The Road to Usability
“(…) the lack of progress. Today’s Web UI doesn’t look much different than it did in 1994.” (Tim Bray – New Architect)
All posts from
September 2002
Babyface Design for Mobile Devices and the Web
“Challenges include limited spatial and color resolution, limited font choice, limited space, and information visualization in the form of miniature charts, maps, and diagrams, particularly table/list navigation.” (Aaron Marcus – Next Interface)
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)
Information Design Processes: Developing Accessible and Understandable Information
“Aren’t all graphic design projects very similar?” (Karel van der Waarde – Icograda)
A Meta-Taxonomy for Diagram Research
“What is the common ground for a science of diagrams?” (Alan F. Blackwell and Yuri Engelhardt)
Contingency Design: Maximizing Online Profitability By Helping People When Things Go Wrong
“Contingency design is (…) the error messaging, graphic design, instructive text, information architecture, backend system, and customer service that helps visitors get back on track after a problem occurs.” (37signals)
Use Usability to Best Advantage
“The issues affecting usability often have as much to do with your customers as with the design of the site.” (Melaney Smith – ClickZ)
The Cranky User: Electronic publishing, Usability, and a Free Lunch
The need for open standards (Peter Seebach – IBM developerWorks)
What Are Topic Maps?
“(…) something that collects the key concepts in the organization’s information and ties it all together, is nowhere to be found. This is where topic maps come in.” (Lars Marius Garshol – XML.com)
GAIN 2.0
The Journal of Design and Business (American Institue of Graphic Arts)
UI Guidelines versus Usability
“(…) how usability testing should be used to find out if your product meets the needs of your users and allows them to do their jobs effectively.” (MSDN)
User Study Techniques in the Design and Evaluation of a Ubicomp Environment
“To be successful, ubicomp applications must be designed with their environment and users in mind and evaluated to confirm that they do not disrupt the users’ natural workflow.” (Sunny Consolvo et al. – UbiComp 2002 Lecture Notes)
The Network Society: A Shift in Cognitive Ecologies?
“By examining the psychodynamic effects on human cognition of the adoption of the technology of writing we can logically assess and contextualize the potential effect of the massification of networked information systems on our day-to-day thought processes.” (Mathew Wall-Smith – First Monday Issue 7.9)
Site Navigation: A Few Helpful Definitions
“(…) collaborating with your team on the design of a navigation system can be difficult unless you all share the same vocabulary when talking about the different parts that make up the navigation UI.” (Indy Young – Adaptive Path)
Evolution Trumps Usability Guidelines
“Designing a web site, either usable or unusable, is hard work.” (Jared M. Spool – User Interface Engineering)
Lessons to be Learned
“There are serious problems with the way user experience-related programs are being taught.” (George Olsen – Boxes and Arrows)
Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville
“When we wrote the first edition, we had relatively little experience. Most of our massive IA projects at Argus came afterwards.” (George Olsen – Boxes and Arrows)
Switch to Mac OS X
A guide to key user experience differences between Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X (Apple – Mac OS X User Experience)
Information Architecture: Carrying out a Classification Situation Analysis
“Classification design should follow the ‘geniuses steal, beggars borrow’ rule. Your job is not to come up with some innovative way to classify your content. It is to find a classification that works.” (Gerry McGovern)
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)