the landscape of design practice as well, creating new domains of collective creativity. It is hoped that this evolution will support a transformation toward more sustainable ways of living in the future." (Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers)

Posted by PJB on April 11, 2008 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?

"Much has been said about how the Web 2.0 era has fundamentally altered the way consumers interact online. But to what degree is today’s digital consumer really changing her online behavior? Are the hallmarks of Web 2.0 site design (tag clouds, wikis, social media, etc.) on the way to becoming mainstream hits or just techno-hype? And what are the implications for us, as experience designers, as we strive to create more useful and usable digital products?" (Garrick Schmitt - AA | Razorfish Digital Design Blog)

Posted by PJB on April 11, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Sharing Your Experience about User eXperience 

"Why is the lack of a shared definition? There are several reasons: First, UX is associated with a broad range of fuzzy and dynamic concepts, including emotional, affective, experiential, hedonic, and aesthetic variables. Typical examples of so-called elemental attributes of UX like fun, pleasure, pride, joy, surprise, and intimacy are but a subset of a growing list of human values. Inclusion and exclusion of particular values or attributes seem arbitrary, depending on the author’s background and interest. Second, the unit of analysis for UX is too malleable, ranging from a single aspect of an individual end-user’s interaction with a standalone application to all aspects of multiple end-users’ interactions with the company and the merging of the services of multiple disciplines. Third, the landscape of UX research is fragmented and complicated by diverse theoretical models with different foci such as emotion, affect, experience, value, pleasure, beauty, etc." (MAUSE COST Action 294)

Posted by PJB on April 11, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Network in the Garden 

CHI 2008 Awarded Best Paper - "History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet, we know little about how rural communities use modern technologies, so we lack knowledge on how to design for them. To address this gap, our empirical paper investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. Using a dataset collected from a broadly popular social network site, we analyze users’ profiles, 340,000 online friendships and 200,000 interpersonal messages. Using social capital theory, we predict differences between rural and urban users and find strong evidence supporting our hypotheses. Namely, rural people articulate far fewer friends online, and those friends live much closer to home. Our results also indicate that the groups have substantially different gender distributions and use privacy features differently. We conclude by discussing design implications drawn from our findings; most importantly, designers should reconsider the binary friend-or-not model to allow for incremental trust-building." (Eric Gilbert et al.)

Posted by PJB on April 09, 2008 | Classification: Collab Web | Permalink

Meet Your Peers

"Meeting new people and catching up with old friends is one of my favorite things about attending the IA Summits. The folks in this community are some of the smartest and most welcoming people I know! Alas, while concepts and practices can be clearly conveyed in publications such as Boxes and Arrows, it is very difficult to describe the people behind these ideas in a way that does them justice. Perhaps if they introduced themselves to you." (Jorge Arango - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on April 09, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

MoMoment MoMo#5 - Dan Armstrong

"Dan Armstrong, CTO of Rabo Mobiel, was the keynote speaker for Mobile Monday #5. During the keynote (duration 35.30) Dan tells more about what Rabo Mobiel is doing at this moment, looks forward to the projects planned for this year, and challenges the public with some of his ideas on what the environment looks like in 2012." (Mobile Monday Amsterdam)

Posted by PJB on April 09, 2008 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

The History of Information Architecture

"Leading-edge organizations are constantly looking for ways to improve their employees' abilities to innovate and create, and information architecture plays a critical role. Listen as Gartner analyst Whit Andrews speaks with Alex Wright - information architect for the New York Times - about his recent book, Glut." (Whit Andrews - Gartner Voice)

Posted by PJB on April 07, 2008 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

The Web Beyond the Desktop

"In the desktop space we've had decades of evolving user interface best practices that work reasonably well across platforms and browsers. In the device space, many of those bets are off due to their drastically different nature." (David Shea - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted by PJB on April 07, 2008 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The User Experience of Software-as-a-Service Applications

"Over the last several years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of software applications offered over the internet. The ability to release user interface changes on a potentially daily basis has forced user experience professionals to rethink their traditional linear methodologies. With a new set of internet-based usability techniques as well as the remarkable ability to receive real-time, continuous feedback from end users, designers today have the potential to create the most usable and competitive software user interfaces to date." (Katrina Rhoads Lindholm - ISD Symposium Spring 2007)

Posted by PJB on April 03, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Document Engineering and Information Architecture

Complete syllabus with lecture notes and audio recordings - "This course introduces the discipline of Document Engineering: specifying, designing, and deploying electronic documents and information repositories that enable document-centric or information-intensive applications. These applications include web services, information supply chains, single-source publishing, composite applications/virtual enterprises/portals, and so on. Course topics include developing requirements, analyzing existing documents and information sources, conceptual modeling, identifying reusable semantic components, modeling business processes and user interactions, applying patterns to make models more robust, representing models using XML schemas, and using XML models to implement and drive applications. The syllabus contains over 20 short case study examples from different industries, with special emphasis on business-to-business, healthcare and medical informatics, and e-government." (Robert J. Glushko)

Posted by PJB on April 03, 2008 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Being Human 2020 

"In March 2007, Microsoft Research organised the ‘HCI 2020’ meeting at the El Bulli Hacienda Hotel near Seville, Spain. The event’s title expressed its key question: what will Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) be like in the year 2020? That question is important because HCI, significant as it was in the late 20th century, has a pivotal part to play in the 21st, when computers will become so pervasive that how humans interact with them will be a crucial issue for society. HCI 2020 produced many ideas, both thrilling and troubling. This report is not a conventional publication of an academic conference but seeks to convey the passion of those ideas, both for the general reader and the HCI practitioner. For the general reader, this is important because knowledge of what the future might be may empower, while ignorance harm. For the HCI practitioner, its purpose is to map out the terrain and suggest new approaches while keeping an eye on the main prize: the embodiment of human values at the heart of computing." (Microsoft Research) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on April 02, 2008 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?

Audio and slides - "An audio recording synchronized to the presentation of slides is now available for my CHI 2007 conference session entitled, 'Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?' For a sense of how the members of the panel repositioned themselves on stage during the session (which you'll hear but, of course, not see), read 'So, whose advice really works?'" (Richard Anderson - riander blog)

Posted by PJB on April 01, 2008 | Classification: User experience | Permalink