February 2009

Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy

"The usability profession is experiencing the current economic downturn just like everyone else. This article offers ten tips for usability professionals trying to weather this economic storm." - (Tom Tullis - Journal of Usability Studies 4.2) courtesy of uxtweets

Posted by PJB on February 27, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Exploring a Deep Web That Google Can't Grasp

"Now a new breed of technologies is taking shape that will extend the reach of search engines into the Web’s hidden corners. When that happens, it will do more than just improve the quality of search results — it may ultimately reshape the way many companies do business online." - (Alex Wright - NYTimes) registration required

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2009 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Establishing a Service Design Methodology

"Okay, there it is; there is no design process!" - (David Nichols - itSM Solutions)

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Reviewing User Interfaces

"Has your boss or a client ever asked you to review a user interface for a Web or desktop application? Perhaps the request went something like this: Can you just look over these new screens for us? Oh, and can you check the error messages, too? It won’t take long! And, by the way, we ship next month." - (Rhonda Bracey - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with Disabilities

"When people talk about both usability and accessibility, it is often to point out how they differ. Accessibility often gets pigeon-holed as simply making sure there are no barriers to access for screen readers or other assistive technology, without regard to usability, while usability usually targets everyone who uses a site or product, without considering people who have disabilities. In fact, the concept of usability often seems to exclude people with disabilities, as though just access is all they are entitled to. What about creating a good user experience for people with disabilities—going beyond making a Web site merely accessible to make it truly usable for them?" - (Whitney Quesenbery - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2009 | Classification: Accessibility - Usability | Permalink

Patterns in UX Research

"One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior." - (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2009 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

Improving website design to grow sales

"Design and usability matters a lot when creating a company website and getting it right could be the difference between business success and business failure." - (Chris Barling - BusinessZone) courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Beyond prototype fidelity: environmental and social fidelity

"(...) environmental fidelity, social fidelity, and prototype fidelity need to be employed and manipulated throughout the design process to bring to our projects the generative ideas, validation, ability to see, play and iterate something that previously was only imagined, and the concrete conversation starters that let us talk and think with our teams and stakeholders." - (Paula Wellings - Adaptive Path blog)

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

"Web application design teams that have a shared understanding of a project's context and objectives produce better results. Joseph Selbie explains, and gives us tips on how to promote shared, holistic understanding in our own teams." - (Joseph Selbie - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Visual Interface Design: The Photography Example

"When developing user interfaces, designers increasingly use custom graphical elements. As the web browser becomes basic technology for software interfaces, more and more elements derived from graphic and web design replace the traditional desktop approaches to the concrete design of human-computer interfaces." - (Milan Guenther - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2009 | Classification: Visual design | Permalink

Six ways to make Web 2.0 work

"Technologies known collectively as Web 2.0 have spread widely among consumers over the past five years. Social-networking Web sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, now attract more than 100 million visitors a month. As the popularity of Web 2.0 has grown, companies have noted the intense consumer engagement and creativity surrounding these technologies. Many organizations, keen to harness Web 2.0 internally, are experimenting with the tools or deploying them on a trial basis." - (Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger P. Roberts - The McKinsey Quaterly) - courtesy of shuggie

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2009 | Classification: Social Web | Permalink

User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research

"(...) a much more significant change was made at Yahoo! more recently: a merger of the user experience research group and the market research group, yielding an organization named, Customer Insights." - (Richard Anderson - Riander)

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2009 | Classification: Design research | Permalink

Tim Berners-Lee speaks on Linked Data

"This slide set was presented at the TED 2009 conference, 'The Great Unveiling' in Long Beach, CA. USA, 4, Feb 2009." - (W3C)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2009 | Classification: Metadata | Permalink

In Defense of Readers

"Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking. We measure how frequently they click but not how long they stay on the page. We concern ourselves with their travel and participation - how they move from page to page, who they talk to when they get there—but forget the needs of those whose purpose is to be still. Readers flourish when they have space - some distance from the hubbub of the crowds - and as web designers, there is yet much we can do to help them carve out that space." - (Mandy Brown - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2009 | Classification: Typography - Writing | Permalink

Bad service disguised as good service

"In a world where products are becoming more and more alike, service is often the only differentiating factor. So don't let someone con you into thinking that you are receiving good service when the opposite is actually the case – well-intentioned or not. If we don't demand better service, we will never receive it." - (Eric Reiss - FatDUX blog)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

It's Not Who Your Customers Are, It's How They Behave

"No department has a complete view of the customer, however, and so in place of true understanding are models and frameworks that attempt to describe the customer. Many companies don't go beyond demographics and market segmentation." - (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

IA Summit 2009 Full Schedule

"The Information Architecture Summit is the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals. It’s grown from a special interest group’s efforts to define an emerging field, to a rich and expanding community of practice shaping and informing multiple disciplines." - (IA Summit '09)

Posted by PJB on February 17, 2009 | Classification: Events - Information architecture | Permalink

Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998

"Mobile phone users struggle mightily to use websites, even on high-end devices. To solve the problems, websites should provide special mobile versions." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on February 17, 2009 | Classification: Mobile design - Usability | Permalink

Wordlings in a Web 2.0 World

"Public language has become impoverished by ‘managerialism’ which frequently reduces language to strings of ‘weasel’ words, a phenomenon blamed on the information society. This process is not as ubiquitous or as inevitable as often represented, however. Drawing on Burke’s notion of human beings as 'wordlings', I argue for the centrality of well–crafted words, especially on the Internet, and offer examples of language crafted with care and passion, leading to distilled and vivid expression. I use the term 'word bytes' for such language, as it can cut through the multiple items of information from many other media with which it is surrounded, and demand to be noticed and remembered. I conclude we do not have to accept the impoverished form of 'managerial' English, often produced by elites and used to justify the 'financialization' of the late capitalist world. We can begin to counter it by our own practices of using words with care and passion, and by disseminating our words. We can also stop and question 'weasel' language wherever we encounter it." - (Carolyne Lee - First Monday 14.2)

Posted by PJB on February 16, 2009 | Classification: Writing | Permalink

How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects

"Creating personas that are a reflection of real people helps us as web designers and developers to empathize with our end users and more easily consider needs, goals, and priorities that may be different than our own. These are critical skills to have since we may not be part of the target audience for the site we're developing." - (Ron Akanowicz - CivicActions) courtesy of jjursa

Posted by PJB on February 13, 2009 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Future Practice Interview: Bill Scott

"How do you get team members to start speaking the same language? Constant communication between the teams. What also works is adopting a common language to describe interactions. The use of design patterns is a powerful way to disseminate common thinking and approaches to common problems. I have been pleasantly surprised when language that design and engineering use to describe certain bad approaches (anti-patterns) gets in-grained even in our product managers vocabulary as well." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2009 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Interaction 09: All posts in one place

"From opening parties to closing remarks, Core is all over IxDA's latest gathering in Vancouver." - (Carl Alviani - Core77)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2009 | Classification: Events - Interaction design | Permalink

Each One, Teach One

Kim Goodwin's IxDA '09 keynote - "(...) it discusses the future direction of interaction design as a profession. We've seen demand for our services increase dramatically over the past few years, and, in order to continue to respond to this demand, we need to make more of us. Part of the solution involves creating academic programs to provide the foundation for learning the craft of interaction design; another part is to create a culture of mentorship. This means that all of us need to learn to teach what we do." - (Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Touchpoint: The Service Design Journal

"Finally! - We can now herald the outcome of the new Service Design Journal, Touchpoint, for March 2009. In cooperation with Continuum, we took some more time in order to make Touchpoint a really professional, entertaining and gainful magazine for all readers. The journal aims at creating a forum for discussion and debate amongst service organizations, professionals, students and educators of service design." - (Service Design Network)

Posted by PJB on February 11, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Engagement and stakeholding. And steak

"Whatever type of work we're doing, and whatever terms we use to describe it, when it comes to our hoped-for outcomes, aren't we all trying to get beyond experience, interaction, and design? Aren't we trying to create artifacts that ultimately engage? Isn't that the secret sauce?" - (Louis Rosenfeld - bloug)

Posted by PJB on February 11, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Is Good Design Replicable?

"The implicit assumption is that if you perform some particular UX method then you'll produce consistently better design: the right process = the right product. So, the obvious question to ask is: Is there evidence that someone following a certain process produces great design every time?" - (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Writing Usability Requirements and Metrics

"(..) our experts discuss how to write effective usability requirements and metrics for the redesign of a legacy public sector system." - (Janet M. Six - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Thriving in a Difficult Economy: A Tale of Ugly Babies and Sacred Cows

"The brutal fact is—we're in a difficult economy. Every day, we hear about another company that's laying off employees. Just yesterday, an article on Yahoo! News reported “Mass layoffs involving 50 or more workers increased sharply last year, and large cuts appear to be accelerating in 2009 at a furious pace. In fact, there were layoffs at Yahoo! itself in December. Letting people go is traumatic for everyone involved. It's traumatic for the employees who are laid off, whose relationships to their livelihoods—not to mention their friends and colleagues—are abruptly severed. It's painful to the remaining employees, whose friends and colleagues were so abruptly removed. Sometimes companies must make deep budget cuts to succeed, but it's painful, and those of us who have been through layoffs before agree that it seems to get harder every time we do it." - (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy?

"While there are indeed some UX professionals who—by either personal inclination or circumstance—resemble the specialists and generalists Jared describes, in my opinion, the ideal employee to hire for your UX team is neither a specialist nor a generalist." - (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Apple's Flatland Aesthetic I: How a Simple Idea is Causing Complexity

"Apple needs to take a fresh look at all of their products across the board, specifically looking for where old decisions favoring new users are now dragging those same users down. Of course it's a good idea to avoid complexity, including hierarchies, where possible, but some tasks are inherently complex. Go for visual and behavioral simplicity where it works, but be prepared to back off." - (Bruce Tognazzini) courtesy of johngruber

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

How Crafty Word Order Can Instantly Improve Your Writing

"Written communication has increased with email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, and numerous other Internet services. As readers we struggle constantly to understand these communications despite enormous pressures on our time and attention. Phil Yaffe has been offering Ubiquity readers simple principles that have helped make these written communications significantly more effective. A while ago he told us about ten general principles, more recently about three acid tests, and now a single principle for good sentences." - (Philip Yaffe - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted by PJB on February 09, 2009 | Classification: Writing | Permalink

REG-iA: Research & Education Group in Information Architecture

Great initiative of European Information Architects Andrea Resmini, Dorte Madsen, Katriina Byström, Nils Pharo, Stanislaw Skorka and Luca Rosati. - More coming soon!

Posted by PJB on February 09, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Carpe Diem

Slides from the keynote address to Interaction09 by Dan Saffer. - (KickIt)

Posted by PJB on February 09, 2009 | Classification: Events - Interaction design | Permalink

Live at Interaction09: Day 1-4

"Today one of the best UX events in the world started; interaction09 in Vancouver. For four days more than 400 interaction designers huddle together in order to get inspired on the field of interaction design. Of course we sacrificed ourselves and traveled to Vancouver just to give you a 'live' report. For the next four days you can read our thoughts and observations." - (Jeroen van Geel - Johnny Holland)

Posted by PJB on February 06, 2009 | Classification: Events - Interaction design | Permalink

Service Thinking

"In the private sector and in the public sector there is enormous opportunity to increase the competitiveness and improve the effectiveness of services. The answer lies in Service Design and Service Thinking. (...) Our thinking is often a product of the past. This is compounded in a world where that past is all about product thinking. The future demands fresh perspectives. Service Thinking provides just that." - (Ben Reason, Chris Downs and Lavrans Lovlie - live|work) - courtesy of risd

Posted by PJB on February 05, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business

"(...) customer experience is an organizational mindset. It's not something a business buys, it's something a business becomes. Customer experience refers to the totality of experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints." - Thnx for being one of your favs. (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted by PJB on February 05, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

IA Growing Roots - Concerning the Journal of IA

"(...) we definitely do have a phenomenological definition of IA: IA is what has been going on in the self-identified IA community of practice (and related academic oases) in the last 10 years or more. (...) the upcoming peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Information Architecture, due in Spring 2009. For the discipline to mature, the community needs a corpus, a defining body of knowledge, not a definition." - A big applause for this initiative. Keep up the good work! (Andres Resmini, Katriina Byström and Dorte Madsen - ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2009)

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

UX Patterns Explorer

"User Experience Patterns are great, because proven and repeatable solutions help to get a head start on UI Design. Infragistics makes its new UX patterns explorer "Quince" available for free. Quince, which launched today, is an online repository of the world's most useful and usable UX patterns. Free and open, anybody can contribute to Quince and grow the UX pattern body of knowledge." - Silverlight required (Infragistics)

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2009 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

TagPipe: Interaction 09

This TagPipe covers all found and uploaded user-generated content regarding the conference IxDA Interaction 09 (Feb. 5-8, 2009 - Vancouver CAN) and tagged as 'Interaction09' on Google BlogSearch (blogposts), Flickr (pictures), Technorati (links), Del.icio.us (pages), Twitter (tweets) and SlideShare (presentations). Just download the OPML-file and import the file into your offline or online RSS Reader. Enjoy! - courtesy of robinkuit

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2009 | Classification: Tagpipe | Permalink

EG: The Entertainment Gathering

Making Information Entertaining and Entertainment Informative - "How do you explain EG? It's a bit like music. But talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Music taps feelings so deep and so special that we don't have words for them. Music names them for us. You can't explain music in words." (Richard Saul Wurman)

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Beyond the touch screen

"Since Apple's introduction of the iPhone, it seems like everyone is excited at the possibility of implementing a touch screen, and why not? There are a lot of benefits to touch-screen interfaces: Extreme flexibility in visual and interaction design allows products and applications to be tailored for specific needs and audiences to target markets; less reliance on hardware controls means significant savings in mechanical cost; larger screens allow more opportunities for richness in states and animations; greater flexibility also means the possibility to reduce waste in the creation of longer-lasting devices with upgradable OS's and software." (Michael Voege - Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

What the heck is user experience design??!!

Interview with Jesse James Garrett - "Some describe it as making things easy and enjoyable to use. Others describe it as all the elements that impact someone's perception of a product or system. Jesse James Garrett says it's a lot like going on a great first date. For those who haven't heard of it before: You'll be surprise by how much it impacts your life. For those who know it well: Believe it or not, the complexity made simple. You'll finally know what to say in the elevator when someone asks you what you do for a living." (Tea with Teresa) - courtesy of janjursa

Posted by PJB on February 03, 2009 | Classification: Interviews - User experience | Permalink

Process not a differentiator?

"The design process and methods are not very difficult to learn. For those who want to learn them and for design firms that believe them, there is not much room to grow in the process arena. Sure, new methods are created all the time. But I don't think they revolutionize the process as a whole." (Jamin Hegeman)

Posted by PJB on February 02, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Macintosh: 25 Years

"Although its individual features weren't new, the Mac offered integration, the expectation of a GUI, and interface consistency." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on February 02, 2009 | Classification: Classics - Usability | Permalink

Touchscreens no substitute for good user experience

"Touch interactions are fundamentally different from those performed with keys or even a stylus, and will often require a completely revised user interface. Nokia, which has been busily skinning Series 60 in preparation for the introduction of touchscreen products, would do well to take note." (MEX) - courtesy of kicker

Posted by PJB on February 02, 2009 | Classification: Mobile design - User experience | Permalink