December 2009

Information, Physicality, Co-Ownership, and Culture

"Tangible computing has a long history of interest in technology circles; like augmented reality and computer-supported cooperative work, it has long been the focus of research studies in academic institutions, and not ironically, the focus of a large quantity of science fiction movies, too. It is only in the past half-decade, however, that the stars have aligned to support tangible computing in practice." (Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko - ACM SIGCHI Interactions XVII.1)

Posted by PJB on December 29, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

"The constraints that recessions impose; on budgets and on time can help us focus more sharply on what matters most, and sharpen our methods and skills to make us more competitive and better at what we do." (Erin Malone - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on December 25, 2009 | Classification: Social Web | Permalink

Walls Come Tumbling Down

"The constraints that recessions impose; on budgets and on time can help us focus more sharply on what matters most, and sharpen our methods and skills to make us more competitive and better at what we do." (Andy Clarke - Stuff and Nonsense) - courtesy of herjeno

Posted by PJB on December 25, 2009 | Classification: Prototyping - Technology | Permalink

Don Norman on Ethnography and Innovation

"Overall, it seems other examinations of innovation have proven the exact opposite of what Norman claims in his article. There is indeed a wealth of evidence that people’s needs can and should precede technology. And frankly, Norman's 'examination' seems more of the back-of-the-napkin type with several errors." (James Kalbach - Experiencing Information)

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

Journal of Information Architecture: Issue 2

"The difference between usability and user experience (UX) design is often explained as the latter trying to paint a richer picture and pay attention to engaging users in the process of interaction1. This is preferably accomplished by providing an engaging experience. In particular informational applications are often supposed to be entertaining. In many circumstances this is beneficial and highly appropriate, particularly in the context of low-choice interaction scenarios such as news and entertainment-related content or applications. However, the important condition to remember is context. In fact, context is the crucial aspect to consider when creating an environment that allows playful and experimental emotions to emerge." (Journal of Information Architecture)- A very nice X-mas present

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

Is the Value of Information Architecture a Myth?

"For large sites, portals or company intranets Value BEGINS with the information architecture. There is nothing else that matters as much as Information Architecture in these instances. If people can’t find the information they are looking for, the application is useless. It does not matter how great the design is, how fast the page loads, how cute the menu drop-downs are – what matters is intuitively organized information that is easily accessible." (Lou Storiale Blog) - courtesy of wolfnoeding

Posted by PJB on December 22, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Anybody Can Do Usability

"Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on December 21, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Testing Your Own Designs Redux

"This column is an attempt to synthesize a new set of guidelines for testing your own designs that I’ve based on the best of my own and UXmatters readers’ ideas." (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on December 21, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Testing Content Concepts

"As UX professionals, we’re all familiar with the need to test user experience designs. Testing content, however, might be a different story. Most companies haven’t given testing content the attention it deserves—partly because it’s challenging. One challenge is that time and budget usually do not allow us to test every single piece of content. Another challenge is that gathering too much unfocused feedback can freeze our projects in analysis paralysis. To meet these challenges, try testing your content concepts—and start testing them early in your projects." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on December 21, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy - User experience | Permalink

Information Architecture: The Backbone Of SEO & Usability

"One of the clearest mistakes we make in web site development is not understanding the people who use them. Despite the help of personas, user testing, scenarios and marketing data in advance, even the big brand sites struggle to be user friendly. Why is this? One reason is the context in which pages and links are delivered. For findability to work properly, we need to know the words people use to communicate with their surroundings. This may be different online, especially in situations where we can ‘be anyone’ and change who we are." (Kim Krause Berg - Search Engine Land)

Posted by PJB on December 18, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture - Usability | Permalink

Otlet's Models of the World: A Historical Knowledge Space Lab

"I would like to draw attention to the scientific models of the Belgian information pioneer Paul Otlet who albeit that they are standing in positivist and Modernist tradition can still be relevant for mechanical and manual modelling of science within the Semantic Web and Web 2.0." (Charles van den Heuvel - Modelling Science)

Posted by PJB on December 16, 2009 | Classification: Classics - Social Web | Permalink

Design and Meaning: An Interview with Nathan Shedroff

"(...) it’s clear to me that business, design, and sustainability can no longer be approached or practiced separately and that one of the most powerful points at this intersection is meaning." (Vicky Teinaki - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted by PJB on December 16, 2009 | Classification: Interviews - User experience | Permalink

Web Site User Experience Anatomy

"Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly. Optimizing the user experience of each part however is problematic: Where do you start? How much user experience testing and adjusting should you do on each of your page types? What’s critical, important or just a nice to have in terms of spending your limited user experience testing resources?" (Craig Tomlin - What Makes Them Click)

Posted by PJB on December 16, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

How to seduce your users with web design

"We all like being seduced. Interaction on the web can take advantage of this idea. There is a notion of “seductive interfaces”. It’s about surprise and delight. We are all seducers. We are doing it out of instinct. This doesn’t have to do with deviation, mind control, and trickery. It’s not about the one-night stand; it’s about forming a long-term relationship with the user." (ZDNet) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted by PJB on December 16, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Seven Controversial Usability Predictions for 2010

"I have seven somewhat controversial usability predictions for the 2010 I think you might be surprised to read. These predictions are based on my understanding of the state of the usability field based on blog posts, articles, tweets and all the other news and information I’ve picked up throughout the year. Whether you agree or disagree with these predictions, I think you’ll agree that in the past year we’ve seen plenty of change, and will continue to see increasing changes in our field in 2010." (Useful Usability)

Posted by PJB on December 15, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Dimensions of design / Against ahistoricity

"The ahistoricity of interaction design – the notion, implicitly held or otherwise, that rich interactivity is an entirely new topic in design for human experience, perhaps with the Doug Engelbart demo as Year Zero – has always driven me nuts. When even an old-school HCI stalwart like Don Norman fails to deliver useful insight, perhaps it’s time to start looking further afield for inspiration." (Adam Greenfield - Speedbird)

Posted by PJB on December 14, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

How UCD and Agile can live together

"User-Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?" (David Farkas - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted by PJB on December 14, 2009 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Why don’t we actually read anymore?

"This kind of reading suggests that behind it lies a different kind of thinking. And unfortunately this may weaken our capacity to develop a deep kind of reading. According to Maryanne Wolf, development psychologist at Tufts University, we have become ‘mere decoders of information’. Our ability to interpret text, to make rich mental connections that are formed when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. But actually we are dealing with a problem here that we have to cope with because our ancestors, like Plato, believed that writing and reading was a good thing." (Denise Pires - Dancing Uphill)

Posted by PJB on December 14, 2009 | Classification: Writing | Permalink

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web in Research from a Historical Perspective

Pre-publication - The designs of Paul Otlet (1868-1944) for telecommunication and machine readable documentation to organize research and society - "At the end of the nineteenth and in the first decades of the twentieth century various European scholars, like Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet, Otto Neurath, Wilhelm Ostwald explored the organisation, enrichment and dissemination of knowledge on a global level to come to a peaceful, universal society. We focus on Paul Otlet (1868-1944) who developed a knowledge infrastructure to update information mechanically and manually in collaboratories of scholars. First the Understanding Infrastructure (2007) report, that Paul N. Edwards et al. wrote on behalf of NSF, will be used to position Otlet’s knowledge organization in their sketched development from information systems to information internetworks or webs. Secondly, the relevance of Otlet’s knowledge infrastructure will be assessed for Web 2.0 and Semantic Web applications for research. The hypothesis will be put forward that the instruments and protocols envisioned by Otlet to enhance collaborative knowledge production, can still be relevant for current conceptualizations of ‘scientific authority’ in data sharing and annotation in Web 2.0 applications and the modeling of the Semantic Web." (Charles van den Heuvel in: Knowledge Organization, 36 (4) 214-226)

Posted by PJB on December 13, 2009 | Classification: Classics | Permalink

Building Society, Constructing Knowledge, Weaving the Web

Pre-publication - Otlet's Visualizations of a Global Information Society and His Concept of a Universal Civilization - "I have discussed at such length Berners-Lee's Weaving the Web in order to compare the US-oriented views of the history and future of the World Wide Web, as its proclaimed inventor expressed them toward the end of the twentieth century, with the ideas explored 50 years or more earlier by Paul Otlet and his colleagues about knowledge organization on a global level. My aim is to try to show how some of the issues that were important in explaining the origin of the World Wide Web and in predicting its future were already being explored at the beginning of the twentieth century by a number of European pioneers, who proposed similar solutions and encountered similar problems to Berners-Lee." (Charles van den Heuvel in W. Boy Rayward [ed.] European Modernism and the Information Society, pp 127-153)

Posted by PJB on December 13, 2009 | Classification: Classics | Permalink

Where Wireframes Are Concerned

"Wireframes can be useful, valuable artifacts for informing the designer's process. But they often fail miserably as a first-step deliverable for clients." (Andy Rutledge - UX Magazine)

Posted by PJB on December 11, 2009 | Classification: Wireframes | Permalink

Dec. 10, 1944: Web Visionary Passes Into Obscurity

"Some historians see in Otlet’s work a prototype of the World Wide Web and the hyperlink. Although unsuccessful, it was one of the first known attempts to provide a framework for connecting all recorded culture by creating flexible links that could rapidly lead researchers from one document to another — and perhaps make audible the previously unheard echoes between them. Anticipating postmodern literary theory, Otlet posited that documents have meaning not as individual texts, but only in relationship to each other." (Wired) - courtesy of lievenbaeten

Posted by PJB on December 10, 2009 | Classification: Classics | Permalink

Using Emotional Experience Design to Engage Customers on Your Website

"The results, while not surprising for any web designer, usability tester or marketing specialist, show the way the web is continually evolving. From Web 2.0 to 3.0, the web has the power to engage and connect users. However, as the report reminds us, it’s not always employed in a helpful and user-friendly way." (CMS Wire) - courtesy of usabilitynews

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

The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

"Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences — particularly when we approach content." (Erin Scime - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on December 08, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Making pagination meaningful

"Working with long lists of information over a network, like web email, can be problematic. Very long lists can have a huge performance hit on your servers, leaving the user tapping her fingers waiting on slow page loads, especially on ‘very thin’ clients like mobile devices. To limit the server hit and increase response times, some systems paginate data, that is, break it up into a series of pages." (Chris Noessel - Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on December 08, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The Potential of Transdisciplinarity

"Transdisciplinarity has a semantic appeal which differs from what one often calls inter- or multi-, or pluri-disciplinarity. And, note that the prefix - trans- is shared with another word, namely transgressiveness. If it is true that knowledge is transgressive, then it means transdisciplinarity does not respect disciplinary boundaries. It goes beyond the disciplinary boundaries, but it does not respect institutional boundaries, either. In addition, there is a kind of similarity, a kind of convergence or co- evolution, between what is happening in the sphere of knowledge production and what we can see going on in the way that societal institutions are developing." (Helga Nowotny - Rethinking Interdisciplinarity)

Posted by PJB on December 08, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The Fable of the User-Centred Designer

"Follow a young man's journey as he discovers the three secrets of user-centred design. After reading this 40-page fable, you'll understand the framework of user-centred design and know how to apply it to your own design project. It's a small book that has big results." (UserFocus)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World

"Our language is limited and imperfect. Typically, people type search queries quickly and with little forethought, so queries are definitely less than perfect. When a customer constructs a query that may have more than one meaning, a good search user interface provides tools to help the customer define the query in less ambiguous terms, so the search results more closely match the person's intention. This process is known as disambiguation, and best practices for effectively supporting the disambiguation of search queries are the subject of this column." (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Optimization: Applying Moore’s Law to User Experience

"As UX designers, our vision is to optimize the overall human‑computer system, improve the ability of humanity to solve important problems, and help people to gain insights more effectively. In this column, I'll look at what optimization means, as well as some of the ways in which we can optimize user experience." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Sketchy Wireframes: When you can't (or shouldn't) draw a straight line

"When it comes to user interface documentation, wireframes have long been the tool of choice. However, using traditional diagramming tools like Visio, OmniGraffle, and InDesign, most wireframes today look the same as their ancestors did from a decade ago – assembled with rigid, computer-drawn boxes, lines and text. While these artifacts have served us well, they can also be slow to produce, burdened with unnecessary detail and give a false impression of 'completion'. To compensate for the drawbacks of traditional wireframes, many practitioners put aside the computer in favor of simple pencil sketches or whiteboard drawings. This speeds up the ideation process, but doesn’t always produce presentable or maintainable documentation." (Aaron Travis - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture - Wireframes | Permalink

Tree Testing: A quick way to evaluate your IA

"A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical 'tree' of topics. But to date, the IA community hasn't found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task. Some years ago, Donna Spencer pioneered a simple paper-based technique to test trees of topics. Recent refinements to that method, some made possible by online experimentation, have now made 'tree testing' more effective and agile." (Dave O'Brien - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Short-Term Memory and Web Usability

"The human brain is not optimized for the abstract thinking and data memorization that that websites often demand. Many usability guidelines are dictated by cognitive limitations." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Why Strategists Need Content Managers

"(...) I'm of the opinion that content strategy is most certainly NOT content management. As strategists, we have input on how the content is produced, managed and governed, but our goal is ultimately to aid in the creation of a strategic set of best practicies and personas to be sure that content developers are creating the most appropriate content for machines and humans." (Daniel Eizans)

Posted by PJB on December 07, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Facts and Frameworks in Paul Otlet's and Julius Otto Kaiser's Theories of Knowledge Organization

"In this article, I sketch Otlet's and Kaiser's ideas about information analysis and compare the types of knowledge organization systems (KOSs) that they constructed on the basis of these ideas. As we shall see, Otlet and Kaiser held very similar views about the possibility – and desirability – of disaggregating documents into information units and organizing the latter into indexed information files. Both men also agreed on the technological means to implement their information-analytic approach." (Thomas M. Dousa - ASIS&T Bulletin Dec/Jan 2010)

Posted by PJB on December 04, 2009 | Classification: Classics - Information architecture | Permalink

CS and IA Unite Already, Will Ya!

"Content Strategy is not Copywriting. Design is not Window Dressing. Information Architecture is not Boxes and Arrows. (...) CS and IA are the same thing, or at least they should be." (Ian Alexander - Eat Media)

Posted by PJB on December 02, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy - Information architecture | Permalink

The Experience Imperative: A Manifesto for Industrial Designers

"The challenge is not to design an object, but to design an object that changes dynamically and adapts over time. This requires a new approach to design. (...) Call yourself an experience designer." (Ken Fry - Core77)

Posted by PJB on December 02, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Can Experience be Designed?

"We naturally assume that the way we experience our world must be unique. The idea that our experience has been shaped by someone else threatens our belief in individuality and personal freedom. Out of the fear to not be special many will even reject the idea that two people can share a similar physical experience." (iA)

Posted by PJB on December 02, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink