May 2010

Innovation at Google: The physics of data

"Today, we measure the size of the Web in exabytes and are uploading to it 15 times more data than we were 3 years ago. Technologies for sensing, storing, and sharing information are driving innovation in the tools available to help us understand our world in greater detail and accuracy than ever before. The implications of analyzing data on a massive scale transcend the tech industry, impacting the environmental sector, social justice issues, health and science research, and more. When coupled with astute technical insight, data is dynamic, accessible, and ultimately, creative." (Marissa Mayer)

Posted by PJB on May 31, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Search - Technology | Permalink

Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards in Usability

"The usability crisis is upon us, once again. We suspect most of you thought it was over. After all, HCI certainly understands how to make things usable, so the emphasis has shifted to more engaging topics, such as exciting new applications, new technological developments, and the challenges of social networks and ubiquitous connection and communication. Well you are wrong." (Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen)

Posted by PJB on May 30, 2010 | Classification: Tablet design - Usability | Permalink

Paris, je t’aime

"Led by some of the biggest names in the content strategy world, the workshops and sessions covered a lot of territory. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways for me from my two days in Paris." (Stacey King Gordon)

Posted by PJB on May 28, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Combining Methods: Web Analytics and User Testing

"After presenting on combining methods at the EuroIA in 2009, Adam Cox and Martijn Klompenhouwer again showed the benefits of combining two separate sources. They delivered their presentation at the yearly Usability Professional Association conference in Munich (UPA2010). This time they focused on how to use Web Analytics in the preparation and execution of usability testing. Drawing from their experience of combining Web Analytics and User Research over the years, they illustrated several practical examples of how this combined approach works when it comes to user testing. After a short introduction of the individual methods, they demonstrated this approach by showcasing specific usability testing projects with a presentational style that was both visual and conversational." (User Intelligence)

Posted by PJB on May 28, 2010 | Classification: Design research - Usability | Permalink

Podcast for the 2010 UPA International Conference

"From May 24th to May 28th, the 2010 UPA International Conference is being held in Munich, Germany. This event brings together more than 700 usability professionals from all over the world. To give you an impression of the diverse range of speakers and topics, the UPA provides an audio podcast accompanying the conference. Therein, you will find interviews with various conference attendants and organizers, some of them recorded during the event, others before and after it." (Content Crew)

Posted by PJB on May 27, 2010 | Classification: Events - Podcasts - Usability | Permalink

The Philosophy of Service Design

"(...) on a theoretical level anyway, the benefits of service design over conventional 'style led design' or 'industrial design'. Perhaps such more established forms of design have a philosphy and perhaps even succeed in representing that philosophy or design intent, but what they lack is the story or narrative that will engage users with them." (Ferg's Public Engagement Blog)

Posted by PJB on May 27, 2010 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Top 5 reasons why The Customer is Always Right is wrong

"The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service." (Alexander Kjerulf ~ Chief Happiness Officer)

Posted by PJB on May 27, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Usability Ain't Everything: A Response to Jakob Nielsen's iPad Usability Study

"The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group's April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We're not usability engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we're user experience designers. Experience is more than just usability." (Fred Beecher ~ Johnny Holland)

Posted by PJB on May 26, 2010 | Classification: Tablet design - Usability - User experience | Permalink

Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010

"There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial, I examine some of our most cherished beliefs. Examples: design research helps create breakthrough products; complexity is bad and simplicity good; there is a natural chain from research to product." (Videos of the IIT Institute of Design)

Posted by PJB on May 26, 2010 | Classification: Information design - User experience | Permalink

Why You Should Adopt An 'Accessible Content Strategy'

"With the burgeoning number of computing devices and software solutions, it is easier than ever before to deliver single-sourced content such that it is accessible, consumable and actionable by as many users as possible." (The Content Wrangler)

Posted by PJB on May 25, 2010 | Classification: Accessibility - Content strategy | Permalink

Tufte & Beautiful Evidence

"It was a breath of fresh air not to be surrounded by fellow ad folk. Maybe you were there, but I didn't spot you or find your tweets. There were certainly some designers and UX people. I found the lecture a mixed bag - it was certainly a lecture rather than a presentation. During the introduction and the conclusion Tufte seemed rather uncomfortable whilst reading from notes. But the core of the content, around analytical design, was delivered away from the lectern and that was when Tufte and the lecture came to life. My take out from the evening was that information doesn't care what it is; but how it is brought to life is critical for its interpretation and power as a communicator. 'Whatever it takes' was Tufte's recurring theme about how to visualise data, avoiding being a slave to a particular methodology." (MBA Blog)

Posted by PJB on May 25, 2010 | Classification: InfoViz - Information design - Information graphics | Permalink

The Elegant Architecture of the Customer Experience

"People are the most vital asset when designing and crafting a unique customer experience. Disciplined execution requires a robust set of processes to ensure efficiency and uniformity and keep pace with the burgeoning scalability requirements of the enterprise. Automated systems are vital to augment productivity of operations and to fulfill accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, reliability and scalability needs." (E-Commerce News)

Posted by PJB on May 25, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Organizating Content: A 7 Parts Series

"I'm starting a new series on organizing content. I'm not sure how many parts there will be in this series. Writing essays in a serial format is an experiment I'm exploring. Basically this approach to writing follows the agile model. I write a bit, get some feedback, write some more, get feedback, and keep going. The feedback along the way shapes the direction I'm heading. Also, with each serial post, I hope to take the issue a little deeper." (I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted by PJB on May 25, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy - Information architecture - Writing | Permalink

Involving Stakeholders in User Testing

"Besides usability specialists, all design team members should observe usability. It's also good to invite executives. Although biased conclusions are possible, they're far outweighed by the benefits of increased buy-in and empathy." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on May 24, 2010 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Interface Expert Knocks iPad Apps for Inconsistent Usability

"The iPad has been hailed as an interface triumph. But one usability expert has published an exhaustive critique of the iPad, taking it to task for the inconsistency and obscurity of its apps’ interfaces. The problem, at its core: A lack of interface standards means every app behaves in a different way." (Wired) courtesy of apblog

Posted by PJB on May 23, 2010 | Classification: Tablet design - Usability | Permalink

Content strategy

"With the mass of online content available, merely repurposing offline material for the web won't satifsy the expectations of today's consumers. A more adventurous strategy is required." (Meg Carter ~ New Media Age)

Posted by PJB on May 21, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Understanding the Cost of We Can't Find Anything

"One problem I often hear when talking with any organization about new solutions is understanding the cost and inefficiency of their existing way solutions, processes, or general way of doing things. In the past year or two I have used various general measurements around search to help focus the need for improvement not only on search, but the needed information and metadata needed to improve search." (Thomas Vander Wal)

Posted by PJB on May 21, 2010 | Classification: Metadata - Search | Permalink

15 Tips for Designing Terrific Tables

"A good table communicates a lot of information in a concise, easy to understand way. Because the emphasis really should be on the information, over-designing a table can kill the effectiveness. However, in the right hands, clever design can not only make a table more attractive, but can actually increase readability." (Design Shack)

Posted by PJB on May 19, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Experience Design: Technology for all the right reasons

"The book clarifies what experience is, and highlights five crucial aspects and their implications for the design of interactive products. It provides reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach, and presents a detailed working model of experience useful for practitioners and academics alike. It closes with the particular challenges of an experiential approach for design. The book presents its view as a comprehensive, yet entertaining blend of scientific findings, design examples, and personal anecdotes." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)

Posted by PJB on May 18, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Special Issue: Experience Design – Applications and Reflections

"Already last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and I edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and views in Human-Computer Interaction and Design." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)

Posted by PJB on May 18, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Designing User Experiences for Children

"Creating a great experience for Web site users should always take the users’ perspectives into consideration. While a user's age can be a contributing factor in a design's success for a particular user, demographic information should not trump design conventions. Then, why do UX designers struggle when creating Web sites for children?" (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 17, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Sketches and Wireframes and Prototypes! Oh My! Creating Your Own Magical Wizard Experience

"Why is every conversation about wireframes I've encountered lately so tense? For instance, at a recent UX Book Club meeting whose topic was a discussion of some articles on wireframes, the conversation moved quickly from the actual articles to the question of what a wireframe even was. What the discussion came down to was this: no one knows the answer, and trying to find it feels like a wild-goose chase—or like wandering off on our own down a yellow brick road to find the all-knowing and powerful Oz to figure the answer out for us." (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 17, 2010 | Classification: Prototyping | Permalink

Playful User Experiences

"As user experience designers, we tend to focus on getting users to the end of the journeys we've designed for them as quickly and effortlessly as possible. We try to take them from point A to point B in the shortest possible time. To me, it sometimes feels a little like we’re trying to get a child to quickly undergo a blood test before he notices that it hurts." (Shira Gutgold ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 17, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Resurrecting User Interface Prototypes (Without Creating Zombies)

"To create a good user interface design, prototype your concepts and evaluate them with real users. The more natural you want the user interface to feel, the more details you will have to take care of. This makes prototyping more challenging and time-consuming than the conventional notion of prototyping, which is to build something rapidly and cheaply." (Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on May 17, 2010 | Classification: Prototyping | Permalink

The Service Blueprints Overview

"For some time now I've been collecting interesting service design visualizations. But having them stack up on my desktop just doesn’t add a lot of value. As I've noticed that this blog attracts a lot of people with an 3 year old article on service blueprints I decided that would be the best category to start with. So I've compile an overview of the service blueprints I've stumbled upon so far." (Marc Fonteijn ~ 31volt)

Posted by PJB on May 14, 2010 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

The Future is Already Here: Three Trends in IA

"(...) my opening keynote slides and the talk I wrote out which I gave at the German IA Conference in Cologne, Germany May 14, 2010. I speak about experience design, social design and service design. The theme of the conference is Service. Design. Thinking. What I actually said may have been slightly different than the text here but the intent was the same." (Erin Malone)

Posted by PJB on May 14, 2010 | Classification: Events - Information architecture - Service design | Permalink

FlowingData

"FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better - mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all." (Nathan Yau)

Posted by PJB on May 12, 2010 | Classification: InfoViz - Information graphics | Permalink

A Common Sense Content Strategy

"Lately, everyone on the web is talking about content. Content strategy has made its way into our collective consciousness and web writing is coming into its own." (Tiffani Jones ~ MIX Online)

Posted by PJB on May 11, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy - Writing | Permalink

Understand The Web

"Perceptions of the web are changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more." (Ben Ward) courtesy of rogerjohansson

Posted by PJB on May 11, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Technology | Permalink

The Anatomy of a Website

"Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task. Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article's comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components." (Alexander Dawson - Six Revisions)

Posted by PJB on May 10, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - Technology - User experience | Permalink

The Small Print: Writing User Interface Instructions

"Experts say that a person's behavior on the web is highly goal-driven. People have things they want to accomplish, whether it's making a purchase, finding a recipe or learning how to do something new. Inherent in many web page designs, therefore, is information to help a user perform an action." (Understanding Graphics)

Posted by PJB on May 10, 2010 | Classification: HCI - Writing | Permalink

iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing

"iPad apps are inconsistent and have low feature discoverability, with frequent user errors due to accidental gestures. An overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles cause further usability problems." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on May 10, 2010 | Classification: Tablet design - Usability | Permalink

Peter Merholz: The Want Interview

"The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they're shifting away from 'user experience' and towards 'experience design'. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful 'customer journeys' by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three 'waves' - and predicts the fourth." (Want Magazine)

Posted by PJB on May 05, 2010 | Classification: Interviews - User experience | Permalink

A Brief History of Markup

"HTML is the unifying language of the World Wide Web. Using just the simple tags it contains, the human race has created an astoundingly diverse network of hyperlinked documents, from Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, to personal blogs and websites dedicated to cats that look like Hitler. HTML5 is the latest iteration of this lingua franca. While it is the most ambitious change to our common tongue, this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The language has been evolving from the start." (Jeremy Keith ~ A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on May 04, 2010 | Classification: Technology | Permalink

Interacting with the Semantic Web

"It's about the lines, not the points." (Duane Degler ~ Design for Context)

Posted by PJB on May 04, 2010 | Classification: Metadata - Technology | Permalink

Findability and Exploration: The future of search

"The majority of people visiting a news website don't care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very specific topic. They might just be wandering around. Or they're visiting your site because they're interested in one specific event that you cover. This is big. It changes the way we should think about news websites." (Stijn Debrouwere) courtesy of petermorville

Posted by PJB on May 04, 2010 | Classification: Metadata - Navigation - Search | Permalink

In Search of Novel Ways to Design Large Cultural Web Sites

"In this paper, we illustrate how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), combining lightweight information architecture with advanced search paradigms (like faceted search) and interactive visualization strategies, can be used to better support a number of communication goals. The examples are taken from the new Web site for the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage (to become public in Autumn 2010), where both a huge amount of content (the Italian archeological heritage) and a variety of users’ profiles (from scholars to amateurs and tourists) are managed." (Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas, and Luigi Spagnolo ~ Museums And The Web 2010) courtesy of petermorville

Posted by PJB on May 04, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - Search | Permalink

Doing User Research Faster and Cheaper

"Despite our seeing some initial signs of a recovery, for most people the economy still sucks. Companies have less money to spend and are more cautious about how they spend it. Companies that haven't already cut user research from their project plans altogether are asking researchers to achieve the same results for less money, in less time—or just to do less. Is it possible to scale back user research and still provide value? If so, how can we do things faster and cheaper?" (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2010 | Classification: Design research | Permalink

Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II

"This month's column covers strategies for making people more aware of the filtering options that are available to them, as well as methods of improving transitions between the various states a user encounters in a search user interface." (Greg Nudelman ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2010 | Classification: Mobile design - Patterns - Search - User experience | Permalink

Achieving Design Focus: An Approach to Design Workshops

"Stakeholders with business, design, and technology viewpoints can pull products in different design directions—sometimes without knowing how the design work fits into an overall strategy. This can leave stakeholders feeling lost and unhappy. Creating a focus around design goals and asking and answering the hard design questions as a team is an effective way of coalescing a team around one design direction. At the same time, it can create a more optimal and fun working environment. In this article, we'll describe a design workshop approach that can help you find that design focus." (Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology

"As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients’ products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on May 03, 2010 | Classification: Design research - User experience | Permalink