March 2009

When Life Intervenes

An IA Summit Podcast Preview with Samantha Bailey - "Samantha Bailey, the 2009 IA Summit Chair, tells Chris Baum about how she approached creating this year's IA Summit program, the how the Summit community has morphed over time, and what it means to be a part of this community of practice." - (Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 31, 2009 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

Stop Listening to People like Me

"(...) there are two issues here that most of us are neglecting to consider in our endless discussions: career lifecycle and domain lifecycle. These are the East/West aspect of all of our debating. If you leave these out of the discussion, you can't really understand the debate, or the people debating, or what it should mean to you." - (Louis Rosenfeld) courtesy of sly@TWTTR

Posted by PJB on March 30, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities

"User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 30, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Enough UX Chumbaya!

"Interaction Design is NOT Information Architecture. Stop the madness of trying to be everything to everyone!!" - (Dave Malouf) courtesy of jjursa

Posted by PJB on March 29, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture - Interaction design | Permalink

The Memphis Plenary

"What war is the field of information architecture fighting? The war we still seem to be fighting is the war against information architecture itself as a valid concept, as a meaningful part of design practices. (...) The discipline of information architecture and the role of the information architect will always be defined in conjunction with one another. As long as you have information architects, what they do will always be information architecture. (...) There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers." Great point-of-view. - (Jesse James Garrett)

Posted by PJB on March 29, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Big rock, small rock, and chorizo sausage

"As it seems to be a common pattern with me in recent times, this post has been long in the making and even longer in the thinking. And I'm not done yet, really, but since the 10th IA Summit in Memphis, Tennessee, seems to have expanded our horizons in novelty ways, I have a feeling the times are ripe for a first attempt at my tuppence on the subject. What subject? IA, IxD, UX, and where we stand, of course. And say thanks to JJG." Provocative, deep thinking, and milestone article for the discipline of information architecture. Congrats Andrea! - (Andrea Resmini - FatDUX blog)

Posted by PJB on March 27, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Bringing academics and practitioners together

"Can we use the nuggets buried in research to generate interaction between academics and practitioners? Here's an idea: at the next IA Summit, perhaps we could dedicate a half day or full day precon to workshopping the ideas in ASIS&T's top research papers from the preceding year." - (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted by PJB on March 27, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Demystifying Interaction Design

"If interaction design isn't about influencing behavior... then what exactly are you doing?" - (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted by PJB on March 26, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

27 Visualizations and Infographics to Understand the Financial Crisis

"If there's anything good that has come out of the financial crisis it's the slew of high-quality graphics to help us understand what's going on. Some visualizations attempt to explain it all while others focus on affected business. Others concentrate on how we, as citizens are affected. Some show those who are responsible. After you examine these 27 visualizations and infographics, no doubt you'll have a pretty good idea about what's going on." - (FlowingData)

Posted by PJB on March 26, 2009 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Wall of Deliverables

"(...) a companion site for the IA Summit Wall of Deliverables annual event and an ongoing repository of deliverables submitted from the community to share." Great initiative by Jacco et al. - (About WoD)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture - User experience | Permalink

Journal of Information Architecture (Spring 2009)

"Spring 2009, Volume 1 Issue 1 of the Journal of Information Architecture will be available to all for download in PDF format as either individual articles or as a single complete publication on March 31st 2009." - (About the JoIA)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

"When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge. There is no "Consumer Trust for Dummies", but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur." - (Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Progressive User Adoption

"Users of technology products—from mobile phones to ecommerce Web sites—often stop learning and adopting features long before they've mastered those products’ full capabilities. A learning plateau usually occurs once a user has learned the features that meet his minimum product-adoption criteria, when the benefit of adopting more features doesn't seem worth the extra effort or risk." - (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2009 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

The UX of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

"In this column, I'll provide a technology selection framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications they're considering purchasing, with the goal of ensuring their Information Technology investments deliver fully on their value propositions." - (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on March 24, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Including Recommendations in User Interfaces to Enhance Motivation

"Motivation is an important factor in any kind of online interaction or transaction. People need a little encouragement when they’re not really convinced they should take any action or are uncertain about what action to take next. As users perform tasks online, they need to understand what’s happening and expect you to help them move forward. This article discusses the responsibility of a user interface to provide recommendations along a user’s path of interaction." - (Afshan Kirmani - UXmatters)

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

SxSW 2009: Designing Our Way Through Web Forms

"The Designing Our Way Through Web Forms panel at South by Southwest Interactive 2009 featured Christopher Schmitt, Eric Ellis, and Kimberly Blessing discussing specific ways to successfully create compelling forms for your users." - (Luke Wroblewski)

Posted by PJB on March 23, 2009 | Classification: Podcasts | Permalink

Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well

"Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user's choices." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 23, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Seeing Tomorrow’s Services: Recap

"Probably the main distinction between CMU and the Berkeley iSchool is the focus on frontstage experience versus the backstage system." - (Jeff Howard - Design For Service)

Posted by PJB on March 20, 2009 | Classification: Podcasts - Service design | Permalink

Creating a better service experience by providing less choice

"It's very common in service design to map the touchpoints in a journey and try to optimize every single one. Designing for the perfect balance in the number of function overlapping touchpoints (FOTP) is often overlooked (or forgotten) while it holds great potential to even further improve a service experience." - (Marc Fonteijn - 31volts)

Posted by PJB on March 19, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Behavior is our Medium

"Robert Fabricant talks about Interaction Design as a practice beyond just computing technology. He gives examples of Interaction Design as far back as ancient history, all the way to a humanitarian project underway today. He shows that Interaction Design's primary medium is behavior, extending far past the high technology world into the realm of human behavior and relationships." - (IxDA Library)

Posted by PJB on March 19, 2009 | Classification: Events - Interaction design | Permalink

Q&A with Jesse James Garrett

"(...) I believe our profession is intrinsically good." - (Liou Yamane - CHI Nederland)

Posted by PJB on March 18, 2009 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Twine: Keep Up With What You Are Into

"People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, Web pages, products - and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want." - (About Twine)

Posted by PJB on March 18, 2009 | Classification: Search | Permalink

One Software Doesn't Fit All

"(...) some users get more value from software applications than others. This is because software is written from a certain user perspective. In many cases, the problems and challenges faced in making software work can be explained by the tension created when the design of software is dominated by one perspective over another. In CRM systems, for example, the sales reps who must do the work of entering data about contacts and meetings often must be bludgeoned or bribed to do so. They get little benefit from such tracking, as opposed to the VP of sales, for whom the data is a vital way to understand what is happening." - (Dan Woods - Forbes) courtesy of cooperjournal

Posted by PJB on March 16, 2009 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

Kindle Content Design

"Writing for Kindle is like writing for print, the Web, and mobile devices combined; optimal usability means optimizing content for each platform's special characteristics." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 16, 2009 | Classification: Technology - Usability | Permalink

Remembering the Day the World Wide Web Was Born

"What drove Tim Berners-Lee to imagine this game-changing model for information sharing, and will its openness be its undoing?" - (Scientific American In-Depth Report)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2009 | Classification: Hypertext - Information design | Permalink

The next Web of open, linked data

Tim Berners-Lee on TED 2009 - "Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." - (TED Blog)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2009 | Classification: Metadata - Social Web | Permalink

Similarities Between Interaction Designers and Agile Programmers

Alan Cooper video - "During the Agile 2008 conference, Amr Elssamadisy interviewed Alan Cooper. During their conversation, Alan provides additional context for his talk, 'The Wisdom of Experience' and explains why he believes the adoption of Agile methods by developers is a positive development for interaction designers." - (Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications

"I had the opportunity to speak with Afshan Kirmani on her article. (...) We talk about the design of an online web based application. Part 1 of the series focuses on the web based form where the user experience is critical before the user enters the application. The various aspects include a good entry point into a form which determines if users stay or leave. The beginning of every form is most important as details like usability set your apart from your competitors." - (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2009 | Classification: Interviews - Podcasts | Permalink

Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

"I want to start this discussion by proposing a model for collaboration1 that links the various elements of collaboration, comment on the so-called “collaboration software” currently available, and make some tentative suggestions about IA and UX requirements for a real collaboration platform." - (Matthew C. Clarke - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on March 13, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

ETech 2009: The Dotted-Line World

"I presented a talk at ETech today. It links the capabilities of ubiquitous computing and intersects it with service design to come up with a justification for creating subscription-based services out of (certain) everyday objects. (...) We must think of service design as going beyond functionality and beyond monolithic lock-in, but as a process of addressing specific needs." - (Mike Kuniavsky - Orange Cone)

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

The History and Evolution of User Experience Design

An interview with Peter Merholz, President and Co-founder of Adaptive Path. - "User experience design is, at its core, a philosophy that products and services should be designed so that they are pleasurable and easy for people to use. While that might seem an obvious design approach, it's actually not the way many designers historically thought about making things. In fact, it wasn't until the 1990s that an industry came together around this particular approach to design." - (Tea with Teresa) courtesy of deluca

Posted by PJB on March 11, 2009 | Classification: Interviews - User experience | Permalink

The Best Way to Understand Your Customers

"It's in difficult economic times that customer experience matters most -- you don't want to make it even easier for your customers to walk away because they've been so frustrated working with you." - (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

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

Stage Directions Meet Functional Specifications: They Have a Lot in Common

"When it comes to modern theater, stage directions—the descriptive text that appears within brackets in a script—are an important piece of the puzzle. They speak for the playwright when he is not there. They provide details about how the playwright has imagined the environment and atmosphere. They describe critical physical aspects of the characters and settings. Stage directions can also be critical in dictating the intended tempo and rhythm of the piece. Whether they establish a production’s overall tone or elucidate particular actions of characters, stage directions help tell the complete story that is in the playwright’s mind. Stage directions accomplish all of this, using a simple convention that structurally separates them from the actual story." - (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

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

Evangelizing UX Across An Entire Organization

"This edition of Ask UXmatters discusses how to communicate and sell the UX message across all levels of an organization. Our experts share what strategies and tactics for evangelizing UX have worked for them." - (Janet M. Six - UXmatters)

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

Choosing the Right Search Results Page Layout: Make the Most of Your Width

"Page layout forms the foundation in presenting search results. Your layout decisions for search results pages will have tremendous impact on the user experience for your entire site. Choosing the right width for search results is important, and the optimal width for search results may be a great deal narrower than some people using big monitors would believe." - (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on March 10, 2009 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?

"My talk today is about social media. I'm going to begin by dissecting this silly term and then we'll get down and dirty with how social media is being used." - (Danah Boyd)

Posted by PJB on March 10, 2009 | Classification: Social Web | Permalink

Kindle 2 Usability Review

"Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 09, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Brenda Laurel: Why didn't girls play videogames?

"A TED archive gem. At TED in 1998, Brenda Laurel asks: Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys? She spent two years researching the world of girls (and shares amazing interviews and photos) to create a game that girls would love." - (TED.com)

Posted by PJB on March 06, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Interacting With Advertising

"When advertising uses truthiness to tell a story we want to hear, we'll grant it endless permission to be in our face." - (Steve Portigal - ACM Interactions XVI.2) via markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on March 03, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Single Question Interview: David Merrill of Tacolab on Siftables

"(...) the major problem is not anymore the amount of computation we have, it’s how we can interact with that computation." - (Peter Merholz - AP blog)

Posted by PJB on March 02, 2009 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Write for Reuse

"Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text." - (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on March 02, 2009 | Classification: Usability - Writing | Permalink

Marissa Mayer Gives Us An Insight Into How Google Works

"Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google recently delivered a fascinating Keynote at the Google I/O Developers Conference. She shares a heap of interesting nuggets, from the reason why they chose 10 search results as default, and why they chose a yellow background behind their ads as opposed to the industry favored blue." - (TheNextWeb)

Posted by PJB on March 02, 2009 | Classification: Search - User experience | Permalink

Industry trends in prototyping

"In the world of designing interactive products and services, prototype is generally defined as some representation of a design idea. In the world of physical products, the term tends to connote something quite similar to the finished manufactured form. Indeed, industrial designers use the term model to describe what interaction designers think of as a prototype." - (Dave Cronin - Adobe Dev Connection) courtesy of janjursa

Posted by PJB on March 02, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design - UCD | Permalink