‘Rock Star’ is perhaps the most abused phrase in the history of job listings. Nobody should be looking for a “rock star” accountant, HR recruiter or janitor. Whomever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both. —AvoidThisJob.com on the differences between a Rock Star and a Planet Funk Store Manager
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Signal vs. Noise
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QUOTE: 'Rock Star' is perhaps the most abused phrase
2 Jul 2009 | 2:02 pm -
Product Blog update: New Basecamp features, Highrise/Harvest integration, etc.
2 Jul 2009 | 8:18 amSome recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog: Basecamp New File Uploading features in Basecamp We’re excited to announce a batch of improvements to File Uploads in Basecamp. Now it’s easier to attach multiple files at once, we’ve improved our progress bar to show you as each file is uploaded, and you can click thumbnails to zoom image attachments without leaving the current page. These new features make it faster and easier to attach, review and discuss files in Basecamp. Here’s a demo video to show you all the improvements. New Basecamp feature: The Daily Digest… -
Oldie But Goodie: Sketching with a Sharpie
1 Jul 2009 | 7:16 amI’ve always preferred sketching UIs with an as-thick-as-I-can-find Sharpie over a thin ballpoint pen or finely sharpened pencil. Ballpoints and fine tips just don’t fill the page like a Sharpie does. Fine tips invite you to draw while Sharpies invite you to just to get your concepts out into big bold shapes and lines. When you sketch with a thin tip you tend to draw at a higher resolution and worry a bit too much about making things look good. Sharpies encourage you to ignore details early on. If you sketch, try a thick Sharpie next time. You may find you’re better able to… -
Design Decisions: Results from the Basecamp account screen redesign
30 Jun 2009 | 9:54 amJust about two weeks ago we launched the a redesign of the account chart in Basecamp. This is where people can upgrade or downgrade their accounts. The goal was to increase overall upgrade conversions and encourage people who are on Basic plans or lower to upgrade to the Plus plan (our lowest priced full-feature plan). Results I’m glad to report our design hunches appear to have paid off. We’re only about two weeks in, so we don’t have a ton of data yet, but we can compare the 14 days since the upgrade with the 90 days prior to the upgrade. Average upgrades/day: up 13%… -
Working at 37signals
30 Jun 2009 | 8:54 amIt’s been several weeks since I was hired here at 37signals so I thought it might be interesting to share some of my experiences so far. Ready, set, go! One of the best things has been how quickly I’ve been able to jump in and start contributing. The very first project I worked on was a refresh of the Account screen in Basecamp. What started as an exercise quickly escalated to a new design that we wanted to actually put into the app. So it wasn’t long before I moved from Photoshop right into the app code to integrate the new design. This required me to build on my limited…
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456 Berea Street
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Break
19 Jun 2009 | 12:55 amIt’s summer here in Sweden, and that means it’s time for my annual break from work and anything even remotely related to it, including this blog. I’ll be back in August.Posted in Life. -
Page zoom does not mean the end of flexibility
18 Jun 2009 | 11:17 amThe latest versions of most browsers support – and default to – full page zooming instead of just increasing text size. Some argue that this means you no longer need to think about what happens when users increase (or, to a lesser degree, decrease) text size, and that there is no longer a need for fluid or elastic layouts or using other units than pixels for font sizing. The thought may be tempting, but I don't quite agree, for much the same reasons as Zoe Mickley Gillenwater gives in Why browser zoom shouldn’t kill flexible layouts, where she argues that full page zoom does not solve… -
Accessibility improvements in Mac OS X Snow Leopard
17 Jun 2009 | 11:24 amApple recently announced that Mac OS X 10.6, a.k.a. Snow Leopard, will ship in September this year. I’m looking forward to it for several reasons, one of them being the accessibility improvements it will bring. According to Apple’s Mac OS X Accessibility page, Snow Leopard has plenty of accessibility news, several of which will not only help people with disabilities: VoiceOver trackpad gestures let you control VoiceOver from the trackpad Improved Braille support means built-in support for even more Braille displays Finally, full VoiceOver support for HTML tables The rotor lets you use the… -
Do you think a WCAG 2.0 technique can be improved? Let the W3C know.
16 Jun 2009 | 12:25 pmWhile going through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, I have noted that some of the Techniques for WCAG 2.0 could be improved, at least in my opinion. In some cases it’s a simple typo, in other cases the technique doesn’t describe what I would consider current best practice. The good thing is that the technique documents aren’t set in stone like the main WCAG 2.0 document is. If you have suggestions for improvement to a WCAG 2.0 technique (or any other WCAG 2.0 document), the WAI web site has a page with Instructions for Commenting on WCAG 2.0 Documents. I haven’t done… -
Using the Web with a refreshable Braille display
11 Jun 2009 | 12:50 pmChances are that you have either seen someone use a screen reader to access the Web. You may even have tried one yourself. Braille displays, however, are not as commonly seen, and since you need more than just software to use one it just isn’t feasible for most sighted Web professionals to actually try one. Not to mention the need to learn Braille to be able to read anything. So watching a video of someone using a refreshable Braille display to read with their fingertips may be as close as you get. Roger Hudson has posted one such video in Refreshable Braille and the Web, and I suggest you…
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Boxes and Arrows
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Using Wikis to Document UI Specifications
29 Jun 2009 | 1:16 amIntroductionThe role of the interaction designer is to specify the interface’s behaviors and elements, so that engineers know what to build and how the product should operate. This documentation is commonly known as a UI specification or UI spec. There are several applications for authoring a UI spec, with wikis being a relatively new tool. However, designers should be aware of a wiki’s benefits and drawbacks for documentation, since UI specs uniquely reflect a project and its context. The documentation needs are often based on the size of the project, launch date, team dynamics,… -
UI Pattern Documentation Review
29 Jun 2009 | 1:16 amIntroductionUser interface (UI) patterns have the potential to make software development more efficient. The prospect of such efficiency gains has led to interest in user interface (UI) patterns by individuals and organizations looking for ways to increase quality while at the same time reducing the costs associated with software development.The very nature of UI patterns requires that they be familiar to end-users. An individual UI pattern is a discrete, repeatable unit of user experience. I refer to collection of patterns as a library.In many cases, less proprietary patterns are more useful… -
UX Book Clubs
16 May 2009 | 2:00 amIn early Nov 2008, I started to talk to a few people about the idea of a book club in Sydney to discuss User Experience (UX) books. Russ Unger and Donna Spencer encouraged me to let other people hear about it, and when I did – through the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) Members discussion list, and then through the Interaciton Design Associaton (IxDA) – many people thought it was a good idea. And then something surprising happened, people liked the idea so much that they started doing things to make it happen. Andrew Boyd registered the… -
Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage
4 May 2009 | 12:51 amThe Balance of PowerThere are a wide variety of uses for Wikis and a level of interest in using them that’s matched by an extensive range of Wiki software. Wikis introduce to the Internet a collaborative model that not only allows, but explicitly encourages, broad and open participation. The idea that anyone can contribute reflects an assumption that both content quantity and quality will arise out of the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’There are, however, negative effects of this extreme openness. One problem is the deliberate vandalism of Wiki pages. Another is that even those with… -
Interaction 09 Follow-up
4 May 2009 | 12:51 amFrom February 5-8, 2009, IxDA hosted their second annual conference, Interaction 09, in Vancouver, BC. Last year’s inaugural conference in Savannah had a powerful and lasting impact on the community, filled with encouraging messages and the realization that for many of us that we had “found our tribe.” The challenge for 2009 was to see if that energy could be recaptured a year later—in a new place and during undeniably pressing times.The SettingThe Four Seasons in Vancouver felt much less intimate than the refuge and privacy we shared in Savannah, and the impact of…
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ZURBlog
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ZURB Has a Fresh Batch of Interns
1 Jul 2009 | 9:15 amWith summer upon us, the intern floodgates have opened and ZURB is hosting not one, but two summer interns. Meet Boris and Josh. Josh and Boris present the most recent version of an internal app they've been working on. The Interns give a once weekly presentation to the ZURB team where they solicit feedback on their tool and get chopped up on their preso skills. The duo are chugging away on some top-secret internal applications in the same laboratory where Notable was created. They're working in tandem on some of our best ideas to turn them into reality. Like we've said before: ZURB interns… -
Wireframe Faster with OmniGraffle Variables
1 Jul 2009 | 7:18 amWe use OmniGraffle to bust out fast, high quality wireframes here at ZURB. To help us crank those bad boys out, we rely on a few core features of OmniGraffle that allow us to stay focused on what really matters—the wireframing. As is the case with all our deliverables, we do our best to maintain presentation and context with every deliverable (sketches, wireframes, mockups, etc) as they'll typically be emailed around without the original message. To keep as much context as possible, we put our logo, project name, document name, and task in the headers of our files like so: Here's the… -
When do I get to use Notable? Can you give a sneak peek?
24 Jun 2009 | 4:42 pmGuest blogger and future ZURBian Dmitry Dragilev steps in to offer this introduction to Notable, ZURB's web feedback product currently in a private release. We know all of you are wondering—when am I going get a chance to try out Notable? When is Notable going public? What features does it have? So, for all of you who cannot sleep anymore: here's what we can tell you. When do I get to try it out? We’ve had an overwhelming response since we announced Notable just weeks ago! Hundreds of people signed up for a private invite and we’ve had tons of great feedback (with some people… -
Request Early Access to Notable
2 Jun 2009 | 5:34 pmWe're excited to announce the private release of Notable, the easiest way for teams to provide feedback on a website. Over the last few months we've put significant time into building what we think is a pretty cool utility for teams that build websites and products online. Why did we create Notable? After years of struggling to exchange quick feedback on dynamically changing websites, we were determined to come up with a solution that made it incredibly easy to get stuff done. Photoshop, Powerpoint, screen capture tools and email are useful tools, but they're not great for exchanging quick… -
Making Forms Convert Through Awesome Inline Labels
30 Apr 2009 | 11:43 pmForms are everywhere on the web – it's the primary way users can interact with a web-based system. If your site or app uses forms (and we'd bet that it does) those forms need to be well designed, or users aren't going to follow through. They may not sign up for your service, they may not fill out their demographic information, they may not even log in again after sign up. We love well-designed forms here at ZURB, and recently we've been exploring some cool new tricks for how we can display form inputs and labels in a concise, usable and totally awesome way. Inline labels are nothing new…
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Accessites.org
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Refreshable Braille
9 Jun 2009 | 2:30 am<img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/braille-display.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="" /> When guest author Roger Hudson presents accessibility seminars or workshops, he usually asks those attending to indicate if they have seen a screen reader being used. Several years ago, it was not uncommon for only about 10 percent of the audience to indicate that they had. Recently, often more than three quarters of the people attending say they have seen a screen reader in use. However, nearly all assume a screen reader… -
Orion House Bed and Breakfast
23 May 2009 | 2:38 pm<a href="http://bed-breakfast-port-isaac.co.uk/" title="Orion House Bed and Breakfast"><img class="right border" src="http://accessites.org/site/site-img/bedbreakfastportisaac.jpg" width="200" height="120" alt="Visit the Orion House Bed and Breakfast site" /></a> Compared to many other bed and breakfast (B&B) websites that we've seen, the <a href="http://bed-breakfast-port-isaac.co.uk/">Orion House Bed and Breakfast</a> site is outstanding. We're convinced that evveryone's… -
Under New Management
11 May 2009 | 6:02 am<img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/new-direction.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="" /> Late in 2005 I had the notion that most people felt accessible web sites are boring and basically without merit offering only the most simplistic functionality and style. As long as that notion persisted, I thought, it would effectively hold back the masses from embracing the needs of all users, not just those they felt were important. I thought that I could perhaps alter that notion, dispelling the myth, by showcasing sites… -
Leveling the Playing Field: We’re all Differently Abled
25 Mar 2009 | 7:30 am<img class="right" src="http://accessites.org/site/post-img/labeled-disabled.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="Labeled Disabled!" /> Accessibility and web accessibility are often highlighted as issues for people with disabilities. This is no surprise, all things considered, given the common definition of accessibility. "Disability" is, however, an almost meaninglessly broad term. Many of those who could be considered disabled would not choose to self-identify as disabled. "Disability" is a label, and like any label,… -
Keith W. Bell
10 Feb 2009 | 7:02 pm<a href="http://www.kwbell.biz/" title="Visit the Keith W. Bell site"><img class="right border" src="http://accessites.org/site/site-img/kwbell.jpg" width="200" height="120" alt="Keith W. Bell site" /></a> The <a href="http://www.kwbell.biz/" title="Visit the Keith W. Bell site">Keith W. Bell site</a>, at first glance, appeared clean and professional, albeit perhaps fittingly plain. Once we started exploring more deeply, kicking the site's tires and looking under the hood,…
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Architectures of Control | Design with Intent
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Sort some cards and win a copy of The Hidden Dimension
2 Jul 2009 | 2:19 pmIf you’ve got a few minutes spare, are interested in the Design with Intent techniques, and fancy having a 1/10 chance of winning a brand-new copy of The Hidden Dimension, Edward T Hall’s classic 1966 work on proxemics (very worthwhile reading if you’re involved in any way with the design of environments, either architecturally or in an interaction design sense), then please do have a go at this quick card-sorting exercise. It makes use of the pinball / shortcut / thoughtful user models I introduced in the last post, so it would probably make sense to have that page open… -
Modelling users: Pinballs, shortcuts and thoughtfulness
2 Jul 2009 | 9:08 amThe different approaches to influencing people’s behaviour outlined in the Design with Intent toolkit are pretty diverse. Working out how to apply them to your design problem, and when they might be useful, probably requires you, as a designer, to think of “the user” or “users” in a number of different ways in relation to the behaviour you’re trying to influence. I’ve thought about this a bit, and reckon there are maybe three main ways of thinking about users - models, if you like - that are relevant here. (These are distinct from the enabling /… -
‘Smart meters’: some thoughts from a design point of view
18 Jun 2009 | 1:09 pmHere’s my (rather verbose) response to the three most design-related questions in DECC’s smart meter consultation that I mentioned earlier today. Please do get involved in the discussion that Jamie Young’s started on the Design & Behaviour group and on his blog at the RSA. Q12 Do you agree with the Government’s position that a standalone display should be provided with a smart meter? -
Smart meter design consultation: chance to get involved
18 Jun 2009 | 2:19 amOver on the Design & Behaviour list/group, Jamie Young of the RSA has started a discussion about the UK’s ’smart meter’ plans, on which the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is running a consultation. Jamie’s blog post here is a great introduction to why designers should care about this: essentially, it’s a chance for to get involved in influencing a government / electricity industry initiative which will result in smart meters in 25 million homes. The smart meter display is potentially going to be a ubiquitous product, an everyday user… -
frog design on Design with Intent
14 Jun 2009 | 7:04 amRobert Fabricant of frog design – with whom I had a great discussion a couple of weeks ago in London – has an insightful new article up at frog’s Design Mind, titled, oddly enough, ‘Design with Intent: how designers can influence behaviour’ – which tackles the question of how, and whether, designers can and should see their work as being directed towards behaviour change, and the power that design can have in this kind of application. It builds on a trend evident in frog’s own work in this field, most notably the Project Masiluleke initiative (which seems to have been incredibly…
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UX Magazine
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UX Magazine running on Drupal
29 Jun 2009 | 1:44 amWhat a week! We have a bunch of new and exciting stuff to announce this week, but we'll start off the day by announcing our transition to Drupal. UX Magazine is now running on Drupal 6. The design has been left intact, although most of our frequent visitors will notice a dramatic upgrade regarding the sites' speed. We've also moved all out stuff over to the Rackspace cloud. We might still have some unresolved issues in the backend, and we might have to double up on some feeds but please bare bear with us, this is all part of the transition... We have lot's of exciting announcements coming… -
Google Wave Announced!
28 May 2009 | 10:49 pmGoogle I/O 2009’s big announcement could be the open-source – e-mail – chat – wiki – social network – file share – Twitter hybrid: Google Wave. While it won’t be out for another several months Mashable offers a pretty good recap of what to expect. -
Badda Bing!
28 May 2009 | 12:39 pmToday, Microsoft publicly unveiled its soon-to-launch search engine Bing! It’s expected to go live in the next few days, so keep a close eye on it. We will… -
Palm Pre Emulator Videos
26 May 2009 | 7:02 amWe’re pretty excited about the imminent launch of the Palm Pre. but until we officially get our hands on one we’ve been enjoying these screencasts taken via the WebOS emulator. While it’s hard to get a good feel of the phone without multitouch the videos go into quite a lot of detail on most features. -
2010 Toyota Prius Microsite
26 May 2009 | 6:50 amNice little product page for the new 2010 Toyota Prius. Still not sure about the car’s stylings but I love the animated infographics. I hear it also made The FWA’s site of the day.
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Design for Users
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What’s Your Body Saying About Being Fearless?
7 Jun 2009 | 12:29 pmA little bird on a wire informed us yesterday there was a thought-provoking new post over on The BrandBuilder’s blog (thanks Reza!) “Be fearless!” Blanchard instructs us, in his inimitable style. How I wish I could, some days. He says that “courage is one of humanity’s greatest gifts” and that is such a beautiful observation. But what if persistent, underlying fears and hidden emotions are getting in our way, despite our best intentions? I don’t know if any of you suffer from the same issues I do when it comes to business risk, taking chances,… -
A Study in User Experience: Twitter & #fixreplies
13 May 2009 | 7:56 amI have found that being a user experience person has often meant arguing a lot. Your role in the company, is to be the user advocate, not the company advocate, so that your voice is a reminder and constant reflection of a product’s users… you represent them, and are paid for doing that. But that means having to speak up, be confrontational at times, and be as persistent as you can possibly be when you passionately feel bad decisions are about to be made without being fired. So this Twitter issue of removing a certain setting regarding seeing your friends reply to folks you… -
Are You Getting To the Heart of Your Brand?
21 Apr 2009 | 1:29 pmTwo well-known brand strategists engaged in a conversation on Twitter yesterday that caught my attention. Olivier Blanchard, The BrandBuilder and Gabriel Rossi were discussing some of the problems companies have, in their opinion, with marketing and branding. Gabriel said “People who criticize Marketing & Branding need to learn to see the value of brands as a powerful socio-economic force“, and Olivier’s response was like a glass of cold water in the face: “… as opposed to looking at Marketing and Branding as the discipline of putting together ads, brochures… -
Is Your Agile Software Process Handcuffing the User Experience Design?
15 Feb 2009 | 11:15 amI’m running across a new problem with a number of clients and wondering if my user experience colleagues are having similar issues. The advent of web applications has resulted in a change for many software providers in the way they release software today. Agile software development is a method in which software is designed, examined and delivered to the market swiftly, so that end-users can provide feedback and more feature changes can be made and adjusted within a few months time, rather than once or twice a year. For off-the-shelf software, such as Adobe, Apple or Microsoft products,… -
Pick Passwords That Protect You Online
8 Jan 2009 | 7:34 amThe UX Booth, a neat new usability site, has an excellent article that could help so many users if they see, so I’d like to point my readers there: How To Pick Passwords That Protect Your Online Experience. Since the phishing incident at Twitter that I recently wrote about, another issue happened this week where a hacker was able to use a dictionary cracker to get inside Twitter’s back-end, and he promptly started messing with celebrity users accounts, naturally posting the most immature tweets his feeble brain could come up with. The culprit was one employee who had used a…
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Good Experience
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How to write a novel from Google's autocomplete
2 Jul 2009 | 9:09 amBegin a Google search for "should i" and you'll see what looks like the high points of a pretty interesting novel: Just like a good Russian novel, it doesn't have a happy ending. But begin a search for "should i get" and you see the arc of a story with a more positive ending. It's practically "Bridget Jones's Diary." Any other good "autocomplete novels" out there? Post 'em in the comments. -
Nice summary of the Hollywood blockbuster business: People complain about...
1 Jul 2009 | 9:18 amNice summary of the Hollywood blockbuster business: People complain about Hollywood's tendency to be unadventurous with its big-money titles, but the moviegoing masses clearly get the most excited when they are not being surprised. In other words, the multiplex really rocks when movies are served up the McDonalds way: predictably and comfortably. "Transformers" is definitely that. -
A tip for leading members in the community
1 Jul 2009 | 9:10 amA thought on successful community. Atul Gawande reports how an "anchor tenant" (a leading member) can make or break the network: The anchor tenants that set norms encouraging the free flow of ideas and collaboration, even with competitors, produced enduringly successful communities, while those that mainly sought to dominate did not. Collaboration - even with competitors present - allows a community to thrive. If one member tries to dominate, though, the community withers. This is much to the point of our Executive Councils, where members help each other, even in a context where competitors… -
Amazing range of participants already signed up for Gel Health....
25 Jun 2009 | 9:53 amAmazing range of participants already signed up for Gel Health. -
On patient navigators
24 Jun 2009 | 8:12 pmA patient navigator can improve the patient experience as much, or more, than expensive technology investments. Most often these navigators are laypeople, possibly retirees, with some experience with the health care system: Studies have found that patients recover better with a navigator to coordinate doctors' appointments, facilitate telephone contact between patients and doctors, arrange rides, help with insurance forms, and help patients prepare their questions for the doctor.
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information aesthetics
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Sputnik Observatory for the Study of Contemporary Culture
2 Jul 2009 | 3:09 amSputnik Observatory for the Study of Contemporary Culture [sptnk.org] is the latest project from interactive information design hero Jonathan Harris, well known from other info-aesthetics pieces such as I Want You to Want Me, Whale Hunt, Universe, Love Lines, We Feel Fine and Ten by Ten. If you want to know more about some perplexing themes like Interspecies Communication, Urban Metabolism or 21 Senses, then this site is for you. According to Chris himself: "The project is the result of a 2-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary… -
DD4D Conference Best-Of Coverage (Guest Post)
1 Jul 2009 | 2:25 amFrom June 18-20 we attended the DD4D (= Data Designed for Decisions) [dd4d.net] conference at the OECD Conference center in Paris. The conference was organized both by the IIID and the OECD with the goal to bring together statisticians, information designers, visualization researchers, and practitioners (or as the conference stated: "intermediaries between data, knowledge and empowerment"). The conference organizers had invited a number of amazing speakers, including such celebrities as Hans Rosling and Robert Horn. The overarching question raised by most speakers was how to go from data and… -
Typographic Reinterpretation of Cunningham's Dancing Hands
1 Jul 2009 | 1:51 amAscenders & Descenders is a typographic reinterpretation of Merce Cunningham's dancing hands as recorded by OpenEnded Group for the Loops project. The piece is a Cunningham dance work reconstructed from textual deconstructions of other Cunningham dance works. Each finger has an associated excerpt from an article, review, or essay on Cunningham from the last 5 decades. These texts become the "ink" with which each finger manifests its movements. Each text is dynamically typeset in 3 dimensional space along the curves traced by his fingertips. The software keeps track of various movement… -
Cykelbarometer: Public Copenhagen Urban Bicycle Counter
30 Jun 2009 | 12:23 amThe City of Copenhagen recently launched a public bicycle counter [copenhagenize.com], completely equipped with an air pump for the convenience of cyclists. The urban display counts the daily number of cyclists that use the new Green Path that slices diagonally across the Copenhagen and Frederiksberg pathway system. There is a 'sensor line' in the asphalt on the bike lane a few metres in front of the counter which registers the cyclists, probably via a motion sensor. The idea is to encourage more people to ride by showing how many are using it. The numeric displays show the total so far today… -
Communicating the Noise Levels Caused by Heathrow Airport
30 Jun 2009 | 12:05 amThe book Unseen Networks of Heathrow Airport [iancarr.net] is accompanied by a small collection of simple data visualization posters that illustrate the noise levels at different locations in and around Heathrow airport buildings and boundaries. The "Spheres" poster portrays noise levels recorded at a Sound levels (dB) location in and around Heathrow Airport by colored circles. The "Matrix" visualization displays the link between each Sound levels (dB) location and the type of sound recorded over two minutes. In "Density", each column portrays noise levels and each line represents when the…
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UXmatters
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Innovation Workshops: Facilitating Product Innovation
22 Jun 2009 | 10:26 pmBy Jim Nieters Published: June 22, 2009 “As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design.” As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design. Often, though, UX designers and researchers get stuck with incrementalism—designing minor new features for which another functional group has provided the requirements, expecting UX to design them—regardless of whether the UX team agrees with… -
Reusing the User Experience
22 Jun 2009 | 8:18 pmBy Peter Hornsby Published: June 22, 2009 “Components are proven, reusable units of design and code that meet a specific need. As such, they enable a developer to think about solving problems at a higher level of abstraction, making the development process more efficient.” Developers often report a sense of déjà vu when creating software—a sense they’ve already designed or coded a function. Of course, the feeling that he or she is doing unnecessary work is particularly frustrating when a developer is under pressure! The reuse of software components can… -
Moving into User Research | Establishing Design Guidelines
22 Jun 2009 | 5:12 pmBy Janet M. Six Published: June 22, 2009 Send your questions to Ask UXmatters and get answers from some of the top professionals in UX. We’ll discuss two topics in this edition of Ask UXmatters: moving from technical writing to user research establishing and documenting design guidelines Ask UXmatters answers our readers’ questions about user experience matters. If you want to read our experts’ responses to your question in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com. -
The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media
22 Jun 2009 | 5:06 pmBy Junaid Asad Published: June 22, 2009 “Social networking is now the number one reason people get online.” The emergence and rise of social media [1] have been nothing less than phenomenal. In the perennial battle between patterns of intellect and patterns of society, the rapidly spreading influence of social media has initiated the most significant shift toward dominance of intellect [2] in recent times. A groundswell [3] has unmistakably occurred. Social media’s rise has induced a paradigm shift and changed the way the common man perceives the Internet immensely. Social networking is… -
Know Your Core: Providing Focus for Web Applications
8 Jun 2009 | 2:21 amBy Luke Wroblewski Published: June 8, 2009 “In a world with such low barriers to entry, knowing that you can do something can quickly become secondary to knowing if you should do it.” As the Web has grown, the cost of getting a new application online has plummeted. Web hosting services with unlimited bandwidth and storage now cost less than ten dollars a month. Free open source platforms can easily power the back-end of an application. Free development toolkits for client-side programming (JavaScript) and styling (CSS) make building the front-end of an application much faster. In…
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A List Apart
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Visual Decision Making
23 Jun 2009 | 3:00 amIf it takes only 50 milliseconds for users to form an aesthetic opinion of your site’s credibility and trustworthiness, are designers who create visually compelling sites simply wasting time and treasure on graphic indulgences? Patrick Lynch doesn't think so. -
Introduction to RDFa
23 Jun 2009 | 3:00 amIn part one of a two-part primer on RDFa, learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness to the elements of the body. Mark Birbeck shows us how. -
Managing Werewolves
9 Jun 2009 | 3:00 amWhile you’re always optimistic when leading a team, you know that not everyone’s got your back. Liars and poor communicators can wipe out good work faster than a 404 error. Learn how to think critically about verbal and non-verbal behavior and to separate office politics from truth, so you don’t let the Werewolves win. -
Indexing the Web—It’s Not Just Google’s Business
9 Jun 2009 | 3:00 amInterface responsiveness is one of many details web developers must consider in their quest to deliver a good user experience. An application that responds quickly enhances the user’s sense of control. In working to maximize application speed, though, one often-overlooked element can affect performance more than almost anything else: database design. -
Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video
25 May 2009 | 3:00 amHave you ever wanted to resize a video on the fly, scaling it as you would an image? Using intrinsic ratios for video and some padding property magic, you can. Thierry Koblentz shows us how.
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Functioning Form: Interface Design
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More Sensors Coming to the iPhone...
1 Jul 2009 | 5:00 pmIn Designing for Sensors, I outlined how ubiquitous integration of sensor technologies in consumer devices shifts how we think about designing digital products. Soon, instead of just designing for computing (productivity and data management) or communication (email, social networks), we'll be designing for sensors. Today Apple Inc. revealed new patent applications that cover additional sensors which could be used in future versions of the iPhone. From Mac Rumors: Haptic Tactile Feedback: Adoption of "haptic" display technologies which allow the user will "feel" different surfaces as their… -
Stacks on the iPhone
28 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmIn my Apple’s Next Integrations article, I showcased several examples of how the company integrates new capabilities across its product line. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith recently did the same himself by building an implementation of OS X's Stacks feature on the iPhone. On a related note... is a three-dimensional remote controller (much like Nintendo's Wii) next on the list of integrations?Tags: apple, innovative UIs, UI components, interaction design, navigation -
First Person UIs on Android
24 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmIn my iPhone with a Compass = First Person UIs article, I discussed how location and orientation awareness in mobile devices opens up a set of new interface possibilities that are designed from the user’s current perspective. In other words, first person user interfaces that are built knowing where you are and where you are facing. Recently I found three such applications have made their way to Google's Android Market. Though in their early stages, these apps demonstrate the potential of creating user interfaces from a natural, first person perspective: how we actually see the world. IBM… -
Web Form Design: Korean Edition
23 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmInsight Publishing has translated my latest book Web Form Design: Filling In the Blanks into Korean and the book is now available for sale in Korea. If you are interested, take a look at the book announcement from Insight and the product listing on their site. Or peek inside the book at the Korean book site: Aladdin.Tags: forms, global design, UI components, guidelines -
Apple’s Next Integrations
22 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmNot only does Apple Inc. develop a lot of new hardware and software capabilities, they do a great job of integrating these new capabilities where it makes sense. Consider the lifecycle of Coverflow: a software capability that allows fluid visual browsing of digital assets. Coverflow first appeared in the iTunes media application, then made its way to the iPod line of portable media players, then became an optional way to browse files in the OSX Finder, and now serves as a visual search results list for your browsing history in the Safari Web browser. The iSight video camera, which began life…
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Andy Budd::Blogography Articles
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dConstruct Tickets on sale from 11am Monday
20 Jun 2009 | 2:30 amYes, it’s that time of year again. Time to set your alarms or calendar notifications as tickets for dConstruct go on sale this Monday at 11am. As always we’ve scoured the world to bring you an amazing line-up of speakers. People who educated, entertained and inspired us over the last couple of years. We’ve got insightful speakers like Adam Greenfield, author of “Everyware”, talking about ubiquity and location, or Russell Davies from Wired Magazine talking about the rise in post digital culture. We’ve got entertaining and educational sessions like Nathan… -
My First Impressions of Balsamiq
24 Apr 2009 | 7:26 amI recently received a wireframe from a potential client outlining their plans for a new homepage, which in itself was pretty impressive. It showed that the client had knowledge of the industry as well as a good understanding about the importance of planning. To produce this wireframe our prospective client had used a relatively new tool called Balsamiq, which aims to capture the sketchy nature of hand drawn wireframes with the utility of a GUI application. On the surface this seems like a really good idea and it obviously allowed the client to produce something relatively quickly with little… -
Conferencing part 2 - SXSW
1 Apr 2009 | 1:33 amEvery year SXSW takes on a slightly new dimension so it’s never the same experience twice. Change is inevitable and I always have a good time at the event. However I always find myself harking back to years gone by. I guess that’s age for you. This year attendance had grown by around 30%, and numbers fluctuated between 6,000 and 12,000 depending on who you spoke to. One things was certain though—it was big. With 20 tracks spread over three floors of the conference centre and expanding into the Hilton, SXSW obviously hasn’t been affected by the current economic climate. In… -
Conferencing part 1 - ETech
27 Mar 2009 | 8:45 amAs you’re no doubts aware I’m an unabashed conference junky, so it will come as no surprise to you that I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in the States attending three such events. First up was ETech, the emerging technology conference from O’Reily. Moved from it’s spiritual home in San Diego, this year it was help in the Chino wearing capitol of Silicon Valley, San Jose. The event was much smaller than last year and the tone was somewhat downbeat. However I don’t think this was necessarily down to the economy as a lot of people were speculating. ETech is… -
Why Friends Reunited Failed
2 Mar 2009 | 5:39 amI was recently interviewed by the Independent on Sunday to get a design perspective on why Friends Reunited ultimately failed. However rather than the design of the site, I think the design of the system was ultimately to blame. Friends Reunited was one of the first “Social Networks” in the UK, long before the term had even been coined. Like all good web applications it made something that was difficult to do in the real world, incredibly easy. You could now re-connect with people from your past and spark up new friendships. It also tapped into two basic human traits; curiosity…
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uselog.com | the product usability weblog
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Usability as sales argument for Sharp copiers
2 Jul 2009 | 4:55 amIn addition to Xerox - just push the green button - and Océ, who have been paying attention to the usability of their copiers and advertising that, we can now add Sharp to the 'usable copiers' list. Or at least advertised as usable. In the commercial above, the protagonist asks the following question:Why does my company have so many different printers and copiers, all different brands, with different controls? Give me one product line with a big colorful LCD screen and common controls. [...] And I don't wanna use one of those mini-screen keyboards! How about: a built-in keyboard? Was that… -
Designing usable money is not nickel and dime stuff
29 Jun 2009 | 5:18 amOne of the perks of spending some time abroad is that you get to be naive again. You are not accustomed to the design of what you interact with in daily life, so you see new things. I've had the opportunity and pleasure of spending two months at Northwestern University's Segal Design Institute and MMM-program. And for all the things I thoroughly enjoyed in the US, I must say, it was not the design of the coins and banknotes.What confused me about US coinsFirst of all, looking at the coins (pictured above) you can see that it's not very clearly indicated what the denomination of the coins is. -
How to dial phonewords on a Blackberry?
26 Jun 2009 | 6:03 amOn phones with a regular keypad (left) on every numbered key there's three letters as well, allowing for the use of phonewords or vanity numbers. Think 1-800-flowers or 1-800-rent-a-car. In the US, advertisers often only list the phoneword (as in the photo below). But I was just wondering: how do you enter a phoneword number on a Blackberry keypad (pictured right), where the distribution of letters and numbers over the keys is different? As it turns out, you need to use a workaround. -
FoodUX: for UX designers that are hungry for more
23 Jun 2009 | 5:34 amIt's good to get inspired by other disciplines once in a while. Here's a combination that I hadn't seen before, but that put a smile on my face when I did: FoodUX - gastronomic inspiration for UX designers. As the author puts it: FoodUX is a passion synergy of the creation of memorable culinary experiences and the design for compelling user experiences. -
When graphic design gets in the way
18 Jun 2009 | 11:16 amWhen I first saw the products pictured above I was not sure what to make of them. You are wondering what you are looking at? They're actually fire extinguishers from Fire Design. However, in case of fire I would like anyone who's around to be able to find the fire extinguisher in the blink of an eye. And a cool graphic design doesn't exactly help to identify these objects as being fire extinguishers. They might as well be one of those hip 'design' SIGG bottles.When someone has to find something quick, it helps if the 'something' is looking like they expect it to. In which case it helps to…
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Monday By Noon
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Google’s “Let’s Make the Web Faster” Movement
29 Jun 2009 | 5:04 amI love Google, I really do. The company and all of its work is heavily integrated into everyone’s lives no matter how hard you may try to escape it. Google not only takes a lot of initiative when it comes to the Web in general, Google has done a lot to facilitate Web development on many levels. From Google Code to Google Gears and many (many) in between, Google’s latest venture, Let’s Make the Web Faster, is geared directly at Web developers. What you can learn By far the largest resource available on Let’s Make the Web Faster is the collection of articles available. -
Improving Your Process: Faster Front End Development
15 Jun 2009 | 5:19 amIn our business, time is of the essence. Regardless of your billing policies, as a professional designer it is imperative that you have the ability to accurately estimate a workload and then follow through, on schedule. The ability to estimate work comes only with experience. You can read countless articles on design, even specifically on Web design, but until you get at least a year of consistent, professional work under your belt, it just won’t be there. It’s absolutely no fault of your own, simply because you haven’t worked enough. That said, depending on your billing… -
Improving Your Process: Thinking More About Your CSS
1 Jun 2009 | 6:17 amOver the past few months, I’ve been trying to keep an eye on myself as far as writing CSS goes. Writing CSS leaves a lot in the hands of the author, and every designer has his or her very own method to madness. When it comes to CSS, you can do anything you want, which is mostly valuable, but sometimes hurtful with inexperience. I’m always curious to know the thought process behind writing CSS from the eyes of the author, as every stylesheet can be quite different from the next. The way you write your CSS today depends heavily on what you were initially taught (self or otherwise)… -
Building Functional Alt Sites using SWFAddress
18 May 2009 | 8:40 amMy position on Flash changes from time to time, but to be brutally honest, I’m not a big fan. I absolutely see its worth, and understand that using Flash can enhance the experience of a website in a wide variety of ways. To me, though, Flash is not the Web at its greatest. The Web, to me, is information. It’s a living, ever expanding library of data available for our interpretation and digestion. That’s not to say that the Web can’t be used as an entertainment platform, however. The Web is becoming more adaptive to the entertainment industry than it has ever before,… -
Covering the Implication and Basics of CSS Animation
4 May 2009 | 5:45 amOver the past few months, I’ve been embracing progressive enhancement on a new(er) level. I’ve been using CSS3 to make my life easier, leaving other browsers in the dust with the extra touches. I’ve lost all interest in making sure a design looks equally sophisticated in substandard browsers, and instead opted to leave that last column in my table left aligned instead of making the table a bit easier to read with right justification. Of course I still support IE, and I don’t want to bring that up for debate at this time. That poor horse has been long gone for quite a…
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UserGlue UserBlog
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Peachpit Interview Transcript – A Project Guide to UX Design with Russ Unger
9 Jun 2009 | 11:34 amPeachpit did a podcast interview with Carolyn Chandler and myself a couple of weeks ago, and I was fortunate enough to be able to transcribe my parts it. Below are my answers to the questions that were asked of us. You can also listen to this online, or download a copy of the interview from Peachpit Author Talk. What is user experience design? In the book we define it broadly as “The creation and synchronization of the elements that affect users’ experience with a particular company (or product), with the intent of influencing their perceptions and behavior”. That’s… -
Video Interview at SXSW with Russ Unger
9 Jun 2009 | 11:12 amWow. Feels so very vain to type that. But, if you’re interested in seeing my ugly mug and listening to me talk about the book, “A Project Guide to UX Design” that I co-authored with Carolyn Chandler, please, check out the video! Click here to see the video interview. Feel free to lob tomatoes at your monitor as you deem necessary. -
Chicago Interactive Design & Development Group – May 19, 2009
20 May 2009 | 7:35 pmMay 19, 2009, Carolyn Chandler (my co-author for A Project Guide to UX Design) presented at the Chicago Interactive Design & Development Group’s monthly meet-up. We presented our joint presentation (which is really Carolyn’s that we worked me in to), “Learning to Love Tension, Disruption & Chaos” that we had presented a couple of weeks ago at the Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in San Francisco. It’s amazing what a difference 2 weeks can make! It’s also pretty amazing that we each only knew 1 person in the room–quite a few people… -
If the User Can’t Find the Error Message, It Doesn’t Exist
29 Apr 2009 | 5:41 pmAlternate Title: If a user can’t understand your message in 6.5 seconds, you’ve failed. If a user can’t understand an error message in 6.5 seconds, you’ve failed a lot worse. The past weekend, I took my family to the local mega-movieplex to take in the latest in animated 3D family fun. It’s rather established that I’m a bit of a geek–I love the interactive world, and frankly, if it wasn’t for the visual stimulation of seeing many products combined together, I probably would do all of my shopping online from the comfort of my home office. This is… -
Praise for A Project Guide to UX Design
13 Mar 2009 | 8:41 amI’m down in Austin, Texas, for SXSW and have finally had the chance to see copies of the book! Things are hectic and there’s more information overload and internet underload (seems all connections down here are pretty sluggish from the growing masses of people all trying to be connected at the same time–go figure!), We’ve heard the books have started shipping and we’ve received some copies of our own, so we felt it was time to share some of the praise and feedback that we’ve received: “If Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler were magicians, the Alliance…
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Church of the Customer Blog
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WOM won't wait 'til Monday
1 Jul 2009 | 11:27 amBuzz isn't scheduled, especially bad buzz. Thanks to Twitter, it can snowball into an avalanche of angry buzz after hours or during a weekend, just in time for the Monday morning news, as Amazon and Motrin recently learned. (Recent bad buzz for Domino's began on a Monday evening.)The bigger the company, the more likely the inevitable unhappy Tweet that could begin Saturday morning. Then what? Who's monitoring your brand Friday night to Monday morning? Your social media manager? PR agency? Ad agency? Your social media intern? Do you have a process to monitor and respond to weekend online word… -
Hype vs. excitement
1 Jul 2009 | 6:48 amHype is: Excitement is: An impossible promise A realistic promise Sales-driven Value-driven Exclamation points Passion Obnoxious Contagious Cause for mistrust Cause for belief Overuse of adverbs Adverb-free Narcissistic Optimistic Segway Bike Friday Contrived Authentic Unsustainable Fuel for the future How would you describe hype vs. excitement? -
The secrecy tax
23 Jun 2009 | 11:15 amApple apparently goes to great, almost CIA-like lengths to maintain secrecy.It includes mazes of security doors, numeric codes to enter one's office, which is constantly monitored by security cameras, red warning lights when secret devices are unmasked, and the deliberate spread of misinformation inside the company, according to the Times. Secrecy isn't a communications strategy at Apple. It's part of the company's cultural DNA, and it generates staggering levels of free press and PR.That makes many companies want to emulate Apple's culture of secrecy, but the company is and always will be an… -
The intern trap
17 Jun 2009 | 2:34 pmWould you let a company intern: Man your customer service line? Be your receptionist? Be your spokesperson to the Wall Street Journal? Be the main contact for your most talkative customers? If not, then why do companies put, or think of putting, interns in charge of their social media presence? "Let's put an intern in charge of our corporate Twitter ID" is heard a bit too often.Interns can obviously be smart and bright and with the right training, can do things well. But interns are usually temporary; making one the face of your company on social media sites does them, and you, a disservice. -
An emerging metric: the GoodGuide score
15 Jun 2009 | 1:24 pmA non-profit website founded and staffed by academics and researchers is scoring consumer products based on health, environmental and social impacts. Based on its purpose and how easy it is to use,GoodGuide could usher in a new metric: social value. You could say social value is how well a company practices good corporate stewardship, something the typical may not concern himself with in the aisles of Walmart, but early adopters, buzz-spreaders and health-involved purchasers often do. For GoodGuide, good corporate stewardship includes product ingredients free of carcinogens, aren't brought to…
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InfoDesign: Understanding by Design
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European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past
2 Jul 2009 | 8:57 am"Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information… -
Future Practice Interview: John Ferrara
2 Jul 2009 | 8:48 am"Working in the user experience, we want to capitalize upon interfaces that people already have a lot of experience using. If gaming is so ubiquitous, we'd be terribly remiss in not paying careful attention to it. But there's also just so much innovative work going on in games right now. Game designers are viciously competing with each other to create unique, engaging experiences, and you see rapid development of new ways of interacting. There's really exciting work being done in motion control, voice control, gesture-based interfaces, and online collaboration, as well as elegant… -
Abandoning Service Design
2 Jul 2009 | 4:56 am"Service design faces an uphill battle here in the US. There's plenty of interest on the design side but we need more voices speaking to the business side of the equation. For better or worse, Merholz is one of the few people with access to a platform for making that argument." (Jeff Howard - Design for Service) -
Interactions interviews Adam Greenfield
2 Jul 2009 | 3:44 am"Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I'm so interested in, but by the same token we're that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It's a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it's one we're making without really examining what's at stake." (Speedbird) -
The Future of HCI: Intelligent User Interfaces as Agents of Change (preso)
2 Jul 2009 | 3:31 am"The predominant interaction paradigm for the last 30 years has been Direct Manipulation. This metaphor is starting to crack under the weight of information it has to deal with. The Indirect Management approach taken by systems such as Intelligent Agents aim to alleviate the cognitive load on users. This presentation shows the constraints we face in the user experience field and some future opportunities and threats." (Christopher Khalil)
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Dexo Design - Russell Wilson's Blog on UI Design and Development
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Where is the Sign In on Amazon.com?
29 Jun 2009 | 9:27 pmIs it just me or does it seem strange that there is no Sign In on Amazon.com’s homepage? Each time I visit amazon.com, and I visit too often, if I’m not already logged in, I stumble looking for the Sign In link. I would expect the “Sign In” text at the top of the page to be a link taking me to a Sign In form. Or even better to automatically display a Sign In form on the homepage. But instead you are required to click on something that would only be available to you once you ARE signed in – e.g. “personalized recommendations”, “Your… -
How to display the number of subscribers and unique visitors on your Wordpress blog as text strings
22 Jun 2009 | 2:53 pmI’ve been wanting to display the number of subscribers to my blog and the number of unique visitors (for a particular timeframe) as simple text strings, without images, icons, etc. Turns out this is not as straightforward as I hoped. But it can be done. If you burn your feed through Feedburner (like I do), you can display the number of subscribers (i.e. FeedCount) by inserting some Javascript anywhere on your site. The catch is that you have to accept their presentation with very few styling options: Francesco Mapelli created a Wordpress plugin called Feedcount 1.2 to… -
Results for Most Preferred UX/UI Title Poll
19 Jun 2009 | 9:09 amParticipants were asked to rank titles (prefixes and suffixes) in order of their preference. This doesn’t reflect current titles – this is preferred titles regardless of current titles. - Surveys completed: 146 (hundreds of abandons) - No data on participants (current titles, etc.) – anonymous ranking only without additional questions - Request to take survey sent to: IxDA, Refresh, Agile-Usability, Facebook, Twitter Results: Prefix Rank (most preferred to least): 1. User Experience 2. Interaction 3. User Interface 4. Usability 5. Web 6. Other Suffix Rank (most… -
Google launches “Fusion Tables”
16 Jun 2009 | 2:42 pm” Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts. Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed. Merge data from multiple tables. Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions.” http://tables.googlelabs.com Related posts:Google releases Page Speed -
An online directory of tools for user interface design
9 Jun 2009 | 9:07 pmSomeone recently notified me of a new site, IAApps.com, dedicated exclusively to software applications for user experience professionals. IAApps organizes all the different tools into 4 categories: Interface Modeling Prototyping Screen Capture Usability Testing Each category is then further organized by OS platform: Mac OSX flavors Windows flavors Web I found the navigation somewhat clumsy. Rather than navigate the menus, I’d prefer a tool “site map” – a single page with all of the tools listed under each category and operating system so that I could quickly scan for…
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Information Architects
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The Spectrum of User Experience (1)
As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other. That's why we keep them separated: Can't we just all get along? Or leave each other alone? We can't. The ... -
Introducing webtrendmap.com
Where is this year's clickable version of the Web Trend Map? And the screen savers? And the background images? And the PDFs? Answer: Forget about that. We have something way better in the making. Currently iA is building an interactive version of the Web Trend Map under webtrendmap.com. The idea ... -
Web Trend Map 4: Coolest Gift For Geeks
The beta version has been featured all across the web from TechCrunch to BoingBoing, and Gawker. Now the latest version of our popular Web Trend Map is up for grabs. The Web Trend Map plots the Internet's leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully ... -
Kill Blog Comments?
Blog comments have an innate communication problem: You can't discuss and moderate the discussion at the same time. Moderating blog comments I often feel like being pushed in the role of the understanding father that needs to calm down his rebellious teenage son. Blogs comments are useful to evaluate how ... -
Web Trend Map 4 - Final Beta
Here it is, posted in a panic: Web Trend Map 4. We'll give you a week for final feedback before we send it to the printer. Download: For the final feedback round, we only offer a PNG (2.6MB). There are more formats to come. Feedback: Use the comment section below for feedback ...
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Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
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XHTML WTF
The web's future isn't what the web's past cracked it up to be. 1999: XML is the light and XHTML is the way. 2009: XHTML is dead—kind of. From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009: XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources ... -
Design management
Clusterfuck, despite its saucy name, does not refer to a pleasurable group activity. Its origins are military, its antecedents bloody. The Urban Dictionary offers ten pages of definitions. Our favorite is a double entendre on "cluster bomb" and the oak leaf or star cluster insignia worn by incompetent military brass ... -
The new old minimalists
The earliest websites were minimal in the extreme, but without the style and flair to make a virtue of their simplicity. 37signals and Kottke pioneered the combination of simplicity with deft design sense. Cardigan made it art. Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and ... -
Sour Outlook
It's outrageous that the CSS standard created in 1996 is not properly supported in Outlook 2010. Let's do something about it. Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that ... -
Beauty and Code
In Issue No. 286 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites, Patrick Lynch explains why beauty matters in design, and Mark Birbeck introduces us to RDFa. Introduction to RDFa: Learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness ...
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Bloug
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Upcoming talks: Brooklyn, Seattle, DC
2 Jul 2009 | 6:02 amSteve Krug and now have our fall workshop schedule settled. You might not know, but Steve is working on a new (and much anticipated) book on DIY usability testing; that's what he's covering in his new workshop. I've been tuning my site search analytics for UX workshop; the attendees in London last May seemed to like it quite a bit. We'll be in Seattle October 29-30, and in Washington, DC November 9-10; registration is now open (there are discounts if you register for both, register three or more, or register before the early bird deadline). I'll also be keynoting the first Delve event, here… -
Shame and disgust
1 Jul 2009 | 8:20 amStumbled across this brief article about a new CIO at the US Department of Veterans Affairs. CIO Roger Baker's "...plan will require managers to deliver systems and applications incrementally, rather than all at once. If managers miss three key milestones, he will take steps such as stopping program development, analyzing and fixing problems, or even firing contractors if things appear to get out of hand." Holy crap. They'll even fire a contractor? Good God. But though I snark away, there but for the grace of that Good God go I. I used to do a little IA consulting for the VA. My client was… -
Beyond berrypicking
15 Jun 2009 | 10:55 amA colleague asks: I need to gather some evidence of user behaviour with regards to site search, namely 'browse vs search'. Do you know of any recent research papers that show a trend towards people preferring to search a website, rather than navigate? If so, what are the common themes? Does it depend on the type of user, the type of site, etc? Great question. I always refer people to Marcia Bates' seminal work on berrypicking, which defuses the versus part of "browse versus search," as it well should. But it's now twenty years old; any other, more recent suggestions? -
Main page malaise, part 17
11 Jun 2009 | 1:04 pmFast Company recycles some coverage of the American Airlines main page dustup. Interesting discussion in the comments section, worth checking out. But I can't help but thinking that they're spending way too much time kvetching about the main page at the expense of improving the UX of all those other pages. Advice to American Airilnes UX team: let your pain in the ass stakeholders fight over the main page: while they're distracted, you go and fix the rest of the site. After all, it's important too. -
Dear Content Strategists
5 Jun 2009 | 11:09 amDear Content Strategists: Well done. You guys are fantastic. You've got some great leaders among you, and more importantly, you seem to be generating a lot of meaningful grass roots activity. The world really needs you, and you're poised to achieve some big things over the next couple years. Just don't screw it up, OK? And how might you screw it up? By falling back on old models that make it hard to do new things. By doing it yourself, except when you ought to do it yourself. And most of all, by not using your imagination. Here are some suggestions, annoyingly unsolicited, based on a skewed…
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mcu.org.uk
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60 Hot To Touch Accessible Web Design Tips by Jim Byrne - published in paperback today
New book by Jim Byrne launched: 60 hot to touch Accessible Web Design tips - the tips no web developer can live without!. Now available in paperback. It takes a different approach to the standard big and heavy web technique tomes currently available - this one offers light bytes for easy digestion. It contains 60 easy to understand, practical tips you can put to good use when developing your next website. -
New Website launched: Accessible Web Design Services Glasgow
Former Making Connections Unit Director and Web accessibility specialist Jim Byrne has launched his new business website with the aim of helping organisations: Comply with Disability Discrimination legislation. Reach the largest potential audience - via an accessible, usable website. Access tailored training and support to maintain websites in the most efficient and accessible way. -
Seminar: The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and UK websites
A two hour seminar: Date: 25th May 9.45am - 12am. Book early to avoid disappointment. Venue: The Volunteer Centre, 84 Miller Street, Glasgow G1 1DT Cost: 39UK pounds per person. Facilitator: Jim Byrne email: ddaseminar@jimbyrne.co.uk Does your website comply with the DDA? Book your place on this seminar to explore the issues and find out what you need to know about the DDA and UK websites. This seminar is aimed at those individuals responsible for the creation, or management, of an organisation’s website. By the end of the seminar you will have answers to the following questions: Is your… -
Jim Byrne leaves Glasgow Caledonian University - now providing Web accessibility services
Jim Byrne leaves Glasgow Caledonian University - to provide accessibility web design, development and training services. I have been working within Glasgow Caledonian University since 1996, running the Making Connections Unit as a non-profit organisation providing advice, support and services to organisations interested in publishing accessible information on the web. In the last year I have worked as the University Web Accessibility Project Manager, providing training and consultancy to the web team (and external organisations) and working towards ensuring university websites are accessible… -
Accessible Web Design in Practice Training Course
There are still a few places left on the next Making Connections Unit, Accessible Web Design in Practice training course on the 9th and 10th of December. This a 2 day course being run in Glasgow Caledonian University Library in the Centre of Glasgow; the venue is close to both main Glasgow bus and train stations. Register your interest in the course by filling in the booking form. About the course This course is not about creating unattractive 'text only' pages; accessible design is about designing for disabled people and non-disabled people. The training combines off-line discussion and…
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maxdesign.com.au
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Some links for light reading (30/6/09)
29 Jun 2009 | 5:56 pmAPNG - the animated PNG Introducing The Open Web Education Alliance CSS cascade - a simple step-by-step presentation Traffic drops and site architecture issues Stop Password Masking IE6 denial message for Momentile.com Let’s make the web faster - Google Code Service Design UI Pattern Documentation Review beautiful fonts with @font-face 35 CSS-Lifesavers For Efficient Web Design Visual Decision Making Introduction to RDFa Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies Maintainability Guide -
CSS cascade - a simple step-by-step presentation
29 Jun 2009 | 3:09 pmHere is a presentation I gave on the CSS cascade at a company training session recently. A simple ste-by-step tutorial on the CSS cascade - for web designers and developers who are new to CSS or have struggled with the Cascade. -
Some links for light reading (23/6/09)
23 Jun 2009 | 5:40 amHow not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study HOW TO: Back Up Your Tweets SWFUpload jQuery Plugin Facebook Usernames and OpenID Layar - mobile augmented reality browser Flash indexing with external resource loading Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, Part 1 18 Free Text Editors To Clean Up Your Code 50 Fresh JavaScript Tools That Will Improve Your Workflow Fever Red hot. Well read. Pictaculous - A Color Palette Generator Minimal form layout Education for a team of none Writing Efficient CSS for use in the Mozilla UI Why browser zoom shouldn’t kill flexible layouts The… -
Two articles now in Norwegian
22 Jun 2009 | 8:10 amThanks to Bjorn Enki, CSS Centering - fun for all and Web standards checklist have been just been translated into Norwegian: CSS Sentrering - moro for alle! Sjekkliste for web standard The Web standards checklist article has now been translated into 21 languages: Bulgarian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Italian, French, German, Polish, French (Quebec), Portuguese, Czech, Russian, Finnish, Serbian, Hungarian, Dutch, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian -
Confusion over WCAG 1 and 2 in Australia
18 Jun 2009 | 9:09 amI have attended several meetings recently where clients have stated that they need their sites to comply with WCAG 2.0 - “as this is now the current guideline”. For Australian websites, this is NOT correct. At present, all Australian websites must meet WCAG 1.0 guidelines. As the Australian Human Rights Commission website states: We are continuing to engage in a process of broad-based consultation, and at this stage we have not finalised a view on any specific aspect of WCAG2.0. Our plan at this stage is to develop a draft revision of our Web Advisory Note that can be circulated…
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Muffin Research Labs
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BASH: Using brace expansion
22 Jun 2009 | 3:17 pmThere’s a nice feature of BASH which is to use a comma delimited list of strings inside of curly braces to reduce the amount of typing: here’s an example of using brace expansion to create log files for apache: sudo touch {access,error}.log Something seen less often is a blank entry like so: cp foo{,.bck} Which is shorthand for cp foo foo.bck. This is really useful when copying and moving files around using long paths. Using brace expansion can minimise the amount of typing and help avoid errors caused by typos too. Another use of brace expansion since BASH v3.0 is the possibility… -
vim: automatically highlight long lines
22 Jun 2009 | 2:50 pmThis .vimrc snippet highlights lines when you exceed 77 columns - this is especially useful if you are trying to adhere to PEP8 with Python development. The if statement makes this work for older vims as well as more recent versions which is handy if you put your .vimrc on remote boxes as vim below v7.1.40 doesn’t have the matchadd function. " Highlight lines over 77 columns if has('matchadd') :au BufWinEnter * let w:m1=matchadd('Search', '\%77v', -1) :au BufWinEnter * let w:m2=matchadd('ErrorMsg', '\%>80v.\+', -1) else :au BufRead,BufNewFile * syntax match Search /\%77v/ :au… -
Bash: turn on case-insensitive tab completion
6 Jun 2009 | 3:24 amI always forget this one, but it’s dead handy as it allows you to type “py” hit tab and it will auto complete for “Python” or “python” for example. Without this setting you’d have to type explicitly what you want. To enable run: echo set completion-ignore-case on | sudo tee -a /etc/inputrc tee -a appends to the file - though clearly proceed with caution and if in any doubt backup /etc/inputrc first. -
Running VMware images under VirtualBox
4 Jun 2009 | 5:11 amI use the excellent VirtualBox on Ubuntu but I had a specific Debian dev environment VM that I’d previously run under VMware Fusion on my work mac when it used to have OSX on it ;-). The current versions of VirtualBox (2.2.4 in my case) support running vmdk disks now so it makes it possible to just create a new vm with the appropriate setting for the existing vm image and attach the disks, or so I thought! When I first ran the image it looked to book up fine - however when it got to mounting the root file system it hung saying “Waiting for root filesystem” Fortunately whilst… -
Ubuntu: Turn off changing workspace with mouse wheel
2 Jun 2009 | 2:21 amI found the changing with the workspace with the mouse wheel really annoying. To disable it go to System => Preferences => CompizConfig (available if the compizconfig-settings-manager package is installed) and uncheck “Viewport Switcher” which is under the “Desktop” heading.
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vanderwal.net Off the Top
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Social Design for the Enterprise Workshop in Washington, DC Area
I am finally bringing workshop to my home base, the Washington, DC area. I am putting on a my �Social Design for the Enterprise� half-day workshop on the afternoon of July 17th at Viget Labs (register from this prior link). Yes, it is a Friday in the Summer in Washington, DC area. This is the filter to sort out who really wants to improve what they offer and how successful they want their products and solutions to be. Past Attendees have Said... �A few hours and a few hundred dollar saved us tens of thousands, if not well into six figures dollars of value through improving our… -
Catching Up On Personal InfoCloud Blog Posts
Things here are a little quiet as I have been in writing mode as well as pitching new work. I have been blogging work related items over at Personal InfoCloud, but I am likely only going to be posting summaries of those pieces here from now on, rather than the full posts. I am doing this to concentrate work related posts, particularly on a platform that has commenting available. I am still running my own blogging tool here at vanderwal.net I wrote in 2001 and turned off the comments in 2006 after growing tired of dealing comment spam. The following are recently posted over at Personal… -
Optimizing Tagging UI for People & Search
Overview/Intro One of my areas of focus is around social tools in the workplace (enterprise 2.0) is social bookmarking. Sadly, is does not have the reach it should as it and wiki (most enterprise focused wikis have collective voice pages (blogs) included now & enterprise blog tools have collaborative document pages (wikis). I focus a lot of my attention these days on what happens inside the organization�s firewall, as that is where their is incredible untapped potential for these tools to make a huge difference. One of the things I see on a regular basis is tagging interfaces on a wide… -
Tale of Two Tunnels: Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0
Yesterday I made a few comments in Twitter that prompted a fair amount of questions and requests for more information. The quips I made were about the differences between Web 2.0 (yes, an ambiguous term) and Enterprise 2.0 (equally ambiguous term both for the definition of enterprise and the 2.0 bit). My comments were in response to Bruce Stewart's comment The whole "Enterprise 2.0" schtick is wearing thin, unless you've been monitoring real results. Otherwise you're just pumping technology.. In part I agree, but I am really seeing things still are really early in the emergence… -
Stewart Mader is Now Solo and One to Watch and Hire
There seems to be many people that are joining the ranks of solo service providers around social tools. Fortunately there are some that are insanely great people taking these steps. Stewart Mader is one of these insanely great people now fully out on his own. Stewart Mader's Wiki Adoption Services are the place to start for not only initial stages of thinking through and planning successful wiki projects, but also for working through the different needs and perspectives that come with the 6 month and one year realizations. Those of you not familiar with Stewart, he wrote the best book on…
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PinPoint Performance Solutions
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Planning for Effective E-Learning
13 Jun 2009 | 9:18 pmYou may have heard the term Rapid E-learning and wondered to yourself, what does it mean? As I understand it, Rapid E-learning is delivering training (learning) by electronic means, utilizing quick design and development methodologies and available resources to bring a final solution to your target audience in the most efficient manner. If you have conducted your own research on the subject, you may have found different definitions. Nevertheless, the result is still the same – creating an engaging learning experience quickly and inexpensively. continue reading... -
Why No Blog Posts?
8 Jun 2009 | 8:48 pmNot long ago heard a fellow blogger say, “If you’re not blogging, your busy.” When I first heard him say it, I didn’t necessarily agree with him – until it happened to me. Regular blog posts have been absent for quite some time due to the fact that it’s been busy around PinPoint Performance Solutions. A window of opportunity has been opened up and you should see more posts in the near future. -
Adopting Sustainability for Better Workplace Performance
18 Mar 2009 | 8:21 amA couple years ago I met an interesting individual by the name of John Bernardo, the owner of Sustainable Innovations based in Boise, ID. After learning more about John’s work experience and his business, I started to think about how sustainability in business can improve workplace performance. Below is a brief interview I did with John to learn more about sustainability and how it relates back to business. continue reading... -
Simplify for Better Workplace Performance
25 Feb 2009 | 8:20 amIn good economic times, we tend to see an overabundance in all facets of business and life. There are more options to choose from. However, in difficult economic times tough choices need to be made. With resources dwindling and costs spiraling out of control, companies need to make choices and decide which products or programs to keep and which ones to cut. However, one of the unintended benefits of an economic decline is simplification. With fewer choices and options comes opportunities for better workplace performance. continue reading... -
Cutting Training in a Down Economy is not a Smart Move
10 Feb 2009 | 5:38 amWhen companies struggle through economic downturns, much like the one we are experiencing now, the first instinct is to start slashing the operating budget. Managers and employees are asked to do more with less resources. It’s been my experience that one of the areas hit hardest by budget cuts is the training function. Training is often thought of at times as a luxury or “nice to have” in an organization. It is an expense worth paying for when times are good, but an easy target for elimination when times are bad. continue reading...
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Putting people first
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Interview with the director of UX of the New York Times
2 Jul 2009 | 9:35 amVicky Teinaki talked to Alex Wright, Director of User Experience at The New York Times, and author of Glut, a book on the history of information architecture from human evolution to the internet, about how a librarian gets into user experience, why the New York Times doesn’t talk about readers anymore, and how the web might have been better had history been different. Can you talk about the work you do? I manage a small team responsible for conducting research into how our users (formerly “readers”) interact with the Times, both online and in print. We work closely with our design and… -
Videos of Compostmodern conference online
2 Jul 2009 | 6:00 amAll videos of the Compostmodern conference (San Francisco, February 2009) are now online. Presented by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), this interdisciplinary conference explores the range of design thinking necessary to create a socially and ecologically responsible society. Designers, manufacturers and business leaders come together to find inspiration, share knowledge and explore real world opportunities for transforming products, industries and lives. Speakers included Eames Demetrios of Eames Office, Saul Griffith of Makani Power, Allan… -
From “cultivating diversity” to “embracing cultural diversity”
2 Jul 2009 | 5:33 amA few months ago, we wrote with satisfaction how the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) got inspired by the theme of its first European regional conference (Turin, December 2008 – co-chaired by Experientia partner Michele Visciola), and chose for a major focus on design for its 2009 global conference (Portland, OR, June 2009). The 2010 UPA conference (Munich, Germany, May 2010) takes this just a bit further: design is now ‘experience design’ and the European regional conference theme of “cultivating diversity” has turned into a global… -
July-August issue of Interactions magazine is out
2 Jul 2009 | 4:12 amThe July-August issue of Interactions magazine is out and more and more content is publicly available online (thank goodness): Editorial: Interactions: Time, Culture, and Behavior Jon Kolko Over the past 10 issues, interactions has, with a great deal of conscious repetition, investigated themes of global influence, sustainability, temporal aesthetics, behavior change, and the design for culture. These issues are at the heart of the human condition – whether exploring, solving, or celebrating the relationships between people and society. These themes continually combine to offer a… -
Steelcase research insights
2 Jul 2009 | 2:36 amTwo interesting articles on recent Steelcase research, and particularly on the challenge of how to best gather relevant insights from qualitative research: How to find insights from your research You did the interviews, got the photos, and compiled the reams of data. Now what? A Steelcase experience could guide your next innovation project. Jessie Scanlon – Fast Company “The four-member group based in the Grand Rapids (Mich.) headquarters of the office furniture giant was studying the experience of cancer patients, and had spent months interviewing and photographing doctors and…
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Reaction!
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wells&more book flips two ways
2 Jul 2009 | 2:50 amwells&more's brochure shows the reader graphical content when flipped in one direction, and high gloss architectural photography when flipped in the other. [via swissmiss] -
Zygotes: Interactive beach balls
2 Jul 2009 | 2:26 amTangible Interaction's Zygotes are lightweight helium filled orbs (think beach balls) that respond to human touch - changing colour and generating different sounds as they are punched, tapped, slapped or squeezed. The video above shows the crowd at ACM SIGGRAPH Vancouver playing around with them. (They've also appeared at a Chemical Brothers pre-show in Bucharest) -
Tokyo subway manners posters
2 Jul 2009 | 2:07 amA collection of posters that remind Tokyo subway passengers to mind their manners. -
Theft-proof umbrella
1 Jul 2009 | 1:33 amMac Funamizu's latest product concept is designed to combat umbrella theft - which is quite common in otherwise crime-free Japan, according to core77. -
Lego Arcade
1 Jul 2009 | 1:07 amRelive some classic video games from the 1980s - including Frogger, Space Invaders and Pacman - in this Lego-based stop motion animation.
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Shane Morris: UXB
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Remix Australia Lonely Planet Surface Demo
2 Jul 2009 | 4:17 amThe Lonely Planet Surface application that Amnesia Razorfish showed at Remix has been generating heaps of interest, so I’m pleased to say that the videos are finally online for your viewing pleasure. First check out the Lonely Planet keynote demo (around 7.5 minutes): Then for more detail on designing for touch and multitouch, and for the back story of the Lonely Planet design process, check out the session Iain McDonald from Amnesia Razorfish did with me later in the day (about 45 minutes): Design in the Round: Creating Compelling User Experiences for Surface Also, here are the slides for… -
Surface SDK now available to Microsoft Partners
29 Jun 2009 | 9:41 pmWhile Surface units are still not available in Australia, Aussie companies who are champing at the bit to give Surface design and development a try can now at least get access to the SDK and simulator, and get started working on Surface applications. Microsoft partners can now sign up to the Surface Partner Program. The entry level (“Microsoft Surface Community Members”) provides access to the SDK and simulator, as well as training and other resources. No commitment. Clarification: this is the Workstation edition of the SDK, not the full SDK which comes with a Surface developer unit. What… -
Wacom offers for Remix Australia attendees
10 Jun 2009 | 5:45 amRemix Australia is on tomorrow, and Wacom are offering some great deals on Intuos3 tablets. Check them out at the Wacom stand. Microsoft Partner and Remix sponsor Wacom to offer limited number of heavily discounted professional graphics tablets exclusively for Remix attendees. The Intuos3 professional graphics tablet (as used during Lord Of The Rings production) perfectly integrates with Microsoft’s Expression products delivering 1024 levels of pressure sensitive control to the vector art creation components of Expression Design. As a ReMIX attendee don’t miss out on this… -
Remix registration is live – Register now and Save! Save! Save!
5 May 2009 | 12:53 amIt was weeks in the making, but the Remix Australia website is finally live and taking registrations. Check out the program and you’ll see we’ve been working hard to find the best speakers to cover all the latest Microsoft stuff for the web and beyond. Just look! There’s Surface, there’s Sketchflow, there’s Blend, there’s Silverlight, Virtual Earth, Live and there’s even a session on how to create branded user experiences in SharePoint. Oh, and there’s a technical track too where you’ll stare at Visual Studio all day and wonder what they’re doing over in the creative… -
First Meeting of Silverlight Designer and Developer Network in Sydney May 5th.
29 Apr 2009 | 8:51 pmMiguel Madero and pals have organised the first Silverlight Designer and Developer Network in Sydney for May 5. Chris Anderson will be covering styling strategies and the ubiquitous Jordan Knight will be covering Silverlight 3’s greatest hits. Check out the details at http://miguelmadero.blogspot.com/2009/04/first-meeting-of-silverlight-designer.html
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Standard Web Standards
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Practical Usability Methods for The Busy Web Designer
15 Jun 2009 | 6:19 amI was once asked what my “dream team” for a web design team would be composed off and right off the bat I said I would really like a usability person on my team. There’s a reason why I said that’s a dream team because more often than not, web design teams don’t have a usability guy/girl to manage the interaction design, user experience, and ease of use of the web site. Most of the time, it falls on the shoulders of the web designer to be that usability person because a) there’s no budget for a usability analyst/engineer b) there are no resources for a… -
Spoke at the 14th Graphic Expo
4 Jun 2009 | 6:56 amI was invited to give a couple of talks in behalf of the Philippine Web Designers Organization (PWDO) at the 14th Graphic Expo in Pasay City. The talks I gave centered on two aspects of what I’m very much interested in: Web Standards and Freelancing for the Web. Those two speaking slots were held on two different days, but the weather was just bad (like storm-like bad). For the Web Standards talk, the audience was primarily non-web designers, but potential clients of web designers. (I initially thought I would be educating designers, but it was OK.) I had to adjust the talk to focus… -
Whoa! A New Search Engine? (Wolfram Alpha)
1 Jun 2009 | 8:56 amIn the past couple of weeks, a new search tool had been getting a lot of internet ink: Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha is a tool that makes its distinction by not scouring through billions and billions of pages, but rather computing the response on the fly. Meaning, if you type in an item, say “internet users,” Wolfram Alpha will compute, or piece together its reponse from its data banks. In contrast, Google (and any other search engine) will return existing web pages it deems best fit to the search query. This is an intersting take on the evolution of “answer engines”. -
Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 09
29 May 2009 | 7:01 pm“How do you improved tabbed browsing?” This is the fundamental question the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 09 is trying to answer. More specifically, the design challenge is how to find new, innovative ways to create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance. The context of this challenge is the inherent weakness of tabs: it can work for a few items (around 9-10 tabs), but it falters when the number of tabs goes beyond that. (Imagine tabbed browsing for 50 windows). I think the challenge is really to now go beyond tabbed browsing because I… -
Smart Sandbox: When Cross-platform Integration has Issues
27 May 2009 | 7:53 amIn the past week, Smart Communications launched Sandbox, The Philippine telecoms giant’s entry into the local social network scene. Sandbox boasts an integrated social community on the web and mobile platforms. From the Sandbox site’s own words: Sandbox is a portal that brings all content and services you love on the web all in one place. In Sandbox, you can create your own profile and update your status for your friends to see. You can upload and view photos and videos, write a blog or join a forum discussion. You can also go shopping on line. You can send and receive email…
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Subtraction.com
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Jean-Luc Godard Interviews Woody Allen
30 Jun 2009 | 12:45 pmGold mine of a discussion between two giants, from 1986. -
Typography in Doubt
29 Jun 2009 | 5:13 pmOver the weekend, resigned to the couch while fighting a cold, I watched John Patrick Shanley’s movie adaptation of his own play, “Doubt.” It’s a truly superb piece of dramaturgy that’s gripping and not a little depressing, to be honest. But it’s also sure to reward any viewing, so thought-provoking and thoughtful are the plot and dialog throughout the movie’s 104-minute running time. That includes the movie’s beautifully simple titles, too. In fact, the titles of this film are so effective, they reminded me of how rare a thing is truly… -
Goodbye to Way Back When
26 Jun 2009 | 9:21 am -
Advertising Designs for Container Corporation of America
25 Jun 2009 | 10:36 amGallery of amazing designs from a former corporate leader in commissioning extraordinary work from seminal designers. Also see gallery two and gallery three. Via Sam Potts. -
Photojojo: Guide to Kodachrome
25 Jun 2009 | 4:31 amAn end-game primer on how to get your hands on, shoot with and develop the distinctive, century-defining photographic film before it’s completely discontinued. And by the way, if you’re at least mildly interested in photography and not yet subscribed to Photojojo, you’re missing out.
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The Web Standards Project
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Introducing The Open Web Education Alliance
29 Jun 2009 | 5:49 amThe W3C recently announced an exciting new incubator group - The Open Web Education Alliance (OWEA) - that is certain to have a significant impact on helping web standards and best practices find their way into classrooms around the world. The mission of OWEA is to bring together companies, schools, and organizations involved in shaping the education of Web professionals to explore the issues around the topic of Web development education and create solutions for improving it. Many organizations like Opera, Adobe, Yahoo, WOW, and WaSP InterAct have been diligently working to develop curricula… -
Interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification.
13 May 2009 | 3:19 amYou’ve heard it’s coming in 2012. Or maybe 2022. It’s certainly not ready yet, but some parts are already in browsers now so for the standards-savvy developers, the future is worth investigating today. Ian “Hixie” Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification, hopes that the spec will go to Last Call Working Draft in October this year. Accessibility Task Force member, Bruce Lawson, interviews Hixie on how the specification for the next generation of the Web’s markup language is shaping up. Disclosure of affiliations: both work for browser vendors—Bruce… -
InterAct translations and localizations
11 May 2009 | 6:02 amWork is well and truly underway to get WaSP InterAct translated into multiple languages. With an army of over thirty volunteers working in eighteen languages we hope to get localized versions of the Curriculum into schools colleges and universities near you soon. It’s a huge project and we’re looking for as many volunteers as possible. If you’d like to help translate or help with localizing content for your local education system email the ILG leads and we’ll put you in touch with other volunteers. Full details abut how to get involved can be found in the… -
Help tidy HTML 5 (and get your name in lights)
2 Apr 2009 | 8:46 pmThe editor of the HTML 5 spec, Ian Hickson, calls for input on issues in the spec—typos, contradictions, or simply confusing bits. If everything goes according to plan, all issues will get a response from the editor before October. He says The plan is to see whether we can shake down the spec and get rid of all the minor problems that have so far been overlooked. Typos, confusion, cross-reference errors, as well as mistakes in examples, errors in the definitions, and major errors like security bugs or contradictions. Anyone who helps find problems in the spec — however minor — will… -
Purpose of Conficker Worm Uncovered
31 Mar 2009 | 10:00 pmLate yesterday, members of the Internet Information Security Consortium (I2SecC) working in conjunction with a cadre of white-hat hackers from around the globe were able to identify the purpose of the Conficker worm, which has been able to infect a large number of unprotected computers. Starting today, April 1, this network of compromised hosts will begin a massive denial-of-service attack on Web sites that do not pass validation as being fully standards compliant. In order to ensure you do not fall victim to the worm’s botnet, I2SecC recommends immediate validation of the markup and…
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UsabilityBlog
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Bad Sign-In Experience @ Amazon
30 Jun 2009 | 10:28 am(Click image to view full-sized) (Note: It must be “beat up on Amazon day” here in Central Texas, because I just noticed that Russell Wilson over at Dexo Design just posted an article about Amazon’s “can’t sign in from home page” problem.) After all these years, Amazon still hasn’t fixed that wonky “new customer” / “returning customer” interaction. For those of us who tab their way through form fields, this one bites me in the butt every time. First I enter my email, then I tab to the password field. Then I enter it, tab to the… -
Bad IVR: If You Need Something From Me, How About Letting Me Know?
23 Jun 2009 | 8:22 amOnce again I had a sub-optimal experience with an interactive voice response (IVR) system. I called AT&T to check on the status of my service call - we haven’t had dial tone on our land line since mid-Saturday - and the system asked me to input “my ten digit phone number, starting with the area code.” Which I dutifully did. And you know what happened? Nothing. And more nothing. A whole bunch of nothing. After a good 7-8 seconds of waiting I sighed and figured I should probably press “#” or something. Sure enough, after pressing “#” the system… -
(Hope You Like The) New UsabilityBlog Design
16 Jun 2009 | 11:35 amUnless you’re using a screenreader (or a feed reader, duh…) you probably noticed the updated visual design I launched today. Hope you like it. The blue was starting to get to me. Shouts to Sandeep Gayke for the Wordpress coding fu. Recommended. Submit to popular social media sites (take your pick below): No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. -
My UPA09 “UX Kit” Presentation & Bonus Audience Comments
15 Jun 2009 | 12:55 pmToday I’m posting the presentation and source document from my UPA2009 presentation “A Kit For Building User Experience Teams in R&D Organizations.” The talk went very well; nearly everyone in the (somewhat small but whatever) audience spoke up and contributed. Happily, when I posted links to this content on Twitter I got about a half-dozen retweets, which for a second-stringer like me is not too shabby. So I think you’ll like this preso and the kit doc, which I’ve released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. BTW you… -
My “Usability Or User Experience” Presentation From Big (D)esign 09
14 Jun 2009 | 8:03 pmI had a really good time presenting and watching others present at Big (D)esign 09 in Dallas two weeks ago. One highlight was getting to hear Norm Cox’s keynote. My presentation was well-received from what I can tell. But I got so busy prepping for UPA2009 that I completely forgot to post my Big (D) presentation. So, my presentation from Big (D)esign “Usability Or User Experience?” is now available here at my business site (ShermanUX, which I clearly don’t plug enough…). My co-presenter Kaaren Hanson is still working on getting her slides in shape for general…
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User Centered
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GameInformer/GameStop didn't think the subscription process through very well
30 Jun 2009 | 9:13 pmI wanted to get a "Game Informer" subscription as I previously had one and miss it. Going to the website, I found the subscription link easily enough with a link that takes me to gamestop.com to do the shopping cart stuff. Fair enough. But I don't think these two companies got together and actually walked through this use case, otherwise they would have seen that there is a "shipping charge" and "X business day/transit nonsense that cause me to just abandoned the app in favor of calling them directly. You're treating a subscription like it's a one time purchase. This… -
More band-aids from Apple for the poorly designed iPhone podcast UI
20 Jun 2009 | 9:17 pmAt the sake of making this a site dedicated to Apple's podcast UI management, I'd like to point out yet another change that came about with the 3.0 iPhone software update, but first, see the history of this topic on the site to get up to speed, also, Kenneth Maage's thoughts in the comments here are pretty insightful as well for a "how it should work" argument. The scrubber (left-to-right slider) is very difficult to use with podcasts, and was a poor design decision. ...The fact that Apple added the 30 second rewind and the following scrubber fixes is enough evidence in the… -
Update: Design Decisions: iPhone (focus on podcasts)
18 Jun 2009 | 10:17 amThis image is a follow up to illustrate the text that goes with Design Decisions: iPhone (focus on podcasts)I thought it was illustrative enough to post separately, and not in the original post. It shows using the exact same widget in relatively the same location on the screen for different functions is a unnecessary (but admittedly minor) design decision. It's using the old 2.X iPhone OS, but the same design applies to 3.0 -
iPhone podcast UI is incrementing towards "good"
18 Jun 2009 | 8:55 amAnyone who's been around this site for awhile (all three of you) knows that I have a long standing series of beefs with Apple on how they handle podcasts on the iPod/iPhone. In summation- Apple initially treated the UI for podcasts very much like that for music/songs and have subsequently updated with a series of patches and band-aids to compensate that slowly increment towards a passable podcast UI. Apple's new iPhone software includes another one of these fixes that is likely spurned on by the same issues I brought up in my previous post on this topic- the seek and slider functions are… -
Opera Unite is how I envision the web.
16 Jun 2009 | 5:21 amOpera Unite is exactly how I envision my web experience working. Currently, I have a complicated web hosting/FTP setup that is cumbersome and time consuming. With Opera Unite, it's drop dead simple to share photos with my family. I envision a a situation where I just turn on my digital camera, an "eye-fi" like wireless memory card + service downloads my pictures to a folder on my computer, and Opera Unite makes it available to all! User Centered, super simple...all I had to do was push a button on my camera. My only beef would be that it's too simple- I'd like some time to evaluate…
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Veerle's blog: full articles
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Abstract my WordPress theme for WooThemes
2 Jul 2009 | 1:46 amIt’s a bit too busy here at Duoh! HQ to find the time to write an article for my blog this week, but not to worry, I have written an article about my process when I designed my WordPress theme for WooThemes... WooThemes? WooThemes started as a WordPress theme shop, but is now also expanding to Drupal, Magento and ExpressionEngine, the system my blog and my business site is using. My process Read about my process on the Duoh! blog. If you like reading these kind of articles and like to get background information on our design work, plus get some interesting links along the way, you… -
Answers to small Illustrator and Photoshop problems
22 Jun 2009 | 1:45 amWhen using Photoshop or Illustrator on a regular basis, whether you are a beginner, intermediate or pro user, you often bump into small problems that you would associate with illogical behavior and where you wonder “Why does this happen? Why doesn’t it just do what I want it to do”. They become little annoyances if you don’t know the immediate answer to. As soon as you know how to solve them, you see things clearer and differently. Today I though I share a solution to a few problems I encountered myself recently or in the past : Photoshop CS4 Problem When you move… -
Blogs, Mad About Design
10 Jun 2009 | 8:29 amThis morning the mail man delivered a huge enveloppe containing what felt like a huge book. The curious type that I am I immediately opened the enveloppe to see what the content would be. Inside was the newest book from maomao publications called ‘Blogs, Mad about Design’ Blogs, Mad about Design Don't know how exactly to translate it into words but a thick 500+ pages hardcover makes me excited. Something real in your hands, the smell of print it makes such nice user experience that can't be replicated online. Awesome content in high quality print on high quality paper, a real… -
A new icon for Markup Validator S.A.C.?
3 Jun 2009 | 10:33 amNot sure about you other Mac users, but I only allow slick looking application icons in my Dock. Of course once the application launches it sits there. Call me fanatic, but every time I launch Markup Validator S.A.C. it itches to turn on hiding for the time I need it and then turn hiding off once the application is closed again… The current icon I hear you thinking 'this is over the top'. OK, I guess, but I'm just picky and easily annoyed by things like that. Then again I am a graphic designer after all, who also does icon and GUI design work. As a graphic designer you just notice these… -
Back to the drawing board?
27 May 2009 | 2:23 amI’ve been thinking about redesigning my blog’s logo icon for a while now, but didn’t find a moment so far to spend much time on it. Finally, a few weeks ago I thought I had nailed it down and came up with this simple icon… I was happy with this icon for so many reasons. Most of all it is simple. Simplicity is always something I try to achieve in a logo design and it's often the hardest thing. Circles are my favorite shapes in general. The geometrical style of this icon is exactly what I was looking for. It's also ideal to create a favicon from. The three circles also…
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The Work•Play•Experience Blog
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Using elevators to impress
30 Jun 2009 | 4:37 amGiving captive audiences a lift...Elevators (or "lifts", if you're a BritSpeaker like me) are massively underused resources. Even in these days of fitness awareness, if your building has a people-lifter it will see a lot of use. And people in elevators are a captive audience.So why not show how cool you are by entertaining them, like in this wonderful elevator artwork by Marcello Brambilla for the Standard Hotel in New York?Remember, it's a fine line between entertainment and invasive advertising. Crucially, your audience here is a captive one - so you don't need to grab their attention. Coax… -
Change the scenery and boost innovation
10 Jun 2009 | 7:55 amMove the meeting to the Holodeck...Want a cheap and easy way to boost the effectivity of your creative sessions (and in fact any meeting)? Just change the scenery.My collegue Markus and I felt like a change for our brainstorming session this week, so we headed across the street and into the park where the local town have provided this brilliant performance/meditation/party/picnic/being space.A pen, a pad of Post-its, and our meeting room was ready. There were no chairs, so we kept thinking on our feet. We weren't alone - but chatting to other space-users kept the mood light and the ideas… -
UX > CX > HX?
1 Jun 2009 | 4:51 amWhich way next?Once, there was UX, or user experience. An emphasis on how the user interacted with your product.Then we zoomed out to CX, or customer experience. Looking at the customer's entire interaction with both the product and the company - from using the product to reading the ad to calling support to paying the bill.What's next? HX, or human experience?Considering the interaction between the company (and all it's agents, whether "working" or not) with all the humans it interacts with - whether "customers" or not?It will be fun finding out.Whither weather vane pic from Greg Hefner at… -
Never give in...
31 May 2009 | 4:10 pmIf you love what you do, somebody else will love it too...Winston Churchill gave a famously short speech to schoolboys, where he said:"Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense."If you believe in what you do, and love doing it, he is right. Here's proof:I love the way that the dancer directly appeals to the crowd at the start, but is ignored. The more he just gets down to doing his thing, the more interesting he becomes. And he just never, never, never, never gives up - until his energy is… -
Everyone can be a star - if you let them
27 May 2009 | 7:14 amMark Hurst put me on to this terrific wedding video. It's great fun, but it can also teach us something...Presumably nobody in this clip is a professional performer, but they all give amazing performances. Why?* Because they are doing something that feels new.* Because they are allowed to play around while doing it, which makes it fun.* Because the only pressure on them to "get it right", is their desire to do a good job for their friendsLOCKDOWN Projects are onto a winner here. They took an oversubscribed service (wedding videos) and shook it up with a great idea. Then they made the idea…
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Yu Centrik
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Do you dream of tangible interfaces?
29 Jun 2009 | 8:15 amTouch interfaces are becoming more and more popular. The iPhone and its younger brother, the iPod Touch, are highly responsible for this recent popularization. We will sure see more of this kind of products in our everyday lives. But are we restricted to gadgets with Plexiglas screens? The answer is no. Popularization of tangible interfaces might be the next step in the evolution of interaction paradigms. With tangible interfaces we will be able to put aside the displays, in the way we use them today, to really own the products. Let me introduce you to two products which are quite… -
SmartTV: sooner than we think?
23 Jun 2009 | 6:28 amI wrote up a brief report on the EuroITV conference, held in Leuven, Belgium from 3 to 5 June, where Jay Vidyarthi and I presented. The conference focused on the state of technological advance but also consumption trends guiding the TV of tomorrow. It is becoming increasingly clear that the paradigm of television as we know it will drown, or at least significantly evolve. We know that very few people use interactive functions on their digital television system apart from the program guide and access to show information. This lack of interest comes from multiple sources: applications not… -
Do You Have a Good Security Question?
17 Jun 2009 | 12:39 pmLet’s quickly review why, and under what conditions, these questions are used.Secret questions (security questions) are most often used when a user has forgotten his account password.This device ensures that the person renewing the password is in fact the person he says he is.Of course no system is infallible, but this one considerably reduces the risks. Here’s the general idea: whenever you create a new account - especially with services where you have to provide sensitive personal information (the bank, email, etc…) - you will be asked to choose one or several security… -
Terminology: a major problem in vocal interface design
11 Jun 2009 | 12:43 pmYu Centrik has worked on several projects assessing Interactive Voice Response (IVR) interfaces. We have conducted an evaluation of four automated telephone systems for various government agencies (using touch-tone, not speech recognition). In total, 74 participants from the general public have assessed these systems at different times. Among the ergonomic weaknesses that we identified, some of the most common were related to terminology. We define terminology as not only the collection of words which make up a domain (a system’s ‘lexicon’ - vocabulary, jargon, labels used, options,… -
EuroITV 2009: Design Perspectives
10 Jun 2009 | 10:11 amPierre-Alexandre Lapointe and I recently presented some Yu Centrik research on design methodology and alphanumeric input for interactive TV at Euro ITV 2009 in Leuven, Belgium. The community is in very strong agreement that TV’s place in the future lies somewhere between a traditional source of broadcast content and a fully interactive computer. At Euro ITV 2009, professionals from around the world were drawing lines in the sand on the dimensions of social interaction, user generated content, broadcast vs. downloadable content, input devices, media convergence and systemic…
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UI-patterns.com
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Design pattern: Completeness meter
23 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmThe user wants to complete a goal but needs guidance in when it is reached and how to reach it.Continued... -
Blog post: Towards building engaging relations
22 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmHow do your customers feel about your company and the service you provide? Are they frustrated, energetic, focused, or just happy? Translate their emotions into how much value they will bring to your business and how loyal they are. How do you want your customers to feel, and how do you get them there? Emotional states of your customer and how they relate to their value and loyalty. The worst emotions your customers can have toward you are those of discomfort. Are they stressed because the product they ordered last week has not shown up yet? Are they frustrated because they fail to figure out… -
Blog post: Why design patterns work
16 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmA design pattern is a recurring solution to a common problem. A solution for a problem that has been found to work well over and over. Such a solution over time becomes a convention. Conventions are not limited to the online world, but is to be found everywhere in real world as well. As we grow up, we learn the convention of pushing a door-handle down to open its door and driving on the right side of the road (depending on what country you live in) to avoid nasty collisions. We learn to cross a street when the light is green and hold when its red. We learn how to read a newspaper by learning… -
Blog post: The 80/20 rule - the Pareto principle
10 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmIt is a proven fact that 80 percent of the effects in a system are generated by 20 percent of the its variables. Use this to prioritize your design efforts. The 80-20 rule claims that for any large system 80 percent of the effects are generated by 20 percent of the variables in that system. The rule has proven true in all large systems including those in user interface design as well as economics, management, quality control, and engineering among others. The exactness of the percentages in the 80-20 rule is for illustration purposes only, why the rule has also been called Paretos Principle,… -
Blog post: Give your users the backstage pass
7 Jun 2009 | 5:00 pmAs your web application become increasingly more complicated and deal with increasingly larger chunks of data it is possibly also going towards the path of being more unresponsive. Viewing a flash video in HD, Uploading a 300 MB file, or even ordering a physical product in a web shop will possibly leave your user on hold. Regardless of the waiting time being 10 seconds, 10 minutes, or 10 days, the user will be left in a state of not knowing. Instead of just showing a load indicator or sending out a confirmation email, keep the user updated. Let the user know what is taking so long and how…
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Futile
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IA / UX Deliverables
Research Initial research around the application, service. Interviews of stakeholders and customers. Reviewing competition. Outlines Gathering information in outline form can be an extremely helpful way to quickly collect short bits of information like product names and then group and sort them under different headings. I almost always start my projects here. It really [...] Related posts:links for 2006-03-13links for 2006-07-24links for 2009-06-17 -
Visualizing Traveling Tweets
Just Landed – 36 Hours from blprnt on Vimeo. This piece looks for tweets containing the phrases ‘just landed in…’ or ‘just arrived in…’. Locations from these tweets are located using MetaCarta’s Location Finder API. The home location for the traveling users are scraped from their Twitter pages. The system then plots these voyages over time. This [...] Related posts:TweetcloudsTime lapse video of work in IllustratorWhat is information? What is architecture? -
Housing & Poverty
Housing & Poverty, originally uploaded by densitydesign. Lovely Diagram. Do take a look at the others in the flickr timeline. The quality of the design work is gorgeous. Related posts:IA SummitFinding UX Inspiration On FlickrReligious Teachings on Sex Infographic Related posts:IA SummitFinding UX Inspiration On FlickrReligious Teachings on Sex Infographic -
Religious Teachings on Sex Infographic
Religious Teachings on Sex Infographic Originally uploaded by pseudoplacebo Nicely done simple infographic on the topics of religions and sex. This is why I’m agnostic. Related posts:Infographic: 3 trillion dollar war Related posts:Infographic: 3 trillion dollar war -
I could watch this forever
No related posts. No related posts.
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Dexo Design - Russell Wilson's Blog on UI Design and Development
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Where is the Sign In on Amazon.com?
29 Jun 2009 | 9:27 pmIs it just me or does it seem strange that there is no Sign In on Amazon.com’s homepage? Each time I visit amazon.com, and I visit too often, if I’m not already logged in, I stumble looking for the Sign In link. I would expect the “Sign In” text at the top of the page to be a link taking me to a Sign In form. Or even better to automatically display a Sign In form on the homepage. But instead you are required to click on something that would only be available to you once you ARE signed in – e.g. “personalized recommendations”, “Your… -
How to display the number of subscribers and unique visitors on your Wordpress blog as text strings
22 Jun 2009 | 2:53 pmI’ve been wanting to display the number of subscribers to my blog and the number of unique visitors (for a particular timeframe) as simple text strings, without images, icons, etc. Turns out this is not as straightforward as I hoped. But it can be done. If you burn your feed through Feedburner (like I do), you can display the number of subscribers (i.e. FeedCount) by inserting some Javascript anywhere on your site. The catch is that you have to accept their presentation with very few styling options: Francesco Mapelli created a Wordpress plugin called Feedcount 1.2 to… -
Results for Most Preferred UX/UI Title Poll
19 Jun 2009 | 9:09 amParticipants were asked to rank titles (prefixes and suffixes) in order of their preference. This doesn’t reflect current titles – this is preferred titles regardless of current titles. - Surveys completed: 146 (hundreds of abandons) - No data on participants (current titles, etc.) – anonymous ranking only without additional questions - Request to take survey sent to: IxDA, Refresh, Agile-Usability, Facebook, Twitter Results: Prefix Rank (most preferred to least): 1. User Experience 2. Interaction 3. User Interface 4. Usability 5. Web 6. Other Suffix Rank (most… -
Google launches “Fusion Tables”
16 Jun 2009 | 2:42 pm” Upload small or large data sets from spreadsheets or CSV files. Visualize your data on maps, timelines and charts. Pick who can access your data; hide parts of your data if needed. Merge data from multiple tables. Discuss your data with others. Track changes and discussions.” http://tables.googlelabs.com Related posts:Google releases Page Speed -
An online directory of tools for user interface design
9 Jun 2009 | 9:07 pmSomeone recently notified me of a new site, IAApps.com, dedicated exclusively to software applications for user experience professionals. IAApps organizes all the different tools into 4 categories: Interface Modeling Prototyping Screen Capture Usability Testing Each category is then further organized by OS platform: Mac OSX flavors Windows flavors Web I found the navigation somewhat clumsy. Rather than navigate the menus, I’d prefer a tool “site map” – a single page with all of the tools listed under each category and operating system so that I could quickly scan for…
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Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media
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Consultant Thursdays: What If Your Client Asks You To Implement A “Crazy” Enhancement?
2 Jul 2009 | 1:00 pmOver at IXDA, I came upon the following post: Hello, Someone I work for has a strange enhancement request which I do not agree with, but this person is the boss. I think in my gut, this is wrong. Website: a user management system for secure student data. Clients are a little paranoid about passwords and user names getting out. Behavior: when you select a user and want to reset his or her password, the resulting screen shows the user name, but then blanks out the password which you can only see by printing the page. Blanking out the password seems silly since you can still see it if you print… -
Commonly Confused Words
1 Jul 2009 | 10:41 amIt happens to all of us. We’re busily writing a letter or email and suddenly we doubt if a word we just typed is the right one for the situation. Personally, I always have a hard time keeping “it’s” and “its” straight. Maybe you struggle with “your” and “you’re” or “advice” and “advise.” In fact, there are a number of words that commonly confuse lots of people. To help you out, here’s a guide to some of the ones that I see most frequently in the editing work that I do. Its & It’s Its means of or belonging to it. It’s is the contraction of “it is.”… -
Agile and UX: July 8, 2009 in Los Angeles, CA
1 Jul 2009 | 8:31 amThis is an event I’ll be speaking where we’ll talk about integrating User Experience with Agile methodologies. This is a reschedule of the canceled event. Here’s some of the information: Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and User Experience. That’s where our coaches Patrick Neeman and Michael Vincent come in. Join us as we explore how User Experience… -
Silly Satudays: Stop Motion Animation
27 Jun 2009 | 1:00 pmSimilar Posts: Silly Saturdays: Designing The Stop Sign Silly Satudays: Barack Yourself The Washing Machine vs. Waterfall Requirements Gathering -
UX By Design: 20 User Experience Books You Should Own
26 Jun 2009 | 1:06 pmSure, it’s a top x list, but it’s a great list of user experience books, a few of which overlap what I have here. Take a look.Similar Posts: Cool Website Tuesdays: Swaptree Want To Get Started As An Information Architect? These Are Last Books You Will Ever Need. User Experience Is The Brand
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Kotsego Design
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The Importance of Taking a Step Back
24 Jun 2009 | 10:01 amOften times, you start a project with a vision — the big picture. You understand what’s needed and get to work. You build your product up, make it perfect, align it with objectives, data, best practices, trends and send it off to take a life of its own. People look at it, get an understanding and [...] -
11 Tips on Blogging and Writing Effective Copy
13 May 2009 | 1:33 pmTwitter and other micro-blogging Websites are changing reading behaviors online. Attention is getting harder to get, people expect highly disposable content. Articles and posts are getting shorter, writers have to learn to be more concise. The following tips should help you convince readers to break through the reading barrier: Keep it short. As a general [...] -
Launch of Everbetter.ca
5 May 2009 | 2:16 pmLast Fall, I had the chance of working with a team of extremely talented creatives at Sid Lee on designing a content Website for Baby-Boomers. Interesting project, target audience and objectives, I couldn’t wait to see the site go up. Last week, the Website went up. Now, if you’ve ever worked on a Website, you’ll know [...] -
In Montreal Tomorrow, Thursday April the 30th?
29 Apr 2009 | 5:49 amIf you’re in Montreal on the 30th, you definitely want to come to our UX happy hour organized by yours truly in collaboration with Utilisabilité Québec, an affiliate of the Usability Professional Association. The gathering starts at 5:30pm at Le Belmont, located at 4483, blvd. St-Laurent (map). Philippe Alengry, an e-marketing specialist, will be doing a [...] -
Global Innovation Reduces User Engagement
23 Apr 2009 | 1:23 pmI was at the « Seize the new business opportunities » conference yesterday. The objective of the conference was to highlight new business opportunities created by the current economic crisis. Most speakers (Seth Godin, Tony Chapman, etc) focused on the creation of products that lead to word of mouth and social marketing. The presentations were [...]
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Usability Post
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Using Deceptive Design Elements to Emphasize Product Features
29 Jun 2009 | 10:06 amRecently, I’ve noticed how Apple’s product designs have taken a direction towards deception — a gentle sort of deception that doesn’t trick you into thinking the product has something it doesn’t, but a deception that promotes and extends the appearance of certain features so that they appear better. I think it’s a smart way to design products (from a business perspective) as it will make your products seem better than they actually are, all done artificially through appearance rather than function. Here are a couple of examples. Apple has modified the… -
The 1Kb CSS Grid, Part 3
19 Jun 2009 | 12:35 pmGuest post by Tyler Tate Tyler builds websites and web apps for Vyre in London. In Part 1 we discussed the merits of a lightweight CSS grid. In Part 2 we talked about how the grid can streamline page templates in content management. Here, in the third and final installment, we will cover some of the more nuanced aspects of implementing the grid in real-life situations. Namely: nested rows and (hold the applause) a flexible grid. Nested Rows Every content management system is driven by templates. The beauty of the template is that an entire site can be updated by editing just a single file. -
Introducing LESS: a Better CSS
16 Jun 2009 | 10:17 amI don’t know about you but I’m not really satisfied with the level of control CSS gives me today. The feature set is just too restraining, and while I know how to use it to create anything I want, there is always plenty of code which I wish I didn’t need to duplicate, or I wish I could have written more elegantly. It’s not so much the lack of fancy styling options like shadows and rounded corners, which are there in CSS3, it’s things like the lack of variables and ugly long inheritance selectors. Can’t do much about that, right? Well, actually… Some… -
Reinventing the Color Picker
15 Jun 2009 | 1:32 pmIf you do any form of design work on the computer you’re probably familiar with the color picker. Whether in the form of a color wheel or a set of sliders, color pickers let you do just that — pick colors. ColoRotate is an interesting new site that picks a novel approach to the traditional color picker design. Instead of 2D circles or sliders, ColoRotate features a 3D cone. At the core of the cone is the spectrum of colors. Intersecting that is the tint which lies on the z-axis. You can manipulate each one separately to help you arrive at your color. You can also blend two colors… -
Dynamic Contrast Management
11 Jun 2009 | 12:00 pmHere’s an interesting design technique. I first saw it implemented with just CSS and HTML at the UX Digest blog. Earlier this week Apple have updated their website with a bunch of new product pages after the WWDC keynote and I saw them use this very technique as well, this time with JavaScript. The technique is dynamic contrast management. It’s easier to show than explain so let’s start with the pictures. Here’s the top of the sidebar navigation on the new iPhone features page. This is what its standard state looks like when I’m not hovering over: Notice how all…
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UIE Brain Sparks
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Wondering What UIE’s Research Says About Designing for Search?
1 Jul 2009 | 12:31 pmThere’s lots to say about Search and how to best design for it. Folks often reach out to our own Jared Spool for his thoughts and sage advice on Search. Want to know what he has to say? Jared will be presenting at our July 9 UIE Virtual Seminar - Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit. Users arrive at your web site with the simple goal to find something that’s important to them. If they find it, whether they search or not, they’ll be happy. When they don’t find it, frustration follows. Teams often turn to a sophisticated built-in Search capability to help their… -
UIEtips article: Producing Great Search Results — Harder than It Looks, Part 2
29 Jun 2009 | 12:38 pmLast week we re-published part 1 of Producing Great Search Results. As I mentioned last week, producing a great search results page takes a ton of hard design work. It’s critical to study the users’ goals and needs, and watch how the user interacts with the results the engine produces. In almost every instance, Search is not the user’s end goal. It’s just one tool they can choose to help achieve their objective. Without a deep understanding of their objectives, it’s really difficult to design a great tool for them. In this week’s UIEtips, I conclude… -
Old News about Icons
28 Jun 2009 | 6:39 pmJoe wrote us: I was just in a pattern review meeting, and the age-old discussion of whether to use icons and labels vs. just icons or just labels came up. Years ago, I recall Jared Spool and UIE posting an article in which their tests showed that icons and labels together were generally better. I can’t seem to find it…. could you folks point me to it? Thanks! – Joe P.S. FWIW, I prefer a design *guideline* that would state to use icons + labels unless there is a obviously standard icon, such as email or pdf icons. Of course, even those might not be clear to some user groups. -
UIEtips article: Producing Great Search Results — Harder than It Looks, Part 1
25 Jun 2009 | 8:26 amWhen you study how designs get made as much as we have, you start to notice something: good design is directly related to effort. Good design takes a lot of work. Bad design, as the bumper sticker says, “it just happens.” You won’t find this to be any more true than in the design of effective search results pages. Search results look easy. After all, the engine has done all the heavy lifting. It’s taken the user’s query and scoured through the millions of bits of data to narrow the results down to a presentable set. All you have to do now is just display the… -
UIEtips: Deriving Design Strategy from Market Maturity, Part 1
18 Jun 2009 | 11:52 amOnce I understood how the Market Maturity model worked, life became much easier. The theory, which describes how organizations prioritize user experience over time, makes it easy to know what to suggest to team managers. Using the model is easy. First, you ask a few questions to determine where the organization’s products are relative to their market maturity. The theory then tells you what recommendations are most likely to get attention. For example, getting resources to conduct in-depth user research on users and scenarios is much easier in stage 3 (experience) than it is in…
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Cone Trees
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Dan Roam on “The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures”
1 Jul 2009 | 6:19 amYou can watch the video in WMV format if you don’t have Sliverlight. Dan Roam, author of the book, ‘The back of the napkin’ talks about how to use pictures to clarify and solve problems and how to sell ideas to who ever it may be. The selling ideas bit is extremely important for everyone, and we all know how important this is while working in user experience. There’s always something you are trying to sell at whatever level you are to your product manager, project/ program manager, client, business head, the list goes on and on. This presentation shows how to use the… -
Download Axure Touch Screen Hand Gestures Stencils
24 Jun 2009 | 11:00 amThere are a bunch of touch screen hand gesture stencils available at Kicker Studio for OmniGraffle, Illustrator CS3, Photoshop, Visio, Fireworks (there’s an SVG file as well). I went ahead and created Axure stencils to add to the variety of formats available there. The Axure touch screen hand gesture stencils are available in Axure widget library (.rplib) and project file (.rp). You’ll find all the hand gestures in two sizes- regular and large. Gestures covered, as in all other formats are: Tap Tap & hold Slide Drag Pinch Spread Nudge Flick Touch screen hand gestures stencils-… -
Usability spotter #5- HP laptop touch pads with scroll zones- absence of tactile cue
17 Jun 2009 | 9:25 amSummary The issue with HP laptops that have a touch pad with a scroll zone contained it (as shown in image A) is that they do not provide a tactile cue for the user to help interpret what section of the touch pad the finger is positioned at. In the absence of a tactile cue, it is difficult for the user to determine whether the finger is on touch pad or the scroll zone without looking at it, resulting in the accidental scrolling on the screen when actually the user simply wants to move the cursor. The issue and multiple solutions are discussed ahead. The issue with HP laptop touchpads with… -
David Carson on Design + Discovery
7 Jun 2009 | 7:03 amThe guy who broke all the rules of traditional typography, gave grunge typography an identity of its own, Raygun art direcrtor, David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images. About David Carson David Carson’s boundary-breaking typography in the 1990s, in Ray Gun magazine and other pop-cult books, ushered in a new vision of type and page design - quite simply, breaking the traditional mold of type on a page and demanding fresh eyes from the reader. Squishing, smashing, slanting and enchanting the words on a layout, Carson made the… -
Download Axure ‘Clear input field value on focus’ prototype/ widget library
1 Jun 2009 | 10:55 amTwo Axure widgets (clear text on focus of text field & clear text on focus of text area) for the Input Prompt design pattern are available for download in Axure widget library (.rplib) and and project file (.rp) format. Demo the Clear Input Field Value on Focus Axure widgets Demo (opens in new window, 105 kb) Watch an example video (File size: 330 kb) Clear text value on focus of input field- Axure Widget Library file (.rplib) (downloaded 86 times) Clear text value on focus of input field- Axure Project file (.rp) (downloaded 63 times) Axure Widgets for the User Interface Pattern: Clear…
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Design for Users
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What’s Your Body Saying About Being Fearless?
7 Jun 2009 | 12:29 pmA little bird on a wire informed us yesterday there was a thought-provoking new post over on The BrandBuilder’s blog (thanks Reza!) “Be fearless!” Blanchard instructs us, in his inimitable style. How I wish I could, some days. He says that “courage is one of humanity’s greatest gifts” and that is such a beautiful observation. But what if persistent, underlying fears and hidden emotions are getting in our way, despite our best intentions? I don’t know if any of you suffer from the same issues I do when it comes to business risk, taking chances,… -
A Study in User Experience: Twitter & #fixreplies
13 May 2009 | 7:56 amI have found that being a user experience person has often meant arguing a lot. Your role in the company, is to be the user advocate, not the company advocate, so that your voice is a reminder and constant reflection of a product’s users… you represent them, and are paid for doing that. But that means having to speak up, be confrontational at times, and be as persistent as you can possibly be when you passionately feel bad decisions are about to be made without being fired. So this Twitter issue of removing a certain setting regarding seeing your friends reply to folks you… -
Are You Getting To the Heart of Your Brand?
21 Apr 2009 | 1:29 pmTwo well-known brand strategists engaged in a conversation on Twitter yesterday that caught my attention. Olivier Blanchard, The BrandBuilder and Gabriel Rossi were discussing some of the problems companies have, in their opinion, with marketing and branding. Gabriel said “People who criticize Marketing & Branding need to learn to see the value of brands as a powerful socio-economic force“, and Olivier’s response was like a glass of cold water in the face: “… as opposed to looking at Marketing and Branding as the discipline of putting together ads, brochures… -
Is Your Agile Software Process Handcuffing the User Experience Design?
15 Feb 2009 | 11:15 amI’m running across a new problem with a number of clients and wondering if my user experience colleagues are having similar issues. The advent of web applications has resulted in a change for many software providers in the way they release software today. Agile software development is a method in which software is designed, examined and delivered to the market swiftly, so that end-users can provide feedback and more feature changes can be made and adjusted within a few months time, rather than once or twice a year. For off-the-shelf software, such as Adobe, Apple or Microsoft products,… -
Pick Passwords That Protect You Online
8 Jan 2009 | 7:34 amThe UX Booth, a neat new usability site, has an excellent article that could help so many users if they see, so I’d like to point my readers there: How To Pick Passwords That Protect Your Online Experience. Since the phishing incident at Twitter that I recently wrote about, another issue happened this week where a hacker was able to use a dictionary cracker to get inside Twitter’s back-end, and he promptly started messing with celebrity users accounts, naturally posting the most immature tweets his feeble brain could come up with. The culprit was one employee who had used a…
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HFI Connect
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ROI of UX for Government
One of the most common things we get asked at HFI, from commercial and government clients alike, is how to measure the ROI for UX activities. We begin many a conversation with new or potential clients by walking them through a discussion of the various different benefits that a UX approach could provide their organization - increased conversion rates, reduction in training costs, improved brand value, etc. (you can find a nice white paper and some ROI calculators on the HFI web site) Now, having said that we talk to both commercial and government clients about the business case for UX, the… -
UX Maturity Survey Findings | Usability Champions
Lets take a look at two charts. The first one shows really good news. About half of the respondents report having a committed usability champion. That shows a shocking change from the recent past. Just five years back it was rare to find a committed champion. Today they are common place. Executives are hearing from books, magazines, and their friends that this is a ‘user experience economy’ and that success is based on ‘customer experience’. When we work with companies to get their executive suite onboard we have half our work done already. Yet, take a look at the second chart. I can… -
Designer - Philippe Starck thinks deep on design
Designer Philippe Starck - with no pretty slides behind him - spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question "Why design?" Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized mantra for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush. Why you should listen to him: Philippe Starck is a legend of modern design. He's known for his luxurious hotels and boites around the world -- notably the Peninsula Hotel restaurant in Hong Kong, the Teatron in Mexico, the… -
2008 HFES Presidential Address Quo Vadis Ergonomia - Redux by John F. ("Jeff") Kelley, Ph.D., CHFP
http://www.ergowizard.com/hfestorycorps/interviews/showmovie.html Note about the video: Despite the rehearsal, the video director didn't "get" that the talk would be of an unusual format and that the technical slides were just a prop; hence a good deal of camera time in the first few minutes were devoted to the slides and not to the speaker, who was pantomiming a "Bob Newhart" style phone call interruption. We have tried to make up for that in post-production with some stills and hope that what was actually going on onstage will be evident from the audio. -
What Makes a City Usable?
Last week I was in Portland Oregon for the Usability Professional's Association Conference. It's my second time in Portland, and I was struck again with how comfortable Portland feels. A common phrase I kept hearing on this trip while talking with people from the conference was, "Have you been to Portland before? It seems like such a nice city." So I've been thinking in the last few days about the concept of a usable city. What makes Portland seem so nice? What makes it feel "usable". Here are some ideas: 1) Manageable scale: Portland is a manageable city and has a "usable scale". Meaning,…
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Talkabout Design
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Snooc
21 Jun 2009 | 10:44 amBeautiful hairstraightener, widely appreciated by young women. Automotive styling, improved interaction, wireless and innovative spring system. By: Bluelarix Designworks Industrial Design -
How To Start A Magazine
15 Jun 2009 | 3:49 amSo you're starting a magazine called "Play", how to launch. Have the various artist share their favorite game characters based on the letter of their first name. -
The Beatles: Rock Band Opening Cinematic
3 Jun 2009 | 2:32 pmAmazing opening cinematic made for the latest Rock Band title from Harmonix. The Beatles: Rock Band will let you follow The Beatles from their earliest days to their triumphant Ed Sullivan Show appearance and beyond. Join them in the studio at Abbey Road and experience dreamscapes that put you inside the psychedelic era. Watch it now -
WWDC 09 First Banner
3 Jun 2009 | 9:17 amWWDC 09 will be starting next week. We have a picture of the first banner that went up at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Simple and elegant design that prominantly features iPhone apps. I think this years show will feature more then just the new iPhones. Via Flickr -
Hulu Desktop is the future of TV
28 May 2009 | 1:48 pmHulu Desktop is a lean-back viewing experience for your personal computer. It features a sleek new look that's optimized for use with standard Windows Media Center remote controls or Apple remote controls, allowing you to navigate Hulu's entire library with just six buttons. For users without remotes, the application is keyboard and mouse-enabled. Hulu Desktop is a downloadable application and will work on PCs and Macs. Check out this sweet video that gives you an overview of what to expect from this amazing product. Hulu Desktop can be linked to your existing Hulu.com account which will let…
