HCI

A talk with computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland

Another giant with strong shoulders.

"I couldn't end a conversation with one of the fathers of computer graphics without asking him where he thought the field might go in the next fifty years. I should have remembered, though: Sutherland had already explained to me that he's not into the prediction game."

(Harry McCracken a.k.a. @harrymccracken ~ TIME.com)

Posted on April 16, 2013 | Permalink

40 years of icons: The evolution of the modern computer interface

Knowing where you come from is a great foundation.

"The greatest thing is that this has sort of become a sandbox for the mind. It's a medium, not just a calculating machine. We now have this thing in front of us, it allows us to paint, to write, to listen to music. It mesmerizes us and steals our lives. I think it is the invention of the last 500 years. And we're waiting to see what it does next."

(Jesse Hicks a.k.a. @jessehixxx ~ The Verge)

Posted on April 12, 2013 | Permalink

Transitional interfaces

Animation conveys meaning.

"Folks keep throwing around the word 'delight' when referring to animation and cute interactions. Cool and great for those guys. Guess what though? Animation can be used functionally too. It's not just an embellished detail. Animation leverages an overlooked dimension - time! An invisible fabric which stitches space together. You don't have to be a math dork to understand this. Let's take a look at some simple ideas."

(Pasquale D'Silva ~ Medium Design/UX)

Posted on April 11, 2013 | Permalink

"The music is not in the piano"

One of the giants on whom's shoulders we stand.

Interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay ~ "One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent "agriculture" we could put the world back together and all would prosper."

(David Greelish ~ Techland)

Posted on April 03, 2013 | Permalink

What UI really is (and how UX confuses matters)

DTDT: UX is everything not-UI.

"People mix the terms UI and UX together. UX is tricky because it doesn't refer to any one thing. Interface design, visual styling, code performance, uptime, and feature set all contribute to the user's 'experience'. Books on UX further complicate matters by including research methods and development methodologies. All of this makes the field confusing for people who want to understand the fundamentals."

(Ryan Singer) courtesy of thomasmarzano

Posted on March 31, 2013 | Permalink

Flat or skeuomorphic is the wrong question: It's about satisfaction

Isn't hybrid always the best of both worlds?

"The point of this process is to determine what style appropriately conveys the attitude and personality of the app itself. The intended impacts of each theme are not mutually exclusive - in fact, the hybrid direction we ultimately recommended deliberately borrows meaningful aspects of each."

(Adam Faja a.k.a. @adamfaja ~ Specky Boy Design Magazine)

Posted on March 29, 2013 | Permalink

A great UI is invisible

"The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant." once said the legendary Mark Weiser.

"A user interface that is invisible and that provides seamless interaction possibilities will help the user focus on their goals and direct them to what they need."

(Patrick Cox a.k.a @pcridesagain ~ Codrops)

Posted on March 22, 2013 | Permalink

No to NoUI

When you use it, it has an interface. Even a paper book has one, the text

"Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background."

(Timo Arnall)

Posted on March 21, 2013 | Permalink

Testing dialog design in a speech application

Scenarios, back/front-stage, stories, personas, scripts, and now ... dialogs. Sounds theatre to me.

"The best testing plan for speech applications will combine the methods above or will be a variation of one or more of them. When collecting user feedback on a speech application, it's usually a good idea to capture response files at the same time in order to perform more in-depth speech tuning. Full recordings should be enabled when doing Wizard of Oz testing, and so on. These methods will allow the designer to understand how real-world users interact with a speech system, and provide instructive input for improving and enhancing the quality of the dialog design. More generally, the same testing methodologies can also be adapted to other types of user interfaces outside of speech recognition. This includes the UX for web transactions, web chat, call center scripting, kiosk interfaces, and other systems where user input may be open ended or require semantic interpretation. The more real world testing that can be performed prior to building a system, the closer the launched product will serve its intended purpose right out of the gate, and the less rework will be required."

(Stephen Keller ~ UX magazine)

Posted on March 21, 2013 | Permalink

Teaching and learning human-computer interaction

HCI is alive and kicking.

"Human-computer interaction as a field of inquiry necessarily evolves in response to changes in the technological landscape. During the past 15 years, the speed of change has been particularly dramatic, with the emergence of personal mobile devices, agent-based technologies, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Social networking has also profoundly changed the way people use technology for work and leisure. Who would have predicted a decade ago that (smart)phones would offer constant access to the Web, to social networks and broadcast platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and to hundreds of specialized apps? Who could have anticipated the power of our everyday devices to capture our every moment and movement? Cameras, GPS tracking, sensors—a phone is no longer just a phone; it is a powerful personal computing device loaded with access to interactive services that you carry with you everywhere you go."

(Elizabeth Churchill, Anne Bowser, and Jennifer Preece ~ Interactions March-April 2013)

Posted on March 13, 2013 | Permalink

The new experience economy: Activity as currency

Technology entering into the veins of society and culture.

"But the great equalizer to make this experience economy a true, two-way economy may be the simple sensor embedded in my clothing, car, or public space. Digital value exchanges are beginning to extend far beyond the screen of my phone or laptop. Embedded sensors will allow me to increasingly exchange my activity for currency."

(Graeme Waitzkin and Laura Richardson ~ designmind)

Posted on March 12, 2013 | Permalink

The third user: Why Apple keeps doing foolish things

UX and HCI facing the business community. Always interesting.

"Apple keeps doing things in the Mac OS that leave the user experience community scratching its collective head, things like hiding the scroll bars and placing invisible controls inside the content region of windows on computers. Apple's mobile devices are even worse: It can take users upwards of five seconds to accurately drop the text pointer where they need it, but Apple refuses to add the arrow keys that have belonged on the keyboard from day-one."

(Bruce Tognazinni) ~ courtesy of freegorifero

Posted on March 12, 2013 | Permalink

How 'Minority Report' trapped us in a world of bad interfaces

Getting from off the track to on the track.

"And at the end of the day, it's visual accessibility driving this trend. Hopefully one day we'll reach the point where filmmakers don't want computers to look like conducting an orchestra, and we'll be able to back out of this interface cul-de-sac and find our way forward into a genuinely natural way of using our devices."

(Christian Brown a.k.a. @DeepOmega ~ The Awl)

Posted on February 27, 2013 | Permalink

Windows 8: Design over usability

Win8 as talk of the town. We'll get used to it.

"Windows 8 gets a lot right, but Microsoft's determination to offer computer and mobile users the same interface makes the operating system somewhat weird."

(Simson Garfinkel ~ MIT Technology Review)

Posted on February 22, 2013 | Permalink

The grammar of interactivity

Like all (visual) languages, digital has its own version of morphology, syntaxis, and semantics to communicate with humans. Grammar included.

"User experience design calls for us to write words on buttons all the time - but how do we know whether we're choosing the right ones? Linguistics may provide a clue. What follows is a simple test to check whether your calls to action 'work' linguistically as well as a guide to consider the grammar of your experience elements."

(Jonathan Richards a.k.a. @jonnyrichards ~ UX Booth)

Posted on February 18, 2013 | Permalink

The past 100 years of the future: Human-computer interaction in science-fiction movies and television (.pdf)

HCI in films, TV shows and SciFi is really getting a genre.

"During the past hundred years, science-fiction (sci-fi) films and, later, videos, have, of necessity, had to depict detailed views of human-computer interaction (HCI) of the future, or alternate pasts/presents, in order to convey a compelling scene and, sometimes, in order move forward the plot. This publication explores some of the themes that emerge from examining this body of work. The basic premise is simple: HCI professionals can learn something from sci-fi media, and sci-fi media-producers can learn more from HCI professionals in order to show smarter views of the future."

(Aaron Marcus a.k.a. @amandaberkeley ~ Amanda)

Posted on February 05, 2013 | Permalink

Conceptual models in a nutshell

Conceptual model, the mental model of user and engineer. Old school HCI topic.

"This article explains what conceptual models are and describes the value of developing a conceptual model of a software application before designing its user interface."

(Jeff Johnson ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 22, 2013 | Permalink

Man-Computer Symbiosis

One of the giants on whose shoulders we (HCI) stand.

"Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are (1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and (2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment."

(J.C.R. Licklider a.k.a. Lick, 1960)

Posted on January 09, 2013 | Permalink

UX is not UI

Food is not gastronomy as well.

"UI design is a huge part of UX. I would say that in a good majority of cases the UX designer does in fact design the interface as well. But UX is not UI. This is where the education of others comes in. Helping people understand just what UX is and the invaluable role it plays is illustrated beautifully with the UX Umbrella."

(Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano

Posted on December 17, 2012 | Permalink

Hardware Specs vs. User Experience

A kind of atoms versus bits, again.

"Product quality has to be judged in the context of human tasks, and reviews should emphasize real use—not raw numbers."

(Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted on November 05, 2012 | Permalink

Mobile Input Methods

Input, output and the magic in-between.

"One key area that surprises a lot of designers and developers that I have worked with is input methods. Yes, they know that users don't have a mouse, but there's still an unstated assumption that all desktop Web input widgets will work. Perhaps more troubling is that their personal preferences and rumors sometimes supplant data regarding the kinds of actual experiences that exist out in the world."

(Steven Hoober a.k.a. @shoobe01 ~ UXmatters)

Posted on November 02, 2012 | Permalink

Designing for the Sense of Touch: A New Frontier for Design

Touchy feely.

"Camille Moussette explores how interaction designers can leverage and embrace the sense of touch to develop interfaces and experiences that go beyond traditional visual and form-based aesthetics."

(Science Daily) ~ courtesy of jeroenspiering

Posted on October 29, 2012 | Permalink

The end for keyboards and mice?

You ain't seen nothing yet.

"Apple's iPhone and its rivals may have introduced touchscreens to the masses, but now a raft of technologies promise to change the way we interact with computers forever."

(Paul Rubens ~ BBC)

Posted on October 25, 2012 | Permalink

Modelling is not the answer!

A model is what it is: a model.

"In HCI we have witnessed the rise and fall of conceptual modeling in general. The 1980s focused on changing human behavior, which was captured in models to inform designs. Around 1990 a second wave of HCI questioned the usefulness of this type of approach, pointing out how human behavior is contingent and situated, and that human beings actively work around whatever technical solutions exist. In more recent years, this has been supplemented with a focus on emotion and experience. More than ever, this research points away from conceptual modeling."

(Susanne Bødker, Niels Mathiasen, Marianne Petersen ~ ACM Interactions Sep/Oct 2012)

Posted on October 16, 2012 | Permalink

What Comes After the Touch Screen?

Explosion of input modes: from body to mind.

"Gesture control, devices that recognize different people, and tricks to make a screen feel as if it has physical buttons could be coming to your gadgets."

(Will Knight a.k.a. @willknight ~ MIT Technology Review)

Posted on October 12, 2012 | Permalink

When Is User-Centered Design Selfish?

Is there any other design approach than UCD?

"Who benefits from user-centered design according to standard wisdom? Designers and their employers benefit, because they end up with better products. End users (that amorphous generalised group) benefit, because their software-using lives are more satisfactory. Researchers benefit, because they get papers published about their thoughtful and inclusive design methodologies. What I want to know is whether particular users who contribute to the design process actually get anything out of it? And do they stand to lose anything?"

(Judy Robertson ~ Communication of the ACM)

Posted on October 08, 2012 | Permalink

Make It So: Apologizing for bad SciFi UI

Especially, his Keynote design was remarkable.

"Interfaces in sci-fi serve a primarily narrative purpose. They're there to help tell the story of how a character disables the tractor beam, or hacks into the corporate database, or diagnoses the alien infection. But what would happen if we tried to build these same interfaces for the real world? Some would fare just fine. Most would need a little redesign. A few appear to be just plain stupid or broken. They couldn't work the way they appear to. That is, until you use the technique of apologetics to discover that in fact far from being stupid, they're brilliant."

(Chris Noessel a.k.a. @chrisnoessel ~ The Web and Beyond 2012 ~ Amsterdam)

Posted on October 08, 2012 | Permalink

An interview with Ben Shneiderman

From the New New to the New. There's progress.

"HCI courses are still not mandatory for CS students. It is still a new discipline."

(It's our research)

Posted on October 05, 2012 | Permalink

Touch Targets for Application Design

Principles for touch-based user interfaces.

"(...) deeper dive into designing touch-based interactions. That is, how large we need to make our application controls and where should we place them on screen in order to optimize for touch. In addition to general guidelines, I also showcase a before and after design that converts a keyboard and mouse application to a touch-optimized interface by rethinking navigation, input controls, and more."

(Luke Wroblewski a.k.a. @LukeW)

Posted on August 16, 2012 | Permalink

Socio-Technical System Design

Put your teeth into this monstrous 30,000 word chapter: the social and technology synergy.

"Some say the Internet is making us stupid but a mirror just reflects. Online media showing human brutality, corruption or stupidity just reveal what is. The Internet, as a microscope and telescope on humanity, is showing us to us. It isn't physical, but thoughts cause words and deeds as guns fire bullets. Humanity's thoughts are now online for us to choose. We, the human race, are choosing what we think and what we think is now online, with web-counters keeping the score. What the Internet electronic mirror shows isn't always pretty but it is real and to change oneself one must first see oneself. The evolution of computing is a part of human evolution, of a social experiment that has been ongoing for thousands of years. Only by personal evolution, by seeing beyond ourselves, do we help it succeed."

(Brian Whitworth and Adnan Ahmad ~ Interaction-Design.org)

Posted on June 08, 2012 | Permalink

UI versus UX: What's the difference?

First character the same, second not. Must be different then.

"UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle."

(Dain Miller a.k.a. @_dain ~ Webdesigner Depot)

Posted on June 04, 2012 | Permalink

Engelbart's Violin

And boy, what a symphonies did it bring us.

"In the mind of today's technological entrepreneur, the ideal user (and employee) is semi-skilled - or unskilled entirely. The ideal user interface for such a person never rewards learning or experience when doing so would come at the cost of immediate accessibility to the neophyte. This design philosophy is a mistake - a catastrophic, civilization-level mistake. There is a place in the world for the violin as well as the kazoo. Modern computer engineering is kazoo-only, and keyboards are only the most banal example of this fact. Far more serious - though less obvious - problems of this kind tie our hands and wastefully burn our 'brain cycles'. Professional equipment, whose mastery requires dedication and mental flexibility, may not be appropriate for casual users. But surely it is appropriate - in fact, necessary - for professionals? Just why is this idea confined to crackpots shouting in the wilderness? I hope to learn a definitive answer to this conundrum some day."

(Stanislav Datskovskiy ~ Loper OS)

Posted on May 31, 2012 | Permalink

Principles of User Interface Design

Scope is clear: the design of user interfaces.

"It contains a list of 20 or so design principles that I refer to all the time. This was a good way to get them down into one spot.. so I can point people there in the future."

(Joshua Porter a.k.a. @bokardo)

Posted on May 09, 2012 | Permalink

Augmented Paper

There's some real magic in all these apps.

"Design an experience. Make it as beautiful - and as emotionally resonant - as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality - and software-based thinking in general - is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you. These new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren't desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They're empowering extensions to our real, actual lives - and that's a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They're augmentations, and they should be beautiful."

(Matt Gemmell a.k.a. @mattgemmell)

Posted on April 23, 2012 | Permalink

Critical Dialogue: Interaction, Experience and Cultural Theory

Some real gems in this one.

"Over the last decade there has been a significant growth in interest in aspects of people's experience with technologies under headings such as user experience, aesthetics, affect, fun, reflection, and enjoyment. In more recent years critical theory has begun to make a small but important impact at CHI conferences and other HCI publications. It is arguable that a relationship between critical theory and experience would benefit HCI research and practice as it has benefited other areas of research in the humanities and social sciences. However, in the history of ideas experience and critical theory have not always made good bedfellows, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes resisting each other. This workshop will explore the ways in which HCI might benefit from a constructive dialogue between critical theory and experience in questions of design and evaluation."

(Workshop on April 10 2010, in association with ACM CHI 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia USA)

Posted on April 23, 2012 | Permalink

Designing for touch

Mobile Touch, the new design space with many new constraints, materials and possibilities.

"Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It's not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand."

(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ .net magazine) courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on April 12, 2012 | Permalink

UX Design as a Two-Way Conversation

Assuming the computer talks to you. Computer says 'No'.

"If you were talking to a person who did this you would assume they either weren't listening or were slightly unhinged. When a computer does it you're likely to assume that using the site isn't going to be a pleasant experience, or worse, you may leave."

(Hana Schank a.k.a. @hanaschank ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 05, 2012 | Permalink

Visual aesthetics in human-computer interaction and interaction design

Everything that pleases the eye.

"To scholars and practitioners in the field of HCI at the early 1990's, the idea that aesthetics matter in information technology sounded heretic. Two decades later, in the early 2010s, this thought has conquered a solid place in both academia and industry."

(Noam Tractinsky a.k.a. ~ interaction-design.org)

Posted on March 22, 2012 | Permalink

The Key To A Unified Brand: A Consistent UI

Marketing, brands and business discovering HCI rapidly. A little late, but still...

"The end user doesn't care how your company is structured. Customers view brands as a unified entity, and they expect that brand's value to be delivered across all channels with an equal degree of integrity. The good news is that the digital landscape is forcing all of us to re-think how we work. The bad news is that we're trying to crawl out of a work style that was better designed for Ford's assembly line than for digital ecosystem consistency."

(Peyton Lindley ~ Fast Company Co.Design)

Posted on March 05, 2012 | Permalink

TapSense: Enhancing Finger Interaction on Touch Surfaces

A completely new HCI paradigm sets in.

"At present, finger input on touch screens is handled very simplistically - essentially boiled down to an X/Y coordinate. However, human fingers are remarkably sophisticated, both in their anatomy and motor capabilities. TapSense is an enhancement to touch interaction that allows conventional screens to identify how the finger is being used for input. This is achieved by segmenting and classifying sounds resulting from a finger's impact. Our system can recognize different finger locations - including the tip, pad, nail and knuckle - without the user having to wear any electronics. This opens several new and powerful interaction opportunities for touch input, especially in mobile devices, where input bandwidth is limited due to small screens and fat fingers. For example, a knuckle tap could serve as a 'right click' for mobile device touch interaction, effectively doubling input bandwidth. Our system can also be used to identify different sets of passive tools. We conclude with a comprehensive investigation of classification accuracy and training implications. Results show our proof-of-concept system can support sets with four input types at around 95% accuracy. Small, but useful input sets of two (e.g., pen and finger discrimination) can operate in excess of 99% accuracy."

(Chris Harrison) courtesy of dansaffer

Posted on February 12, 2012 | Permalink

Why External Links Should Open in New Tabs

Unfortunately, many users don't even notice a tab has been initiated. Back, back, back...

"When most designers design websites, they don't pay much attention to links. As long as the link works and takes users to the right page, everything is fine. However, a great user experience goes further than that. There are certain links that should open in new browser tabs, and ones that should open in the same browser tab. It's important for designers to know the difference."

(UX Movement) courtesy of rolandnagtegaal

Posted on February 02, 2012 | Permalink

How the Knowledge Navigator video came about

Great read about the making of the iconic vision video by AAPL.

"Sparked by the introduction of Siri, as well as products such as iPad and Skype, there have been many recent posts and articles tracing the technologies back to a 1987 Apple video called Knowledge Navigator. The video simulated an intelligent personal agent, video chat, linked databases and shared simulations, a digital network of university libraries, networked collaboration, and integrated multimedia and hypertext, in most case decades before they were commercially available. Having been involved in making Knowledge Navigator with some enormously talented Apple colleagues, I thought I would correct the record once and for all about what really happened."

(Bud Colligan a.k.a. @collbud ~ Dubberly Design Office)

Posted on January 31, 2012 | Permalink

Browser and GUI Chrome

I'm wondering if traditional media also have this chrome thing.

"Chrome is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability."

(Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted on January 30, 2012 | Permalink

UI: Getting the Details Right

Why 5 and not 7, 9 or 3?

"User interface details matter to the overall user experience. Many users may not consciously notice these details on your site yet they do have an impact on the overall user experience. When everything feels just right the perception of your site and brand is improved. In this article, we'll look at 5 different types of UI details you should pay attention to."

(Jamie Appleseed a.k.a. @jamieappleseed ~ Baymard Institute)

Posted on January 27, 2012 | Permalink

Industrial HCI Research: A Personal and Professional Perspective

Every practice is made by people, not organizations. Focus on people, not brands.

"In this article, we give you some personal perspective on the changing role of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers practicing in industry over the last 25 years and look to the future. We identify long-lasting themes and emerging trends and add some insight from our experiences working in IT research and development. These experiences include collaborating as team members on a series of HCI research projects during 15 of over 20 years at IBM Research. We also describe what it has been like having a two-person HCI household over the years."

(Clare-Marie Karat and John Karat ~ Journal of Usability Studies Vol. 7, Issue 1, November 2011, pp. 1-8)

Posted on December 20, 2011 | Permalink

Designing Metro style apps that are touch-optimized

By exception, a proprietary tech video on HCI.

"Get the knowledge and guidance needed to build an app for an intuitive, powerful touch experience. Understand how touch design principles are firmly grounded in customer needs of comfort and utility. Discover how your app can use Windows 8 touch language and patterns, capabilities like smart targeting and semantic zoom, and new interactions like 'slide to select' and 'hold to learn' to engage your customers."

(Jan-Kristian Markiewicz & Kay Hofmeester a.k.a. @kayhof ~ BUILD 2011)

Posted on December 14, 2011 | Permalink

The difference between a UX Designer and UI Developer

DTDT (again): Interface is part of the object and experience is part of the subject, be it for design or development purposes.

"UX Designers focus on the structure and layout of content, navigation and how users interact with them. (...) UI Developers focus on the way the functionality is displayed and the fine detail of how users interact with the interface."

(Ben Melbourne a.k.a. @benmelb ~ as in the city)

Posted on December 02, 2011 | Permalink

Origins of the Apple Human Interface

A first hand recollection of ideas, concepts, and prototypes.

This is a verbatim transcript of a public lecture given on October 28, 1997. ~ "We got clearance, thankfully, from the Apple lawyers, which came about two - three weeks ago, so we could give it here, just in time to announce it. We're grateful to Apple to release this for public disclosure, because we think it's of general interest."

(Larry Tesler a.k.a. @nomodes and Chris Espinosa a.k.a. @cdespinosa)

Posted on November 23, 2011 | Permalink

Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design

Another way of phrasing dark patterns would be e-Commerce Magic.

"We might not like to admit it but deception is deeply entwined with life on this planet. Insects evolved to use it, animals employ it in their behavior, and of course, we humans use it to manipulate, control, and profit from each other. With this in mind, it's no surprise that deception appears in various guises in user interfaces on the web today. What is surprising, though, is that up until recently it was something web designers never talked about. There was no terminology, no design patterns, and no real recognition of it as a phenomenon at all. If it wasn't a taboo it certainly felt like one."

(Harry Brignull a.k.a. @harrybr ~ A List Apart)

Posted on November 02, 2011 | Permalink

Two Extremes of Touch Interaction

Touch this, touch that.

"Microsoft Research Redmond researchers Hrvoje Benko and Scott Saponas have been investigating the use of touch interaction in computing devices since the mid-'00s. Now, two sharply different yet related projects demonstrate novel approaches to the world of touch and gestures."

(Janie Chang ~ Microsoft Research)

Posted on October 19, 2011 | Permalink

The mouse dies: Touch and gesture take center stage

A NUI is still an interface, so how natural can it be.

"The moment that sealed the future of human-computer interaction for me happened just a few months ago. I was driving my car, carrying a few friends and their children. One child, an 8-year old, pointed to the small LCD screen on the dashboard and asked me whether the settings were controlled by touching the screen. They were not. The settings were controlled by a rotary button nowhere near the screen. It was placed conveniently between the driver and passenger seats. An obvious location in a car built at the tail-end of an era when humans most frequently interacted with technology through physical switches and levers."

(Jonathan Reichental a.k.a. @Reichental ~ O'Reilly Radar)

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Permalink

Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design

HCI 101 in video, 'cause youngsters don't like to read.

"Through lectures and a project, learn the fundamentals of human-computer interaction and design thinking. Work together in teams of three on a quarter-long project. Each week, in small design studios, present and discuss work with peers. The setting for the course is mobile web applications. The constraints of this small form factor make this an exciting challenge. At the end of the course, present to a jury of IT and design leaders."

(Scott Klemmer ~ Stanford Open Classroom)

Posted on August 31, 2011 | Permalink

The Difference Between UI and UX

As long as there is still confusion among few, these DTDT posts seem relevant. 'Filed in Graphics' (sic!)

"In today's creative and technical environment, the terms UI ('User Interface') and UX ('User Experience') are being used more than ever. Overall, these terms are referring to specialties and ideas that have been around for years prior to the introduction of the abbreviated terminology. But the problem with these new abbreviations is more than just nomenclature. Unfortunately, the terms are quickly becoming dangerous buzzwords: using these terms imprecisely and in often completely inappropriate situations is a constant problem for a growing number of professionals, including: designers, job seekers, and product development specialists. Understanding the proper separation, relationship and usage of the terms is essential to both disciplines."

(Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ Design Shack)

Posted on August 23, 2011 | Permalink

The Fold Exists but Does it Matter?

Paradigms from paper technology (like 'The Page') are deeply rooted in our minds.

"Content decisions should be driving the design of each page. As people scan the page, they are looking for content that seems relevant. Following this information scent should lead them below the fold if that is where their target content exists."

(Emily Smith a.k.a. @emilysmith ~ Design Festival)
courtesy of ronderksen

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink

Understanding Our Interaction Design History

"It's great that we're starting to make the history of digital technology available, but I believe we should also be doing the same for interaction design. We need to understand the history of digital design on screens and how it has changed. It's not because the basic interaction design principles change over time, because they haven't. The principles we introduced in the CHI course - prominence, relationship, flow, clarity, simplicity and consistency - were just as relevant 25 years ago, they probably just had different names. No, the history matters because how we apply those principles has changed as our technology changed."

(David Rondeau a.k.a. @dbrondeau ~ InContext)

Posted on June 01, 2011 | Permalink

user-interface, user-experience & usability explained

"So in short, when I'm 'interacting' with a website I'm using its user-interface design. How I 'feel' and my 'preferences' when using it is my user experience and how 'easy and intuitive' it is for me to perform the functions I came to do, is a measure of its usability. As you can see, it's really hard for someone to specialise in one of these areas without an understanding of the other two."

(Bernhard Schokman a.k.a. @bernardschokman ~ myware)

Posted on May 31, 2011 | Permalink

Imaginary Interfaces

"Screen-less wearable devices allow for the smallest form factor and thus the maximum mobility. However, current screen-less devices only support buttons and gestures. Pointing is not supported because users have nothing to point at. However, we challenge the notion that spatial interaction requires a screen and propose a method for bringing spatial interaction to screen-less devices. We present Imaginary Interfaces, screen-less devices that allow users to perform spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback. Unlike projection-based solutions, such as Sixth Sense, all visual 'feedback' takes place in the user's imagination. Users define the origin of an imaginary space by forming an L-shaped coordinate cross with their non-dominant hand. Users then point and draw with their dominant hand in the resulting space."

(Hasso Plattner Institute)

Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink

The UX of this article

"In many respects, when we talk about, evaluate, and revise products from a usability standpoint, we overlook the most important piece: content. Our tendency is to be concerned only with the wrapper or container, navigation through that container, and the interplay of the elements that make up the container. But what about the content which populates this otherwise dead space?" (Brett Sandusky ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 27, 2011 | Permalink

Progressive Disclosure in User Interfaces

"As designers, we're always trying to get the most out of our interfaces and maximize whatever space is made available to us. While many solutions have been devised over the years, one above all others has consistently influenced the way visitors access the content they seek. From simple techniques, such as tooltips and drop-down menus, to complex single-page websites powered by Ajax, progressive disclosure has become a formidable force. This article explores the methodology of progressive disclosure and its impact on our interface design work." (Alexander Dawson ~ Six Revisions)

Posted on April 05, 2011 | Permalink

Context Menu Design

"A context menu is a menu that contains commands specific to the object that the cursor is currently pointing at – the 'target object'." (Hagan Rivers ~ two rivers consulting)

Posted on March 23, 2011 | Permalink

The Untold Story of How My Dad Helped Invent the First Mac

"Jef Raskin, my father, helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number of the core principals Apple now holds that were set in play three years before the Macintosh was released. Much of this is particularly important in understanding Apple's culture and why we have the walled-garden experience of the iPhone, iPad, and the App Store." (Aza Raskin)

Posted on February 17, 2011 | Permalink

Changing terms for changing times: Usability, HCI, UCD & more

"I am also somewhat sceptical about the value of including information architecture in this analysis. For sure, it is a term currently used within the digital community to describe the application of the principles of user centred design to the development of information-rich websites and applications. But the term was in use long before the web was invented (notably by the software industry)..." (Tony Russell-Rose) ~ courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on February 03, 2011 | Permalink

The Future of User Interaction

"In this column, we'll describe several new technologies that have the potential to change how we interact with technology and the world. Some of these technologies may be many years away from maturity, but they are definitely going to have massive impact in years to come." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters)

Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink

Emergent Computing Paradigms

"Curious if these three emergent paradigms make sense to you: organic material, infrastructure, and social currency." (Rachel Hinman ~ Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on January 03, 2011 | Permalink

Kinect Gestural UI: First Impressions

"Inconsistent gestures, invisible commands, overlooked warnings, awkward dialog conformations. But fun to play." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted on December 27, 2010 | Permalink

Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide

"A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage. This guide will provide design knowledge and fundamentals for this type of UI development. We highly recommend that developers adopt the Metro design style whenever possible. Although requirements may vary based on the application, paralleling this experience will create a more consistent, fluid UI experience from the custom and built-in application view." (The Windows Phone Developers Blog)

Posted on October 15, 2010 | Permalink

Recommendations for usability in practice

"This is the final version of my recommendations for usability in product development practice, based on a PhD research project at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of TU Delft. In the 25 recommendations I discuss how I would organize a company if the goal is to make usable products. So am I speculating here? Yes, to some extent. But the recommendations are based on evidence I found through the three case studies I conducted. The vast majority of the recommendations were based on actual practices within companies I studied or on suggestions by experienced product development professionals." (Jasper van Kuik ~ uselog)

Posted on September 13, 2010 | Permalink

Mobile HCI 2010 Tutorials

"After more than 10 years of Mobile HCI, providing an overview of the state of the art becomes more and more challenging. During the tutorial days of Mobile HCI 2008 & 2009, a number of well-known researchers in Mobile HCI gave overviews of the state of the art and cover many of the relevant topics. The tutorials also introduced the must read papers in this domain. The audience varied and included new students starting a PhD in Mobile HCI, practitioners wanting a quick survey of the state of the art and educators wishing to get an overview of Mobile HCI for their own teaching." (Enrico Rukzio) - courtesy of Wolf Noeding

Posted on September 12, 2010 | Permalink

Making the Deal: Supporting Product Demos with User Assistance

"Demo software changes the rules. Customers purchase your product only after it has proven its usefulness. Usability barriers in demos often cause customers to decide not to purchase—after all, their commitment to your product is minimal at that point. Plus, product reviewers often use demos to evaluate products. They rate your product based on how well the demo performs for them. A poor review can discourage many potential customers from even trying your demo, let alone purchasing your product. In both of these scenarios, your product’s user assistance can affect how successful a user or reviewer is in getting your product to work for them, in the critical window during which they’re making their judgment about your product." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters)

Posted on August 23, 2010 | Permalink

Achieving and Balancing Consistency in User Interface Design

"Consistency is a fundamental design principle for usable user interfaces." (Michael Zuschlag ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Permalink

The Value of Education in Research and Human Factors

"Education is always enriching. It increases your capabilities and improves the quality of your work. As UX professionals, it is essential that we continue to improve our educations and develop new skills. For people who do user research as a part of their jobs, we highly recommend getting formal research education. Even if it is just a single class in experimental methods, research education improves your ability to do your job effectively and gives you the flexibility to deviate from the standard kinds of studies we all tend to do on a day-to-day basis. We work in an innovative industry, so it is important for us to be able to innovate new user research methods. Having an understanding of the fundamentals of research would enable more user researchers to innovate effectively and advance the whole field of user research." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 06, 2010 | Permalink

Engaging with the future differently: From pyramids to pancakes

"Within a new worldview emerging from chaos and complexity, networks and systems thinking, what are the ways to decentralise and distribute innovation, strategy and design?" (Josephine Green ~ Chi Nederland vids)

Posted on June 07, 2010 | Permalink

John Underkoffler points to the future of UI

"Minority Report science adviser and inventor John Underkoffler demos g-speak -- the real-life version of the film's eye-popping, tai chi-meets-cyberspace computer interface. Is this how tomorrow's computers will be controlled?" (Huffington Post)

Posted on June 02, 2010 | Permalink

The Small Print: Writing User Interface Instructions

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

Posted on May 10, 2010 | Permalink

Developers, UX is not UI, learn that and stop trivializing!

"And while this might be just my personal feeling, I am under impression that this kind of misunderstanding and trivialization of UX comes mostly from the developer-centric cultures like ones from Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Reason more for those companies to keep investing and educating all parties involved – you owe that to the customers and to the community of practice! Good things have been done so far – but obviously much more needs to be done." (UX Passion)

Posted on April 29, 2010 | Permalink

Mac & the iPad: History Repeats Itself

"For those of us around Apple for the launch of the 1984 Mac, things are awfully familiar. In bringing that original Mac to market, Steve hit on a formula that worked for him. He keeps repeating it, and it seems to get better every time. It worked for the iPhone, and it worked for the iPad, too. Here are the necessary elements." (Bruce Tognazzini)

Posted on April 21, 2010 | Permalink

New Computer Interface Goes Beyond Just Touch

"Touch screen interfaces may be trendy in gadget design, but that doesn't mean they do everything elegantly. The finger is simply too blunt for many tasks. A new interface, called Manual Deskterity, attempts to combine the strengths of touch interaction with the precision of a pen." (Erica Naone - MIT Technology Review)

Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink

Into the groove: Lessons from the desktop music revolution

"Musical instruments provide really intriguing examples of user interface design. While it can take years of training and no small amount of aptitude, an instrument in the right hands can provide highly nuanced control over the many aspects of sound that come together to form one of the highest forms of human expression. And even for those of us who will never achieve such heights of virtuosity, merely using such a 'user interface' can result a great sense of enjoyment, immersion and fulfillment (what is often referred to as a state of flow)." (David Cronin - Cooper Journal)

Posted on April 09, 2010 | Permalink

Developing a UI Design Pattern Library

"Designing good user interfaces is difficult, and thus software development organizations need effective and usable design tools to support design work. In this thesis a tool, a user interface design pattern library which captures knowledge of good UI design and shares it effectively in reusable format to the development organization (...)" (@Janne Lammi 2007)

Posted on March 30, 2010 | Permalink

UX Design versus UI Development

"One of the more interesting tensions I have observed - since getting into user experience design about five years ago - is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves - and sometimes rightfully so - to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint. It's not the value they add, just the mechanics of delivering the creative concepts." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink

SXSW Live: Beyond the Desktop

"Some people think it's just the hardware, but it’s not. It's also about the software, the context, and the overall user experience." (Michael Leis)

Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink

Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design

"Users overlook features if the GUI elements — such as buttons and checkboxes — are too far away from the objects they act on." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on March 09, 2010 | Permalink

iPad Application Design

"The iPad may be a larger version of the iPhone in terms of the hardware and operating system, but treating it as the same device would be foolish. It turns out that increasing the display size of touch-screen hardware can transform it into an entirely new class of device. The iPad is a productivity platform in a way that the iPhone rightly never tried to be." (Matt Legend Gemmell)

Posted on March 08, 2010 | Permalink

Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications

"Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers. This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects. So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. While one could apply many approaches, techniques and principles to UI design in general, our focus here will be on business Web applications." (Janko Jovanovic - Smashing Magazine)

Posted on February 25, 2010 | Permalink

Agencies at the Interface: Colloquium with Lucy Suchman

"This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human–machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Drawing on examples from recent scholarship in anthropology, science and technology studies, and media arts and design, Suchman argues for research aimed at tracing differences that matter within specific sociomaterial arrangements, without resorting to essentialist human-machine divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while taking responsibility for the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made." (MIT Media Lab)

Posted on February 16, 2010 | Permalink

The Future of User Interfaces

"User interfaces - the way we interact with our technologies - have evolved a lot over the years. From the original punch cards and printouts to monitors, mouses, and keyboards, all the way to the track pad, voice recognition, and interfaces designed to make it easier for the disabled to use computers, interfaces have progressed rapidly within the last few decades. But there's still a long way to go and there are many possible directions that future interface designs could take. We're already seeing some start to crop up and its exciting to think about how they’ll change our lives. In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we'll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future)." (Cameron Chapman - Six Revisions)

Posted on February 12, 2010 | Permalink

UX Strategy is different than UI strategy: Part 1

"(...) a real iterative UX Strategy that is based on Design practice not software engineering practice." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand)

Posted on February 10, 2010 | Permalink

iPad Interesting Moments

"The use of real world style transitions (flipping bookcase over, flipping pages, spreading stacks, rotating orientation, collecting selected elements into stacks) work extremely well with a multi-touch interface. I am using my physical body not a mechanical mouse so the response should feel more real world. This is also what Apple mentions in their UX guidelines." (Bill Scott - Looks Good works Well)

Posted on February 08, 2010 | Permalink

Apple's Proposed Multi-touch User Interface System

"(...) these proposals outline an integrated interaction model of virtual "floating" controls that are specific to the mode or application the system is in. The controls are accessed and manipulated through touch-based gestures, combinations of mutli-touch inputs, and/or inputs detected through sensors. Users get haptic, audible, and visual feedback when using these input methods to interact with the system's set of virtual controls." (LukeW)

Posted on January 19, 2010 | Permalink

Designing & Selecting Components for UIs

"I have to think much harder when I design rich interfaces than when I work on standard Web applicaitons. With the increased flexibility and more components comes a higher risk of making silly mistakes. If I use a component inappropriately, users can't figure out what to do, even though the components may look cool. The purpose of this article is to help designers avoid mistakes and to help them choose (or design) components based on sound, fundamental principles of usability." (Donna Maurer Spencer - UX Magazine)

Posted on January 06, 2010 | Permalink

Information, Physicality, Co-Ownership, and Culture

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

Posted on December 29, 2009 | Permalink

UX Design Tools & Techniques

"UX design defines how software looks and behaves. We're deeply interested in the interaction models that affect how software is perceived, learned and used. Our goal is to make compelling software that's usable, useful and desirable. We are not the only discipline at Microsoft that has an active hand in experience design. In fact, we are a partner." (Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering)

Posted on November 18, 2009 | Permalink

Make It So: Learning From SciFi Interfaces by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel

"Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two, and use this as a scaffold to investigate how the depiction of technologies evolve over time, how fictional interfaces influence those in the real world, and what lessons interface designers can learn through this process. This investigation of science fiction television shows and movies has yielded practical lessons that apply to online, social, mobile, and other media interfaces." (Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel - Huffduffer)

Posted on October 12, 2009 | Permalink

The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol

"Symbols and icons can be both friend and enemy to UX designers. They can convey a great deal of information in the span of just a few pixels or utterly confuse users, depending on the context. The careful application of icons, however, can greatly enhance software, enabling quick access to a feature or function, using a minimal amount of screen real estate." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on October 05, 2009 | Permalink

A shorthand for designing UI flows

"Flows are just as important to good interfaces as individual screens are. Customers don’t land on screens from out of nowhere. Specific sequences of actions lead customers through your app as they try to accomplish their tasks." (37signals)

Posted on September 24, 2009 | Permalink

interactions: Looking Broadly to the Future

"This issue explores the future, where traditional boundaries of interaction are broken, creating a view of design as a larger, more culturally embedded, and ultimately more widely dispersed activity. We hope you enjoy the breadth of these efforts as presented in this issue of interactions." (ACM SIGCHI Interactions Magazine)

Posted on September 23, 2009 | Permalink

CHI Conversations

"CHI Conversations covers Computer/Human Interaction, including design, human factors, cognitive psychology, social science, and more. Our initial series is BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of ACM SIGCHI."

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

(Preso) Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patterns

"In this presentation we share a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns to help user experience designers and strategists grapple with the social dimensions of their products and services. The family of patterns, principles, and practices provides a framework and starting point for the conceptual modeling of any interactive digital social experience." (Erin Malone & Christian Crumlish)

Posted on September 18, 2009 | Permalink

HCI 09: Interaction gets all Emotional

"The ubiquity of computing means it’s now present in all aspects of our lives, and – perhaps not unexpectedly – that increasingly means our emotional lives. Emotions drive a huge proportion of what we do and likewise, our interactions with technology impact on our emotions. Emotion as a 'property' to take into account during design and usability evaluation featured in many papers – hinting at a whole new field of emotional design to come." (Usability News)

Posted on September 15, 2009 | Permalink

Book Chapter: Designed Animism

"What does pervasive computing have to do with animism? Essentially, it can become a tool in manifesting what I call designed animism. The goal is fundamentally experiential, but the conequences are profound: designed animism forms the basis of a poetics for a new world." (Brenda Laurel)

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Permalink

User Interface Trends

"Comment on and rate trends in user interface design for websites and web applications." (About UI Trends) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on August 24, 2009 | Permalink

Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality

"Many people enter the inside-out world of augmented reality (AR) by doing something as ordinary as visiting a major city like New York and trying to get to a local friend's favorite pizza shop, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, via public transportation. Standing in Times Square on a summer evening, they might hold up a new smart phone and pan it slowly around the Square to see a pointer to the nearest subway entrance overlaid on their phone’s video display of the buildings around them." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Permalink

Managing UI Complexity

"Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed." (Brandon Walkin) - courtesy of lievenbaeten

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Permalink

Zooming out from the desktop: The use of metaphors in Human-Computer Interface design

"The desktop/office metaphor is at the base in the interface of the majority of computers currently in use. The desktop metaphor was introduced in late 1970s to make computers friendlier to office workers. Today this type of interfaces and metaphors are not adequate with computer users needs. This dissertation explains why this obsolete concept is still in use. Then some alternative, emerging interfaces are presented. The last chapter then describes the One Laptop Per Child project as an example of how interface design can successfully take different routes from what is considered the industry standard." (Giuseppe Costanza)

Posted on August 10, 2009 | Permalink

Change: moving on to the next level

"The HCI community has always been quite successful in adapting to the constantly changing technological opportunities, human needs and trends in society. By discussing our work amongst colleagues we have incrementally improved our methods and techniques, but apart from that it is important to respond adequately to changing practices and thinking in other fields. At the moment there seems to be a big opportunity and urgency for HCI experts to contribute to the development of the relatively new field of service design. We should not let that opportunity go to waste. This talk is an appeal to the pioneers in the community to get involved in this new area. A lot of the thinking and practices of HCI naturally fit in, and may even lead the way for some of the other disciplines involved." (Geke van Dijk - STBY)

Posted on August 06, 2009 | Permalink

Designing is at least quadricentric

Video registration with multiple brain crackers. - "Interaction Design stresses human-centeredness. A strong focus on people is essential, but we also must focus on craft materials, their form and their function. While some design practices focus too much on means (the 'what' of design), avoiding commitments to explicit ends (the 'why'), we cannot ignore design means. Also, we must further distinguish the purpose of design ('why') from its beneficiaries ('who'), and also between both of these and the 'if' of designing, i.e., between evaluation, purpose and beneficiaries." (Gilbert Cockton)

Posted on August 06, 2009 | Permalink

Book: Search User Interfaces

"Search is an integral part of peoples' online lives; people turn to search engines for help with a wide range of needs and desires, from satisfying idle curiousity to finding life-saving health remedies, from learning about medieval art history to finding video game solutions and pop music lyrics. Web search engines are now the second most frequently used online computer application, after email. Not long ago, most software applications did not contain a search module. Today, search is fully integrated into operating systems and is viewed as an essential part of most information systems." (Marti A. Hearst)

Posted on July 08, 2009 | Permalink

The Future of HCI: Intelligent User Interfaces as Agents of Change (preso)

"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)

Posted on July 02, 2009 | Permalink

Pattie Maes on interfaces and innovation

"There is a wealth of information available, and most of it these days is digitized. I feel that we still don't have good ways to know what information may be available and what is relevant to whatever we are currently doing, to be able to access information, especially while we are in the middle of something. The current computers and the interfaces that we use, they are not really the ideal information-accessing devices." (MHT)

Posted on July 01, 2009 | Permalink

Building Better User Interfaces

"A great user experience starts with the user interface. In this talk, we will explore best practices in user interface design in a learn-by-example approach of the good, bad and the ugly in user interface design. From web sites to rich client, you will learn how areas such as navigation, layout, typography, controls and dialogs can make or break the usefulness of an application. At the end of this talk, you will have the tools and tips you need to bring great user experience through best practices in user interface design." (Microsoft NL DevDays 2009) - courtesy of all2gether

Posted on June 30, 2009 | Permalink

What the heck is the nature of UI design?

"In this article, I will offer an answer and then I will take a look at authority, power and weight of UXP on multimedia projects relating on the teams and how it could or should refer to for guidance in their work. I hope my answers to these questions will be helpful as well as provocative enough to drive some reactions and feedbacks from readers." (Holger Maassen - ux4dotcom)

Posted on June 09, 2009 | Permalink

Know Your Core: Providing Focus for Web Applications

"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 aggregate, these factors enable a new Web application to get in front of a global audience very quickly and easily." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on June 08, 2009 | Permalink

Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience

"The new Windows 7 desktop experience, including the new taskbar and Aero Snap, is both a major user experience change for Windows and an early success story. How did we go about evolving pieces of UI that haven't seen major change since 1995? Come hear about our design process and see the evolution of the design through sketches and prototypes. Find out about our challenges and learn how we used iteration, developer collaboration and design principles to increase customer satisfaction and enthusiasm." - (Stephen Hoefnagels - MIX09 videos)

Posted on June 03, 2009 | Permalink

From Idea to Feature: A view from Design

"What about unarticulated needs? The data plus intent shows the 'known world' and 'known solution space', but one role we have is to be forward thinking and consider needs or desires that are not clearly articulated by those who do not have the full time job to consider all the potential solution spaces. The solution space could potentially be much broader than readily apparent from the existing and running product—it might involve a rearchitecture, new hardware, or an invention of a new user interface." - (Engineering Windows 7)

Posted on June 03, 2009 | Permalink

The Stranger Side of CHI 2009

"At the Computer-Human Interaction 2009 conference last week, researchers showcased many new and innovative ways to interact with machines, from smarter Web browsers to new interactive tables. But the event is also an opportunity to demo more far-out ideas for computer interaction. Here are five of the more unusual projects on show at the event." - (Technology Review)

Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink

CHIstory

"If I have seen farther, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants...and then I looked down at those giants and saw the silly videos they made back in the day. CHI Video Showcase 2009."

Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink

The Study of Visual Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction

"This seminar intended to gather a group of about 25-30 participants who will exchange ideas, views, and case study results that address the seminar's themes. We aimed at discussing methodologies and measures in the study of visual aesthetics in HCI, to explore design antecedents of aesthetic interactive systems, as well as consequences of aesthetic design or aesthetic experience in HCI. We anticipated that the outcome of the seminar will contribute to clarifying the concept, provide an overview of existing practical resources such as measurement scales, solidify the body of knowledge in this area, and generally spark interest in aesthetics in the HCI community." - (Seminar)

Posted on April 08, 2009 | Permalink

The Best Computer Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future

"Computer scientists from around the world will gather in Boston this week at Computer-Human Interaction 2009 to discuss the latest developments in computer interfaces. To coincide with the event, we present a roundup of the coolest computer interfaces past, present, and future." - (Duncan Graham-Rowe - Technology Review)

Posted on April 08, 2009 | Permalink

Where HCI came from

"Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early 1980s, initially as a specialty area in computer science. HCI has expanded rapidly and steadily for three decades, attracting professionals from many other disciplines and incorporating diverse concepts and approaches. To a considerable extent, HCI now aggregates a collection of semi-distinct fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. However, the continuing synthesis of disparate conceptions and approaches to science and practice in HCI has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated." - (John M. Carroll)

Posted on April 05, 2009 | Permalink

Including Recommendations in User Interfaces to Enhance Motivation

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

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Permalink

Reviewing User Interfaces

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

Posted on February 24, 2009 | Permalink

Designing Social Interfaces: The Book

Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience - "This book presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners." (Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone)

Posted on January 27, 2009 | Permalink

Magic Fairy Tales as Source for Interface Metaphors

"The work is devoted to a problem of search of metaphors for interactive systems and systems based on Virtual Reality environments. The analysis of magic fairy tales as a source of metaphors for interface and virtual reality is offered. Some results of design process based on magic metaphors are considered." (Vladimir L. Averbukh - Journal of HCI Vistas)

Posted on January 06, 2009 | Permalink

A Universal Declaration of Users' Rights

"We're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. I'm a big supporter of this, and of Amnesty International, which works to protect these rights. Which got me to thinking: why isn’t there a list of users' rights anywhere? What is the baseline that all users of every product everywhere should expect? So using the UDHR as a starting point, I drew one up." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio)

Posted on November 18, 2008 | Permalink

People Are From Earth, Machines Are From Outer Space

"Norman's law: The number of hours per day spent maintaining our equipment doubles every 18 months." (Donald A. Norman) - courtesy of thehotstrudel

Posted on November 17, 2008 | Permalink

Grounded versus Speculative Reasoning in HCI

"If HCI wants competence in the cultural dimensions of interaction design, it must first have literacy in the intellectual disciplines that specialize in them." (Jeffrey Bardzell - Interaction Culture)

Posted on November 12, 2008 | Permalink

Start-up developing new Web interaction paradigm

"According to the Siri PR pitch, the product is 'a new interaction paradigm for the consumer Internet experience that applies intelligence at the interface.' (...) If we want our technology to have world-changing impact, bring it to the interface: get useful knowledge from all those intelligent people on the Internet give the benefit of this knowledge to everyone, says Tom Gruber." (Dan Farber - CNET)

Posted on October 14, 2008 | Permalink

Emotion and Voice User Interfaces

"When you hear the term voice user interface (VUI), what comes to mind? Most likely, memories of an interactive voice response system (IVR) for customer service arise. IVRs are certainly not going away. For many companies, they remain the foremost contact point with customers. But voice user interfaces are more than just IVRs. In fact, VUIs have tremendous potential for enhancing the experience of any mobile phone user. As the use of mobile devices and applications proliferates internationally, understanding how to integrate, or mash up, graphic user interfaces (GUI) and VUIs is becoming critically important." (Darnell Clayton and Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on September 22, 2008 | Permalink

The Three Paradigms of HCI 

"Informal histories of HCI commonly document two major intellectual waves that have formed the field: the first orienting from engineering/human factors with its focus on optimizing man-machine fit, and the second stemming from cognitive science, with an increased emphasis on theory and on what is happening not only in the computer but, simultaneously, in the human mind. In this paper, we document underlying forces that constitute a third wave in HCI and suggest systemic consequences for the CHI community. We provisionally name this the 'phenomenological matrix'. In the course of creating technologies such as ubiquitous computing, visualization, affective and educational technology, a variety of approaches are addressing issues that are bad fits to prior paradigms, ranging from embodiment to situated meaning to values and social issues. We demonstrate the underlying unity of these approaches, and document how they suggest the centrality of currently marginal criteria for design, evaluation, appreciation, and developmental methodology in CHI work." (Steve Harrison et al. 2007)

Posted on September 10, 2008 | Permalink

Chromium Developer Documentation: User Experience

"This section describes the motivations, assumptions, and directions behind Chromium's user interface design. Its goal is to explain the current design in a way that further work can be developed in-style, or so that our assumptions can be challenged, changed, and improved." (CDD)

Posted on September 03, 2008 | Permalink

The Future of the Desktop

"Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers." (Nova Spivack - ReadWriteWeb)

Posted on August 21, 2008 | Permalink

Ten Futuristic User Interfaces

"Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn't matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved." (Smashing Magazine)

Posted on August 18, 2008 | Permalink

The Story of the Ribbon

"(...) I presented a session at MIX. I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way. It's always fun to present substantially new content, and this was my first time giving large portions of this talk. The audience was great and, although you can't hear them on the video, they seemed to be into it and enjoying the presentation. It was a lot of fun!" (Jensen Harris)

Posted on August 15, 2008 | Permalink

Rethinking the Progress Bar

"This paper describes an experiment that sought to identify patterns in user perception of progress bar behavior. The results are then analyzed to classify behaviors that perceptually speed up or slow down process execution. We conclude with several design suggestions, which can be applied to applications that employ progress bars and contribute to an overall more responsive, pleasant and human-centric computing experience." (Chris Harrison) - courtesy of annekevandelangkruis

Posted on August 15, 2008 | Permalink

Ten Best Application UIs of 2008

"Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on August 12, 2008 | Permalink

Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens

Video registration of Donald Normans presentation - "In his latest book, The Design of Future Things, Norman offers a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow's thinking machines." (From Business to Buttons 2008 recorded sessions)

Posted on August 04, 2008 | Permalink

The Importance of the Management Perspective in the HCI Field 

"We explore the roles and the importance of having a management community inside the Human-Computer Interaction field and inside the large CHI community. We believe that the management community keeps the broad HCI field in touch with the strategic and managerial values of HCI research and practice. It can be an effective advocate and bridge for bringing the importance of HCI research and practice to the strategic and managerial levels of organizations, thus HCI work can have bigger and broader impact on people, organizations, and societies. We call for additional energy, effort, and participation to the management community." (Ping Zhang and Roberto Polillo - CHI 2008 DVD Proceedings)

Posted on July 01, 2008 | Permalink

CHI 2008 Report – Not Only a Rant...

"CHI 2008 is over – once again, time to look back and write a report for the SAP Design Guild. First, I would like to warn you: This collection of CHI 2008 snippets is neither balanced, nor fair. You may even find that this report turns into a rant, but there are also a number of positive observations. Large conferences are always like a shopping bag – you have to pick what suits you best." (Gerd Waloszek - SAP Design Guild)

Posted on June 24, 2008 | Permalink

Psychology in Human-Computer Interaction

"This course is intended to give newcomers enough background in the field of HCI to make their conference experience much more meaningful. It provides a framework to understand how thevarious topics are related to research and practice. It is a tried-andtrue introduction and has become a CHI conference tradition." (David Kieras - CHI '08 video lectures)

Posted on June 05, 2008 | Permalink

Bill Buxton's Bad Ass CHI 2008 Keynote

"In 1997 you yelled out that you would never come to CHI again because they just didn't get it. What changed your mind to come back? Ultimately I can't figure out a better community to work on these problems. It surprised people that I went to IBM, and that I came back here I guess. I had some time to think. I'm glad I came back. I was younger and wilder then and not so calm and cool and collected. I also stopped blaming you and CHI for not getting what I need. Instead, it's my fault. I can say what can I do to get fulfilled." (Bolt|Peters User Experience)

Posted on April 15, 2008 | Permalink

Being Human 2020 

"In March 2007, Microsoft Research organised the ‘HCI 2020’ meeting at the El Bulli Hacienda Hotel near Seville, Spain. The event’s title expressed its key question: what will Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) be like in the year 2020? That question is important because HCI, significant as it was in the late 20th century, has a pivotal part to play in the 21st, when computers will become so pervasive that how humans interact with them will be a crucial issue for society. HCI 2020 produced many ideas, both thrilling and troubling. This report is not a conventional publication of an academic conference but seeks to convey the passion of those ideas, both for the general reader and the HCI practitioner. For the general reader, this is important because knowledge of what the future might be may empower, while ignorance harm. For the HCI practitioner, its purpose is to map out the terrain and suggest new approaches while keeping an eye on the main prize: the embodiment of human values at the heart of computing." (Microsoft Research) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on April 02, 2008 | Permalink

Cues, The Golden Retriever

How our natural responses to stimuli can inform the design process - "I'd like to frame a discussion of cues by touching on a mixture of topics including memory, a few theories from cognitive psychology, and multimedia research. It may get a little dry, but stick with me. The integration of these three areas not only affects how information is encoded and retrieved, it influences how and when cues might best be used." (Jamie Owen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on March 20, 2008 | Permalink

Tap is the New Click: Designing Gestural Interfaces

"Even though the technology has been around for decades, only now are we starting to see mass production and adoption of touchscreen and gestural devices for the public. Jeff Han's influential 2006 TED demonstration of his multitouch system, followed by the launches of Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone, and Microsoft Surface, have announced a new era of interaction design, one where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking." (Dan Saffer - O'Reilly ETech 2008)

Posted on March 18, 2008 | Permalink

Where HCI comes from (and where it might go)

"This week, a new book appeared in my mailbox: HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community (eds. Thomas Erickson and David McDonald). This book helped remind me that human-human interaction was part of HCI, even if the field seems not to emphasize that these days." (danah boyd - apophenia)

Posted on February 26, 2008 | Permalink

My Vision Isn't My Vision 

Or, 'Making a Career Out of Getting Back to Where I Started' - "This was a golden time. My experience with this system surpassed even the motorcycle ride up to Ottawa – including those glorious hilly curves through the countryside. And given my relationship with Mabel, that is no faint praise. But truth be told, even this is an understatement. I am still striving to be worthy of the folks who gave me this, my first introduction to what has become my career. And, as the title of this essay suggests, since then, a huge part of my professional life has been an attempt to get back to where I started. My only hope is that I succeed. I at least owe them that. And the recognition. And thanks." (Bill Buxton - HCI Remixed)

Posted on February 06, 2008 | Permalink

Manifesto of the UI

"I've been thinking more and more lately about the state of user interface and it’s evolution path — it's something that I can't get out of my mind. Over the past few years (we're talking less than 5), we've seen user interfaces across the digital world morph from a static experience into highly dynamic interactive experiences. Web sites like Facebook and MySpace have proven that interactivity and the ability to relate real world ideas to the digital realm wins over features and functionality. Applications like iTunes have shown that how data is presented and you interact with that data is more important than how your computer processes the same data. As such, I'd like to pose a simple question to those front end developers out there: What do you think the future of UI technology will look like?" (Kyle Neath - Warpspire)

Posted on February 01, 2008 | Permalink

Towards a Model of Innovation

"For the last few years, innovation has been a big topic in conversation about business management. But despite all the conversation, there is little consensus on what innovation is and how to get it. Hugh Dubberly, well known for producing highly visual, exploratory models of complex topics, has produced a new model that explores the rich subject matter of innovation." (Hugh Dubberly - interactions magazine) - congrats with the fresh site

Posted on January 04, 2008 | Permalink

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

"The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into 'Human-Computer Interaction'. In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on 'interaction' may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called 'information software', I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users' goals can be better satisfied through other means." (Bret Victor)

Posted on December 20, 2007 | Permalink

HCI in SciFi Movies

"Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction." (A. Butz, C. Endres, and W. Wahlster) - courtesy of michelvuijlsteke

Posted on October 01, 2007 | Permalink

Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known And Loved

"Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can't take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my would-be answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones." (Bill Buxton)

Posted on August 23, 2007 | Permalink

IndieHIG

"The IndieHIG project is an initiative created out of the necessity to document the new look and feel aspects of the Mac OS X experience, outside of the supervision of Apple itself." - courtesy of slashdotorg

Posted on May 16, 2007 | Permalink

Giving You Fitts

"One of the most well-understood and salient principles underlying the ergonomics of graphical user interface design is Fitts' Law. Named for Paul Fitts, a psychologist at Ohio State University, Fitts' Law is a mathematical model of fine motor control which predicts how long it takes to move from one position to another as a function of the distance to and size of the target area. Papers outlining what became known as Fitts' Law were published in 1954 and 1964." (Jensen Harris - An Office User Interface Blog)

Posted on January 21, 2007 | Permalink

OLPC Human Interface Guidelines

"These guidelines are targeted primarily at developers who are building tools for the OLPC laptop. They provide an in-depth view of the various features of Sugar, the laptop user interface, and focus closely on the parts of the UI that pertain directly to software development and the ways in which applications, presented as 'activities', interact with the operating system. However, as these guidelines are intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the user interface, these pages should also be of general interest. Hopefully the descriptions of the various UI elements, particularly in the Laptop Experience section, will quench the thirst of all who want to better understand the project and its goals." (The OLPC Wiki) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted on December 15, 2006 | Permalink

From GUI to E(motional) UI

"In 1988, Apple Computer produced some video scenarios showing how future computers would be able to understand hand gestures, read text, and respond to voice commands. Almost 20 years later, the world is still waiting for a natural way of using computers—though we are beginning to see some of our wildest dreams slowly emerge from the chaos of high technology and become real. In 2006, it is easy to believe that the masses will soon be able to use a computer without any keyboard or mouse. Beyond the constrained space of our personal computer's monitor, keyboard, and mouse, I'm looking for the sort of revolution that would overtake the wild dream of Blade Runner. I can envision huge 3D virtual worlds and systems that are smart enough to feel a user’s mood and respond intelligently. Now, where do you want to go today?" (Leandro Agrò - UXmatters)

Posted on September 11, 2006 | Permalink

Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint

"This course explored the operational, organizational, and strategic impacts of user experience groups within product development companies and provided a conceptual framework for relating UX activities to strategic business processes." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on August 20, 2006 | Permalink

A Crash Course in User Interfaces

"Whenever the topic of interface development comes up, I'm always surprised to see most software engineers cringe as if they’re being told they need a root canal. Almost all modern applications require some sort of graphical user interface, and yet the UI is commonly the last consideration of development. Worse yet (particularly when it comes to web development) the user interface is often created by a graphic designer who isn't familiar with software development. The resulting separation that occurs between the application's internals and its interface can cause serious problems with the project." (Nate Kohari)

Posted on August 03, 2006 | Permalink

International Usability Evaluation: Issues and Strategies

"Like many UX practitioners, I'm often involved in designing products that will be sold across the globe. Half of the challenge is acknowledging there is no one-size-fits-all set of design criteria. The other half is knowing the tradeoffs when choosing between usability methods for requirements gathering and evaluation. What many may find surprising is that our tried-and-true methods themselves can have limitations, depending on the context in which we apply them." (Michele Marut - UXmatters)

Posted on July 25, 2006 | Permalink

User Interface Design: Taking the Good with the Bad

"The key to any successful marriage is compromise. While things may not always go the way you want them to, in the end, coming to an agreement helps you to achieve a greater good. The same holds true for user interface (UI) design. After all, what else is the user interface if not a marriage of form and function?" (Mike Padilla - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on July 18, 2006 | Permalink

Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint (1/4)

"One of the great things CHI offers to both practitioners and academics is an opportunity to reconnect with people from their respective communities. Though the intermingling between these two separate communities is not what it might be. Over the many years since this conference began in 1982, conference attendees have forged and annually - or at least from time to time - renewed friendships with their peers from around the world. Unlike conferences focusing on a particular UX specialty, attendees represented the diversity among practitioners - including designers, usability specialists, user researchers, and UX managers." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on July 12, 2006 | Permalink

History of the button

"Tracing the history of interaction design, software/web design and the future of environmental design through the humble button." (About HotB)

Posted on June 30, 2006 | Permalink

Journeying Through CHI 2006

"When I signed up to attend CHI 2006, for the very first time in my seven-year career, I didn't expect that I'd spend most of the event helping to staff our company's exhibit space and drive hiring for the St. Jude Medical Human Factors Engineering team. In 2001, a paper I'd co-authored with Robert Reimann was accepted for CHI, but I was unable to attend due to conflicting project duties. Over the years, events always seemed to conspire against my attending CHI, although I've had the pleasure of attending other conferences such as DIS and DUX. At CHI 2006, I hoped to educate myself about leading research and fresh trends in the field of computer human interaction, as well as network with folks I've worked and communicated with, especially through the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). In the end, though, working the St. Jude Medical booth consumed the bulk of my time." (Elizabeth Bacon - UXmatters)

Posted on June 05, 2006 | Permalink

Returning to CHI: Different Experience, Same Rush

"In April of 2001, a small dotcom sent a young Webmaster to a conference called CHI in Seattle. That was my first CHI experience. I had been forced to read The Design of Everyday Things, the author of which was some guy the owner knew from when he was working on his PhD at the University of California, San Diego—that'd be Don Norman. I'd never been to Seattle, never been on a business trip before, knew hopelessly little about the concept of usability—except that I was grateful when somebody blamed her problems with doors on the designers of the doors and not her inability to intuit in which direction a door will open—and was chaperoned by most of the dotcom's management team." (Jessyca Frederick - UXmatters)

Posted on June 05, 2006 | Permalink

USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language

"(...) a XML-compliant markup language that describes the UI for multiple contexts of use such as Character User Interfaces (CUIs), Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), Auditory User Interfaces, and Multimodal User Interfaces. In other words, interactive applications with different types of interaction techniques, modalities of use, and computing platforms can be described in a way that preserves the design independently from peculiar characteristics of physical computing platform." (UsiXML.org)

Posted on June 01, 2006 | Permalink

Opening Plenary of CHI2006: Scott Cook (Intuit)

"This plenary is the story of why customer connectivity is hugely important - Cook insists this means not doing surveys which can reinforce the company's existing mindset, but to get out into the customer's actual space - to get out the old ideas and let new ideas come in." (CHI 2006)

Posted on April 24, 2006 | Permalink

Videos in the CHI Video Retrospective Special Collection

"We've added 87 videos from the Assocation for Computing Machinery (ACM) annual Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference. These videos were digitized from the CHI conference VHS video proceedings for the years 1996 through 2002, with the exception of the video proceedings for the year 2000. We expect to add videos for the year 2000 and 2003 video proceedings soon." (The Open Video Project)

Posted on April 13, 2006 | Permalink

The Future of Interfaces is Multi-Touch

"This demonstration was simply amazing -- all running real-time off one laptop and all designed by grad students. I suggest that you take a look at their video that demonstrates the multi-touch interface." (Robert Kaye - O'Reilly ETech)

Posted on March 08, 2006 | Permalink

Interface in Form: Paper and Product Prototyping for Feedback and Fun

"Sketching and modeling are integral features of the design process, critical for both the generation of ideas, and the communication of concepts to others for discussion and evaluation, particularly in the context of human-centered design. While these methods are a natural component of the designer’s education and professional tool kit, there is immense value in exposing other professions involved in the development of products and interfaces to at least a limited set of these same basic tools." (Bruce Hanington - uiGarden.net)

Posted on March 01, 2006 | Permalink

Usability for Rich Internet Applications

"In this article, I provide some practical tips for designing usable RIAs, based on fundamental principles of HCI." (Donna Maurer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on February 21, 2006 | Permalink

Small Multiples Within a User Interface

"Many software programs provide access to, and let users work with, large amounts of information. In addition to interactions that allow users to create, edit, and expand massive data sets, these information-rich applications must also support effective data interpretation." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted on December 20, 2005 | Permalink

Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office

Audio presentation and slides by Jensen Harris (Microsoft) - "This talk will provide a historical perspective on the evolution of the Office user interface and the battle against the mounting complexity of the product. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the different design iterations, and an in-depth look at the new Office UI constructs, including the Ribbon, galleries, contextual tabs, and the MiniBar." (BayCHI)

Posted on December 18, 2005 | Permalink

Blog Interface Design 2.0

"(...) many blogs suffer from interface design shortcomings. Unlike issues of spam and authority, these problems have relatively straightforward solutions that could considerably increase the utility of blog content. Assuming a blog is not filled with spam content (splogs), spam comments, or spam trackbacks, there's often a wealth of information to be found therein: information that is frequently buried deep within archives and comments. This article looks at ways to bring that information forward." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on December 14, 2005 | Permalink

Emotion and the sense of presence in HCI design

"Emotion is becoming accepted as an important ingredient of successful humancomputer interaction design. It has always been important in design, but as a discipline rooted in the methods and mindset of the cognitive psychology of the 70s and 80s, HCI has been slow to accept that affect (as exhibited in feelings of happiness or anxiety) is an essential component of reasoning about the world, not an opposing force. Although we may loosely speak of emotion versus reason, both too much and too little emotion will have a negative impact on cognition, with the latter being the more pathological." (John Waterworth - uiGarden.net)

Posted on October 20, 2005 | Permalink

Web 2.0 Interfaces: The Future of Design

"So, at the end of the talk I re-asked the question about what Web 2.0 means to people. I felt like there was a general consensus: that Web 2.0 is a big deal, especially the architecture of participation. We're turning to new methods to find value for us, and those methods are systems built upon the notion that users add value." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted on September 16, 2005 | Permalink

Designing user interfaces with gestures and sound: Towards the performance and appeal of voice mail browsing

"In the current paper, three dimensions of multimodal access to content are explored: tangible media, use of gestures and sound. To this extent, the current study considers the role of sound feedback in support of user-product communication and gestures towards accessing voice mail via a tangible interface. In the case of voice mail representations, information can be directly represented by the recorded media, whereas the use of abstract sound representations creates a higher level overview of content." (Marco C. Rozendaal and David V. Keyson - The Journal of Design Research)

Posted on August 04, 2005 | Permalink

Why Do Current Graphical User Interfaces Not Work Naturally & How They Can Be Fixed?

"User interface design, a part of the broader field of ergonomics, has been a challenging field to work in since man first tried making a tool for somebody else. Consider the lowly garden trowel. A trowel is simply a piece of wide metal connected to a handle, whereby its wielder may move small amount of earth to place seeds or seedlings in a garden." (Warren M. Myers - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on July 20, 2005 | Permalink

Seminar on Cognitive Modeling for UI Design

"This seminar presents the current state of the art of evaluating user interface designs using models of human performance that are based on cognitive architectures. Such models can yield usability results without the delay and expense of user testing of prototypes, but because they are new and still under development, whether and how to apply them is a challenge. This seminar will survey current theory and practice; no 'how-to' of actual model construction will be presented; rather the goal is to enable a good choice of whether a modeling approach will be useful, and which type of model would be best to pursue." (School of CS - CMU)

Posted on June 29, 2005 | Permalink

Google vs. Yahoo! Interface Design

"As Google and Yahoo! continue their volley of product offerings, I thought it would be useful to compare the interface design solutions each company employed to solve similar user needs." (LukeW - Functioning Form)

Posted on June 06, 2005 | Permalink

Human Technology

An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments - "Human Technology presents innovative, peer-reviewed articles that explore the issues and challenges surrounding the human role in all areas of our ICT-infused societies. The journal seeks to draw research from multiple scientific disciplines with an eye toward how applied technology can affect human existence or how it can, for instance, foster personal development and enhance research and development in industry, education, communication and other fields." (Agora Center - University of Jyväskylä) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on May 20, 2005 | Permalink

A History of the GUI

"Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today? In what follows, I'll be presenting a brief introduction to the history of the GUI. The topic, as you might expect, is broad, and very deep. This article will touch on the high points, while giving an overview of GUI development." (Jeremy Reimer - Ars Technica) - courtesy of lucdesk

Posted on May 08, 2005 | Permalink

The State of Computer-Human Interaction

"You might say it's the toughest problem to solve in the modern world of computing; it's certainly the hardest to define. This month more than 1,800 designers, programmers, academics, professional researchers, industrial engineers, artists, and musicians gathered in Portland, Oregon, for another bash at the question, How do you make these monstrous electronics we've created easier and more pleasant to use? Welcome to CHI 2005, the annual meeting of the Association for Computer Machinery's special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI)." (Quinn Norton - O'Reilly Network)

Posted on April 15, 2005 | Permalink

Jef Raskin The Movie

"Beginning with conversations on interface design and creating a better computer, Our footage reveals a remarkable man who changes the lives of people around him. Passionately described as an inovator with an unfailing moral compass and a gifted educator with an active commitment to play Jef attributes his success in part to a foundation based on music, math and physics." (Dave Burstein) - courtesy of cityofbits

Posted on March 01, 2005 | Permalink

Jef Raskin Passed Away Peacefully

"(...) on Saturday February 26th, 2005 our condolences go out to Jef's family, friends and wider community." (DigiBarn Friends) - Jef's spirit will live through.

Posted on February 27, 2005 | Permalink

Report: Aesthetic Approaches to HCI

"This is a report of the NordiCHI 2004 Workshop on Aesthetic Approaches to Human-Computer Interaction, which took place in October at the University of Tampere." (John Knight - Usability News)

Posted on January 20, 2005 | Permalink

The Role of Design in Software Product Development

Video Lecture - "ePresence Interactive Media is a research project of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto." (Bill Buxton - KMDI)

Posted on January 17, 2005 | Permalink

Ten Most Wanted Design Bugs

"(...) design bugs that have been around so long that we've begun to think of them as folk heros. However, the usual requirement for turning a public enemy into a folk hero is death, not longevity, and so it should be for these worthies: Their executions are long overdue. These bugs aren't necessarily fatal. The are all at minimum highly irritating, and they have all survived for a minimum of five years or five product release cycles, whichever came first." (Bruce Tognazzini - AskTog) - courtesy of slash dot org

Posted on November 29, 2004 | Permalink

Rich Internet Applications for Revolutionary Interface Design 

"The use of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for complex, transactional web applications is a significant leap forward for user interface design and development. It fundamentally changes the foundation of the presentation tier for today's web applications." (Benjamin Wigton - Avenue A / Razorfish Perspectives) - courtesy of brett lider

Posted on November 11, 2004 | Permalink

Ergonomic Soft Mouse and Armrest Mouse Pad

"In this paper, it is shown that a teddy bear skin spongy mouse is a better option than a conventional plastic mouse design and that a portable arm rest mouse pad platform is far better than the conventional mouse platform placed to the side of the keyboard tray." (Bhaskar Gupta - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on September 28, 2004 | Permalink

Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons

"Even prominent websites make elementary errors in the use of basic user interface controls. The main guidelines are clear, but there are ten other things you should consider when using checkboxes and radio buttons." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on September 27, 2004 | Permalink

Ambient Intelligence: Changing Forms of Human-Computer Interaction and their Social Implications

"The paper describes developments to date in ambient intelligence and its closely related counterpart, ubiquitous computing and communication. It discusses the driving forces behind this digital information technology, describes the equipment and devices involved, the obstacles to implementing ambient intelligence on a large scale in real-world scenarios, and considers the future outlook. The authors believe that the introduction of this digital information technology will have wide-ranging implications, which will for the most part be beneficial and valuable." (Mahesh S. Raisinghani et al. - Journal of Digital Information 5.4)

Posted on August 26, 2004 | Permalink

User interfaces: The next generation

"Keyboards and mice will face competition from motion-sensing, gesture recognition and haptic technologies." (Computerworld) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on August 12, 2004 | Permalink

3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice

"(...) addresses the critical area of 3D user interface design - a field that seeks to answer detailed questions that make the difference between a 3D system that is usable and efficient and one that causes user frustration, errors, and even physical discomfort. The authors present practical information for developers, the latest research results, easy-to-follow guidelines for the UI designer, and relevant application examples. While there are quite a few books devoted to user interfaces in general and to 2D user interface design in particular, 3D user interfaces have received significantly less attention." (Doug A. Bowman et al.) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on July 27, 2004 | Permalink

Gummy World: Thoughts on the Graphical User Interface

"The world can be divided into two basic categories: people who like chocolate, and people who like gummies. Chocolate is serious, sexy, and secretive. Gummies are fruity, cheerful, and transparent. Whereas chocolates are often shaped as simple cubes, bars, and domes, gummies masquerade as worms, sharks, strawberries, coke bottles, teddy bears, cartoon characters, and more. Gummies promise a bright world of postmodern illusion, while chocolates imply a dark modernist sublime. It looks like the gummy people were behind the visual design of Apple’s OS X." (Ellen Lupton - Voice: AIGA Journal of Design)

Posted on July 20, 2004 | Permalink

Exploring the mnemonic user interface 

"The manner in which files are visually organized, all according to the popular desktop metaphor, concur with conditions applicable twenty years ago. Over time, these conditions, technical as well as user oriented ones, have radically changed. The desktop metaphor has not. This article is an offspring of personal reflections over too much time being spent traversing file structures and organizing windows in the user interfaces of today's modern operating systems." (Christian Lagerkvist) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on July 12, 2004 | Permalink

Prolegomena to Future Interface Design

A 80 mins. video of Jef Raskin's talk entitled 'What's wrong with the state of interface design today?' - Make sure you have the proper codec. (Microsoft Multi-University/Research Laboratory) - courtesy of vuk cosic

Posted on July 02, 2004 | Permalink

The SIGCHI Bulletin Web Site is here

"Welcome to an exciting new development in our organization: an interactive Bulletin Web Site. You not only can read about the latest developments at SIGCHI you can participate in those developments via discussions, letters to the editor, and your own articles. Likewise, articles can be read on line, printed out or sent via e-mail." (ACM SIGCHI)

Posted on June 13, 2004 | Permalink

Apple Software Design Guidelines

"These guidelines are intended to help guide you through the obstacles that confront Mac OS X developers. They cover different aspects of the design process and offers tips on how you can use Mac OS X features effectively in your design." (Apple Developer) - courtesy of vanderwal

Posted on May 31, 2004 | Permalink

Fundamental issues with open source software development

"The lack of focus on user interface design causes users to prefer proprietary software's more intuitive interface. Open Source software tends to lack the complete and accessible documentation that retains users. Developers focus on features in their software, rather than ensuring that they have a solid core. (...) If Open Source software wishes to become widely used and embraced by the general public, all issues will have to be overcome." (Michelle Levesque - First Monday 9.4)

Posted on April 09, 2004 | Permalink

Structure and Style in Use Cases for User Interface Design

"Various styles for writing use cases are presented with examples and discussions of their relative advantages and disadvantages, particularly their consequences for user interface design and software usability. Essential use cases, a variant employed within usage-centered design, are contrasted with conventional use cases and scenarios. For the most efficient support of user interface design and particularly for large, complex projects, a highly-structured form of use case has evolved. New narrative elements and relationships among use cases are introduced. These include means for expressing partial or flexible ordering of interaction, relationships with business rules, as well as a clarification of the often misunderstood concept of extension that recognizes two distinct forms: synchronous and asynchronous extensions." (Constantine & Lockwood, Ltd.) - courtesy of guuui

Posted on March 14, 2004 | Permalink

The complexity principle

"Overly complex interfaces significantly impact usability and must be avoided. While there are plenty of studies researching this issue and plenty of data to point to how complexity hurts a product, in order to truly address the root of problem, designers must understand where complexity originates." (Design by Fire)

Posted on March 08, 2004 | Permalink

A Tangible Interface for Organizing Information Using a Grid

"We present a new tangible interface platform for manipulating discrete pieces of abstract information, which attempts to combine the benefits of each of these two alternatives into a single system. We developed interaction techniques and an example application for organizing conference papers." (The Open Video Project)

Posted on March 02, 2004 | Permalink

How Would You Redo the Google Interface?

Four designers share their (re)visions (Wired) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on February 26, 2004 | Permalink

Zurgle: The Squeak Desktop Enhancement Project

"The Zurgle project is a campaign to help clean up some of the sharper edges on the current Squeak desktop by adding things like emulated widgets and window skins." (Squeak)

Posted on February 18, 2004 | Permalink

segusoLand: Screenshots and tutorial

"(..) a program for GNU/linux that enables users to specify any kind of action in a very uniform way, with an artificial intelligence that aids you while you are composing the action, by showing you only the relevant options. segusoLand features a completely new user interaction paradigm called 'reciprocal list narrowing'. You won't find it anywhere else. Some people would call segusoLand a 'desktop environment', some a 'file manager", some a "start menu' ... it is difficult to classify it because it is quite innovative." (Maurizio Colucci - segusoLand) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on February 11, 2004 | Permalink

User Interface Design — Is it A Science, An Art, or A Craft?

"My answer is: It's a craft that takes its wisdom from science, its inspiration from art and the design disciplines, its possibilities and limitations from software technology and corporate culture, and its directions — ideally — from the users." (Gerd Waloszek - SAP Design Guild) - courtesy of ben hyde

Posted on February 11, 2004 | Permalink

World's First HCI Rap: 'We Got It'

"Yo -- this is an OK/Cancel exclusive; for the first time in history: HCI and hiphop together. For your educational pleasure; now check this while I wreck with some buttons and levers; give me 10 seconds and I'll start this endeavor" (Tom Chi and KC - OK/Cancel) - courtesy of design by fire

Posted on February 09, 2004 | Permalink

Jef Raskin, Macintosh inventor, looks to the future of computing

"Twenty years ago, Pacifica resident Jef Raskin was a 40-year-old software designer and writer for Apple Computers. He was also a cutting-edge thinker, (he still is, by the way), who imagined a world of connected computers providing infinite bits of information to people sitting at home in front of user-friendly machines. He imagined those machines would be named after his favorite fruit - the Macintosh apple, and that they would have a very simple, graphic interface; designed to be used the way humans think and work, not the way machines do." (Chris Hunter - Pacifica Tribune) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on February 07, 2004 | Permalink

Multimodal Systems

"The interface between humans and computers still suffers from many deficiencies. Multimodal systems using multibiometric elements, multimodal interfaces and multisensor systems are beginning to alleviate many of them." (Juan C. Dürsteler - Inf@Vis!)

Posted on February 02, 2004 | Permalink

Interface Design Issues #02: Consistency and standards

"Consistency is one of the golden rules of interface design. There can be no question about this. It's important on many levels. When applied effectively in a design, consistency creates a foundation for a user to interact with the product in a predictable manner. Consistency creates usage patterns, offering users the opportunity to succeed in the face of an unknown feature encountered for the first time." (Andrei Michael Herasimchuk - Design by Fire)

Posted on January 29, 2004 | Permalink

Project Looking Glass: A Revolutionary Evolution of Today's Desktop

"Project Looking Glass is being created to work with the Solaris and Linux desktop environments using Java technology. When completed, it will work alongside applications designed for a 2D window system, without application modifications." (SUN Microsystems) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on January 27, 2004 | Permalink

The Role of Business Analyst - a Need but no Room for HCI?

"(...) I certainly believe more than ever that there is room for those with qualifications and experience of customer centred design principles in the position of Analyst. However, finding those with the power and faith to appoint these people to an analyst position will continue to be a difficult task." (David N. Clarke - Usability News)

Posted on January 21, 2004 | Permalink

Auditory Interfaces: The Use of Non-Speech Audio at the Interface

"The following is the manuscript of a 'work stopped in progress' in 1994.  That is, it is a book that we started, but never finished.  Nevertheless, we used the manuscript in its various forms for tutorials and courses that we taught, always with the expectation that we would finish. Well, the reality is, that is not going to happen. Nevertheless, despite its lack of completion, the manuscript represents a fair bit of work in an area that does not have much of a literature." (William Buxton, William Gaver, and Sara Bly - Buxton Design)

Posted on January 14, 2004 | Permalink

Audio Interfaces for Online Environments

"Sound is one of our most sophisticated senses, from the time we are babies our entire world is filled with sounds designed to stimulate our behavior. We grow to expect pleasure or annoyance as were are introduced to surprising new sounds as well as established ones. Sound has a variety of forms - voice, music, effects, nature, or other communication forms - and these can be incredible rich, complex, and subtle." (Clark MacLeod - Kelake)

Posted on January 13, 2004 | Permalink

Design Differences: VUIs versus GUIs

"Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are a new concept to many who now have the task of doing everything it takes to develop a VoiceXML application. This article describes the difference between the VUI and the long-familiar GUI." (Rick Beasley et al. - informIT) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on January 06, 2004 | Permalink

Widgetopia

"Collection of widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities." (Christina Wodtke - Elegant Hack)

Posted on January 01, 2004 | Permalink

User interface design for web applications: It is a different world from web site design

"The first lesson I learned was that each design decision is dictated by the focus of the project. The focus of my previous Web site projects was content; the focus of the application's user interface was task-based user entry forms." (Jean Tillman - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on November 13, 2003 | Permalink

From Function to Form

Invited presentation at TU/e Industrial Design, Designed Intelligence Group (2003) (Matthias Rauterberg)

Posted on October 28, 2003 | Permalink

Aero: The Desktop To Come

"The future of Windows is determined by Longhorn, the new operating system that Microsoft is preparing for 2005 that will imply, according to them, the 'life immersion' of the customers in this new technology. We review what is known about it up to now." (Juan C. Dürsteler - Inf@Vis!)

Posted on October 28, 2003 | Permalink

The ZUI Demo

"Zooming is an important part of THE and this simple demo illustrates some of the ways that zooming solves the navigation problems posed by our present system of links, tabs, and other click-and-go-there interfaces." (Jef Raskin - THE) - courtesy of brad lauster

Posted on September 22, 2003 | Permalink

A Taxonomy of User-Interface Metaphors 

"Although metaphor is a commonly used device in the design of user-interfaces, it is not rigorously understood, and most guidance stops at the recommendation of its use. In this paper, we seek to provide a systematic taxonomy of user-interface metaphors, based on and extending the framework of Lakoff and Johnson. We then suggest that some usability heuristics emerge directly from analysis of the taxonomy. We conclude that the taxonomy and heuristics may provide appreciable benefits in user-interface design and evaluation, and address some of the criticisms of metaphor use that have been made." (Pippin Barr, Robert Biddle & James Noble)

Posted on September 17, 2003 | Permalink

Interacting with the Ubiquitous Computer

Keynote at MobileHCI '03 (Albrecht Schmidt)

Posted on September 16, 2003 | Permalink

Mobile HCI: Visions of the Future

"(...) here are my notes from the Visions of the Future panel earlier today. There's some paraphrasing here, so blame me, not the speakers, for any misrepresentation." (anti-mega) - courtesy of black belt jones

Posted on September 16, 2003 | Permalink

Yahoo! Groups: Interaction Architects

"Started by Tog to discuss, settle upon, and promote a single, universal name for the practice of human computer interaction design/architecture" (Yahoo!)

Posted on August 05, 2003 | Permalink

Why We Get No Respect, and What We Can Do About It

"It's time interface designers, or whatever we're calling ourselves, get some respect. After 25 years of wining about it, I've finally realized we have only ourselves to blame." (Bruce Tognazzini - AskTog) - courtesy of webword

Posted on August 04, 2003 | Permalink

Is the Computer Desktop an Antique?

"But Apple may be on to something. Interface consistency was a wise strategy for the early years of PC adoption, but the Mac's new Swiss-army-knife approach makes sense now that using desktop interfaces is as second-nature as reading to a whole generation of computer users. After 20 years of point and click, we're ready to handle multiple interfaces within a single operating system. Bring on the zoom!" (Steven Johnson - Slate) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on July 28, 2003 | Permalink

What is Fitts Law? and its relation to HCI

"Fitts Law is a robust model of human behavior which enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement other than drawing or writing. In Human Computer Interaction Fitt's law is a useful guideline in interface design." (Fredy Ore - Reloade)

Posted on July 22, 2003 | Permalink

Branding and the User Interface, Part 2: Tips on New Media Branding: Behavior and Color

"Because of its increasingly significant impact on your company's brand, the quality of software's behavior is a crucial factor in your organization's success." (Nate Fortin - Cooper)

Posted on July 11, 2003 | Permalink

Inside Panther: A look at the Finder and System

"One of the most significant changes in Panther is the revised Finder interface. The new Finder features the brushed-metal look from iTunes and a new Places sidebar along the left, with quick links to volumes and removable media at the top; and applications, files, and folders at the bottom. With these shortcuts, the Places sidebar replaces some of the previous functionality of the Finder toolbar." (Nick dePlume - Think Secret)

Posted on July 03, 2003 | Permalink

Dogma Scriptwriter turns Attention to HCI Personas

"The workshop is intended for people who have worked with personas before and want to develop the technique. The workshop will focus on how to construct convincing and captivating portraits of users after the initial collection of user data." (Ann Light - UsabilityNews)

Posted on July 01, 2003 | Permalink

Ten Quotable Moments: Challenges and Responses for UI Designers

"To many software team members who havenít worked with UI designers before, it seems unlikely that there could be demonstrable differences in usability based on small details like those. I understand this skepticism, and my background as an engineer has helped me to figure out how to overcome it." (Brian R. Krause - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on June 24, 2003 | Permalink

Interfaces

"(...) the quarterly magazine for members of the British HCI Group, with features, events, reviews and jobs. Back copies are provided here as PDF documents." (British HCI Group) - courtesy of ben hyde

Posted on June 17, 2003 | Permalink

Microsoft's Longhorn 3D UI

"(...) here are a few short videos showing some of the features of the Tier 2 UI." - (Extreme Tech) - courtesy of heyblog

Posted on May 28, 2003 | Permalink

Computers That Speak Your Language

"Voice recognition that finally holds up its end of a conversation is revolutionizing customer service. Now the goal is to make natural language the way to find any type of information, anywhere." - (Wade Roush - MIT Technology Review) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on May 28, 2003 | Permalink

CHI 2003: New Horizons, But What Are They?

"Yes, this was a 'business CHI' - despite, or perhaps because, of all the cross-cultural and emotional ballyhoo. The scientists were not at the front desk, but the designers - designers of enjoyable products, ranging from funny mobile phones and Alessi lemon squeezers to smart and 'intelligent' cars. Did they talk about computer programs? I can't remember..." - (Gerd Waloszek - SAP Design Guild)

Posted on May 21, 2003 | Permalink

Narrative User Interfaces

"Narrative user interfaces are based on the storytelling paradigm and set out to revolutionize the way people interact with computers. They promise to ultimately make computers accessible for everyone. Today's graphical user interfaces, even though they have opened the computer to the masses, have reached their limits." - (Gerd Waloszek - SAP Design Guild)

Posted on May 21, 2003 | Permalink

Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's ETech 2003 Presentation

"Alan took us on a tour of some of the interface marvels of the last 40 years of programming. Using a series of demo films and several pieces of live software to illustrate his points, Kay made a convincing argument that there haven't been any major innovations in interface design or programming for the last 20 years." (On Lisa Rein's Radar) - courtesy of matt jones

Posted on May 13, 2003 | Permalink

Doing The Right Thing: Apple UI History

"If you do this kind of work," says interaction designer Gitta Salomon, "everything bugs you. Your car, your cordless phone, your home entertainment system - you hate everything." (Andrew Orlowski - The Register) - courtesy of kelake

Posted on May 09, 2003 | Permalink

Best of CHIWEB & SIGIA-L (updated)

"Posted CHIWEB summaries in roughly chronological order (April 1996 - March 2003 )" (Scott Berkun - UIweb.com)

Posted on May 01, 2003 | Permalink

Croquet: A Collaboration Architecture

Alan Kay of HP Labs at the Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (Stanford Center for Professional Development) - courtesy of marcus denker

Posted on April 29, 2003 | Permalink

CHI 2003: Opening Plenary Compares On and Off-line Media

"A key issue he identified in working with products that offered the same or similar content across different media was the recognisability of content in different contexts." (Ann Light - Usability News)

Posted on April 24, 2003 | Permalink

The Definitive Desktop Environment Comparison

"This article is a comparison of the UI and usability of several Desktop Environments (DEs), that have been widely used, admired and reviled: Windows XP Luna, BeOS 6 (Dano/Zeta), Mac OS X Aqua and Unix's KDE and Gnome." (Eugenia Loli-Queru - OSnews)

Posted on March 18, 2003 | Permalink

Keyboard Navigation

"(...) one of the fundamental requirements of any application is that users should be able to interact with the application using only the keyboard." (HCIRN Tutorials)

Posted on March 05, 2003 | Permalink

Malacca: Revolutionary Interface for Handhelds

"Malacca is the world's most advanced interface for handhelds, and is based on IML, the Simputer's XML-based lingua franca." (PicoPeta Simputers) - courtesy of dmitri ragano

Posted on February 19, 2003 | Permalink

Conflict in HCI Field: Computer Science vs. Psychology

"Forget about the implementation! It is absolutely secondary!" (Yarone D. Goren) - courtesy of webword

Posted on February 17, 2003 | Permalink

Tangible Interfaces and Graspable Interfaces

"(...) graspable and tangible interfaces are systems relating to the use of physical artifacts as representations and controls for digital information." (Eva Hornecker) - courtesy of brightly colored food

Posted on February 13, 2003 | Permalink

THE Key to User-Friendly Computers?

"Jef Raskin, who helped design Apple's classic user interface, is working on a new system, THE, that could be a big improvement." (Alex Salkever - BusinessWeek) - courtesy of nooface

Posted on January 28, 2003 | Permalink

Putting A Bad Interface On Things

"It's as if the user interface folks have had their clocks flashing 12:00 for two full decades." (Fredric Paul - TechWeb)

Posted on January 27, 2003 | Permalink

Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition

"In safety-critical systems, a thorough understanding of user needs and goals helps to establish workflows, environments, and behaviors that need to be supported." (Doug LeMoine - Cooper) - courtesy of cognitive architects

Posted on January 13, 2003 | Permalink

Alan Newell Assesses HCI and the Health of the Discipline

"Because the major problems about disciplines is understanding what the other people's constraints and motivations are. Psychology is completely different from computer science, because a psychologist wants to understand the world and a computer scientist wants to change it." (Ann Light - Usability News)

Posted on January 09, 2003 | Permalink

Interface Gets The Point

"Getting computers to understand humans the way humans understand humans is a tremendous challenge." (Technology Research News) - courtesy of lucdesk

Posted on January 08, 2003 | Permalink

Human Environment Mission Statement

"To make computer technology available to a wider audience than has been possible by radically and rationally improving its usability." (Jeff Raskin)

Posted on December 13, 2002 | Permalink

Palm OS User Interface Guidelines

"This book describes how to design applications for Palm Powered handhelds so that they conform to Palm, Inc.'s user interface guidelines." (Palm)

Posted on December 06, 2002 | Permalink

Intelligent Interfaces for Local Communities

"With pervasive internetworking, computers have become an extremely effective and economic means by which people communicate." (K. Stathis and P. Purcell - Usability News)

Posted on December 03, 2002 | Permalink

History of the Graphical User Interface

"The graphical user interface, or GUI, of Microsoft Windows is based on that of the MacOS (and the earlier unsuccessful Apple Lisa), which in turn used many elements of the work of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, who produced the advanced but commercially unsuccessful Xerox Alto and Xerox Star." (Wikipedia)

Posted on November 25, 2002 | Permalink

Interface Design as a Life or Death Proposition

"(...) recent initiatives have instituted a more prescriptive, design-focused procedure encouraging extensive user research at the beginning of the development process." (Doug LeMoine - Cooper)

Posted on November 18, 2002 | Permalink

When Good Interfaces Go Crufty

"(...) over the past 20 years, I've noticed that cruft has been appearing in computer interfaces. And few people are trying to fix it." (Matthew Thomas)

Posted on November 08, 2002 | Permalink

Shneidermann Demands Computing Renaissance

"His goal is systems that are usable, universal (...) and useful." (Usability News)

Posted on October 25, 2002 | Permalink

VoiceUI

The Art and Science of Voice Dialogue Design (Sam Horodezky)

Posted on October 24, 2002 | Permalink

Ergonomics Standards & Legislation

"Getting to grips with national and international standards in HCI is more of a black art than a science." (System Concepts)

Posted on October 21, 2002 | Permalink

Mac User Interface Design for New Developers

"The key to usability for Mac applications is consistency with existing Mac applications." (Brook Conner - O'Reilly's Mac OS X Conference 2002 Presentations)

Posted on October 10, 2002 | Permalink

Principles of Good GUI Design

"Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have become the user interface of choice. Yet despite the GUI's popularity, surprisingly few programs exhibit good interface design." (James Hobart - CCI)

Posted on October 03, 2002 | Permalink

The Evolving Mobile User Interface: Strategies for the Wireless Internet

"New and more powerful user interfaces are just as crucial to the success of 3G wireless as applications and radio technology." (Information Gatekeepers Inc.)

Posted on October 01, 2002 | Permalink

Mapping User-Interface Design to Cultural Dimensions

"Cultural anthropologists have identified fundamental dimensions of world cultures. User-interface designers have identified basic components of user interfaces." (Aaron Marcus - Next Interface)

Posted on September 16, 2002 | Permalink

The Humane Environment

"(...) a few of Raskin's ideas have been turned into usable, open-source, open-ended software so that you can try them for yourself." (Jef Raskin - SourceForge.net)

Posted on September 09, 2002 | Permalink

Search Interfaces

"This investigation is about the ordering and structure of the search fields themselves, not the results, which have been the topic of much discussion already." (Liz Danzico)

Posted on September 06, 2002 | Permalink

Design of a Future Wireless Information Device 

"(...) user interface concept for an advanced wireless, mobile device." (Aaron Marcus)

Posted on September 02, 2002 | Permalink

Tablet PCs Will Provide New User Interfaces

"Presuming that Microsoft does a good job at developing and integrating the handwriting recognition and voice technologies, we believe these new interfaces will help drive the emergence of a viable tablet form-factor market." (IT insights from Meta Group - IT World.com)

Posted on August 27, 2002 | Permalink

Shall We Dance?

Ten Lessons Learned from Netscape's Flirtation with Open Source UI Development (Peter Trudelle - CHI2002)

Posted on August 27, 2002 | Permalink

GNOME: Human Interface Guidelines

"(...) how to create applications that look right, behave properly, and fit into the GNOME user interface as a whole. It is written for interface designers, graphic artists and software developers who will be creating software for the GNOME environment." (GNOME Developer's Site)

Posted on August 22, 2002 | Permalink

Experience Working with HCI Folk

"(...) programmers are relatively open to usability input, especially as it often reduces the amount of implementation they have to do (especially trivial implementation)." (Joel on Software Forum)

Posted on August 21, 2002 | Permalink

Lifelike Computer Characters: the Persona project at Microsoft Research

"(...) exploring social user interfaces that employ an explicitly anthropomorphic character to interact with the user in a natural spoken dialogue." (Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group - Microsoft Research)

Posted on August 16, 2002 | Permalink

Zooming User Interfaces

"These interfaces create an intuitive information landscape - the user moves 'further away' to get an overview, or "closer" for more detail, while keeping a sense of orientation and structure that traditional 'pop-up' windows and dialogues can't match." (NYU Media Research Lab)

Posted on August 04, 2002 | Permalink

The Humane Environment

"But once you have learned THE, you will wish that all your software had at least some of its interface features. This we guarantee; it happens every time." (Jef Raskin - SourceForge Humane)

Posted on August 01, 2002 | Permalink

The Interface in the Environment

"(...) always be on the lookout for the unexpected." (Frank Long - frontend.com Usability InfoCentre)

Posted on July 26, 2002 | Permalink

The GUI Gold Standard

"The GUI of certain operating systems seems to be determined not so much by general usability standards but by understanding the quirks and desires of its users." (Elizabeth Milard - NewsFactor)

Posted on July 16, 2002 | Permalink

The New CHIplace Interactive Discussion Forum

"We are constantly adding new content and features to the new CHIplace (...)" (contact CHIplace)

Posted on July 15, 2002 | Permalink

A Photo History of SIGCHI: 1982 - 2001

"Explore annotated photos of CHI conferences and related events from the beginning of SIGCHI through today." (ACM SIGCHI)

Posted on July 09, 2002 | Permalink

Drag-and-Drop versus Point-and-Click: Mouse Interaction for Children

"Today's children will be the adult computer users of tomorrow and their interactions with computers today will shape their future relationship with technology." (Kori Inkpen et al. - The University of British Columbia)

Posted on June 21, 2002 | Permalink

User Interface Design

"(...) good design always involves a process of compromise." (University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign)

Posted on June 14, 2002 | Permalink

Designing the User Interface for the Físchlár Digital Video Library

"(...) we derive a design space to compare existing browser interfaces and to specify new interface ideas in a more systematic way." (Hyowon Lee and Alan F. Smeaton - Journal of Digital Information 2.4)

Posted on June 12, 2002 | Permalink

Aqua Human Interface Guidelines

"This document describes what you need to do to design your application for Aqua, the Mac OS X user interface." (Apple Developer Connection)

Posted on June 06, 2002 | Permalink

Unmasking Interfaces: Archeological Moments of Knowledge

"Does knowledge become simply information when cultural techniques turn technological?" (Wolfgang Ernst - The Digital Cultures Project Conference 2002)

Posted on June 02, 2002 | Permalink

The Commercial Feasibility of a Next-Generation User Interface

"Keep productivity and usability the #1 goal of software design." (Jared White - The Idea Basket)

Posted on May 28, 2002 | Permalink

Preview 'Freestyle': New Interface For Extended PC Media Experiences

"Experience video, audio, pictures, and TV through a convenient, flexible user interface that makes it easier than ever to enjoy your digital media." (Microsoft)

Posted on May 17, 2002 | Permalink

Principles of Educational Multimedia User Interface Design

"The purpose of the principles is to maximize the learning effectiveness of multimedia applications." (Lawrence J. Najjar - Georgia Tech Research Institute)

Posted on May 06, 2002 | Permalink

What is an Intelligent Interface?

"An 'intelligent system' does not necessarily have an intelligent interface, and neither is a well-designed interface necessarily intelligent." (Annika Wern 1997)

Posted on April 25, 2002 | Permalink

Top Research Laboratories in Human-Computer Interaction

"With big labs disappearing, the future of HCI research is in jeopardy." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on April 01, 2002 | Permalink

The Next Generation of Interfaces: Responsibility and Control

ASIST 2001 plenary debate between Ben Shneiderman and James Hendler (Steve Hardin - ASIST Bulletin 28.3)

Posted on March 21, 2002 | Permalink

Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines

"(...) authoritative information on the theory behind the Macintosh 'look-and-feel' and the practice of using individual interface components." (Apple Computer)

Posted on March 05, 2002 | Permalink

Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines

"(...) the IUI model suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand."
(Microsoft Developers Network) - courtesy of ziya oz

Posted on February 04, 2002 | Permalink

DENIM 1.0

"(...) a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design."
(Group for User Interface Research - Berkeley University)

Posted on February 01, 2002 | Permalink

Can Jobs Think Outside the Pretty Box?

Interface guru Jef Raskin, who helped design the first Mac, says Apple has to get beyond its "form fetish" (BusinessWeek online)

Posted on January 25, 2002 | Permalink

Interface Innovation

The Future of Information (Tim McDonald - osopinion)

Posted on December 19, 2001 | Permalink

Distributed and Disappearing UIs in Ubiquitous Computing at CHI2001

Workshop Paper as in the CHI2002 Proceedings

Posted on December 14, 2001 | Permalink

Speech Interface Guidelines

"(...) an overview of speech interface design principles" (Alexander I. Rudnicky - School of Computer Science, CMU)

Posted on December 12, 2001 | Permalink

DVD Menu Design

The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again (Donald Norman - Alertbox)

Posted on December 10, 2001 | Permalink

CHARM

Choosing Human-Computer Interaction Appropriate Research Methods (University of Maryland)

Posted on December 03, 2001 | Permalink

The Multimodal Interaction Group's Publications

"(...) a downloadable selection of the papers" (Multimodal Interaction Group - GIST)

Posted on November 26, 2001 | Permalink

Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction

"The central goal of this book is to teach the reader how to design user interfaces that will enable people to learn computer systems quickly and use them effectively, efficiently, and comfortably." (Clayton Lewis and John Rieman 1993 - 1994)

Posted on November 26, 2001 | Permalink

Complexity in the Interface Age

"(...) the power struggle in machine/human relationships and what it means today to be information-technology literate" (Jeremy J. Shapiro - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on November 21, 2001 | Permalink

User Interfaces and Visualization

"This chapter discusses user interfaces for communication between human information seekers and information retrieval systems." (Matty Hearst - Modern Information Retrieval)

Posted on November 16, 2001 | Permalink

Beyond Algorithms: An HCI Perspective on Recommender Systems

"(...) an effective recommender system inspires trust in the system" (Ramshi Sinha et al. - SIMS UC Berkeley)

Posted on October 29, 2001 | Permalink

VRI XtraNet

"(...) a list of pointers to internet information about software user interface topics" (Vertical Research, Inc.)

Posted on October 16, 2001 | Permalink

Chunking

"(...) to introduce some of the basic scientific and engineering concepts that lie at the heart of good human interface design." (Kevin O'Boyle - The Interface Maffia)

Posted on October 08, 2001 | Permalink

Designing Scalable Interfaces

"Scalable interface design ensures that interface development takes account of the need to change over time." (Tom Farrell - Frontend.com Usability Center)

Posted on September 20, 2001 | Permalink

Human-Computer Interaction in the New Millennium

Human-Computer Interaction, the Past and the Present (John M. Carroll - ACM/Addison Wesley)

Posted on September 06, 2001 | Permalink

Exoinformation & Interface Design

"Exoinformation is the informational byproduct of an individual's information-seeking activities" (Benjamin Brunk - ASIST Bulletin 27.6)

Posted on August 29, 2001 | Permalink

HCI Resources on the Net

"(...) a collection of information related to Human-Computer Interaction" (Mikael Ericsson)

Posted on June 22, 2001 | Permalink

HCI Index

"This collection of pages points you to many different resources on Human-Computer-Interaction on the Internet." (Hans de Graaff)

Posted on June 06, 2001 | Permalink

David Gelernter's New Desktop, A Dialog

"(...) a new interface in which every information asset in your life [is] treated like an email." (Feed Mag)

Posted on May 20, 2001 | Permalink

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines

"Current Evidence-Based Guidelines on Web Design and Usability Issues" (National Cancer Institute)

Posted on May 15, 2001 | Permalink

Human Factors International

"(...) GUI design from the point of view of software ergonomics and human factors." (Eric Schaffer and John Sorflaten)

Posted on April 26, 2001 | Permalink

Debunking The Myths of UI Design

"An expert takes on a range of beliefs that are now common in the software development community" (Paul Smith - IBM Toronto Software Lab)

Posted on April 17, 2001 | Permalink

Bill Gates at CHI 2001

"(...) so you've seen that the frontiers out there are pretty amazing" (Bill Gates' Web Site)

Posted on April 11, 2001 | Permalink

Why is Usability so Hard?

"The answer is complex and detailed" (Adam Smith - HCIRN Reflections)

Posted on April 08, 2001 | Permalink

Magic and Software Design

"Perhaps no field other than magic is tied so closely to the field of graphical interface design" (Bruce Tognazzinni - AskTog)

Posted on April 07, 2001 | Permalink

Debunking the Myths of UI Design

"An expert takes on a range of beliefs that are now common in the software development community" (Paul Smith - IBM Usability)

Posted on March 14, 2001 | Permalink

Reader as User

Applying Interface Design to the Web (Karen McGrane Chauss - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Posted on January 05, 2001 | Permalink

ETAG

A Formal Model of Competence Knowledge for User Interface Design (Geert de Haan)

Posted on January 04, 2001 | Permalink

User Interface Design

Navigating the Information Cyberstorm (Kavita Bali in LiNE Zine 3.1)

Posted on January 03, 2001 | Permalink

Interface Design and Optimization of Reading of Continuous Text

"(...) reading is the means by which the world does a large part of its work" (Paul Muter - University of Toronto)

Posted on January 02, 2001 | Permalink

Graphical User Interface Timeline

"This timeline lists all of the graphical user interface environments" (Nathan's Toasty Technology Page)

Posted on December 16, 2000 | Permalink

The Graphical User Interface: An Introduction

"(...) A good GUI makes an application easy, practical, and efficient to use" (Bernard J. Jansen - Computer Science Program University of Maryland)

Posted on December 10, 2000 | Permalink

The Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines

"(...) standards for the use of the Java look-and-feel" (SUN)

Posted on October 27, 2000 | Permalink

SHORE 2000

"A Comparison of Voice Controlled and Mouse Controlled Web Browsing" (Dept. of CS - University of Maryland)

Posted on October 12, 2000 | Permalink

Tim's User Interface Guidelines

"(...) if you understand and can articulate these concepts to others through your information design, architecture and visual design efforts, the web could be a very different place than it is today." (Tim Gasperak)

Posted on August 23, 2000 | Permalink

MUSIST

Multimedia User Interfaces For Interactive Systems and TV (GSM Software Management AG)

Posted on August 01, 2000 | Permalink