All posts from
July 2003

Design The Experience, Not The Participant

Added on 11 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Experience design is a lot like parenting. In both cases, it is my job to create a safe, creative and inspiring environment in which children, adults or businesses can thrive. As a parent, or as a marketer, I strive to provide the right tools to create desired outcomes. Clarity, consistency, honesty and engagement serve as guideposts in my personal and professional communications. So why is it that sometimes, even with the right pieces in place, the outcome is horribly wrong? I believe that this often happens because, although we can do our best to drive the experience, we cannot control the participants in it. We create the environment, draw the map and try to set a good example. But, even if you’re with your children – or your brand participants – every minute of every day, eventually they will do their own thing.” (Wendy Kadens – Thread)

Search Engine Personalization: An Exploratory Study

Added on 11 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Web search engines are beginning to offer personalization capabilities to users. Personalization is the ability of the Web site to match retrieved information content to a user’s profile. This content can be set explicitly by the user or derived implicitly by the Web site using such user profile information as zip code, birth date, etc. (…) Our findings show that despite the high level of interest in Web personalization, most search engine Web sites currently offer no or limited personalization features.” (Yashmeet Khopkar et al. – First Monday 8.7)

The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

Added on 10 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Every Web team has its own take on dividing up roles and responsibilities and implementing processes for design and development. Formal titles, job descriptions, and reporting structures can vary widely. But the best teams (…) have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.” (Jesse James Garrett – Adaptive Path)

User-Centered Information Design Workbook

Added on 7 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“A user-centered design process involves the participation of users from the very first stage of development, and continues to involve users at each step of the process. The goal of user-centered design is to create a product that works for the potential users and is well-designed for that user group. The first step in this process is to identify the target audience and to meet with them.” (University of Washington) – courtesy of beth mazur

Whatever Happened to Serendipity

Added on 4 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“If for three thousand years we’ve relied on rumor and reputation, custom and external data stores and never least explicit signage to organize our urban experiences, the advent of latent, user-generated, unedited, location-based content is something that has the potential to change the way humans do cities, change it utterly and in short order.” (Adam Greenfield – v-2)

Squeakland

Added on 4 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Squeak is a ‘media authoring tool’ — software that you can download to your computer and then use to create your own media or share and play with others.” (Alan Kay c.s.)

Gates on the Lifespan of Desktop Computing

Added on 3 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“We’re doing anything where software runs – on TV, watches, video games, you name it. If it’s about writing great software that can empower people, we’re doing software for every one of those things. As long as we’re doing a good job writing software we’re targeting our software at the full range of devices.” (USATODAY) – courtesy of nooface

Web Search: How the Web Has Changed Information Retrieval

Added on 3 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Topical metadata have been used to indicate the subject of Web pages. They have been simultaneously hailed as building blocks of the semantic Web and derogated as spam. At this time major Web browsers avoid harvesting topical metadata. This paper suggests that the significance of the topical metadata controversy depends on the technological appropriateness of adding them to Web pages. This paper surveys Web technology with an eye on assessing the appropriateness of Web pages as hosts for topical metadata. The survey reveals Web pages to be both transient and volatile: poor hosts of topical metadata. The closed Web is considered to be a more supportive environment for the use of topical metadata. The closed Web is built on communities of trust where the structure and meaning of Web pages can be anticipated. The vast majority of Web pages, however, exist in the open Web, an environment that challenges the application of legacy information retrieval concepts and methods.” (Terrence A. Brooks – Information Research 8.3) – courtesy of victor lombardi

Usability!=User Experience

Added on 3 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“This is not to say usability engineering isn’t important — it’s critical. But it’s also critical that the practice’s inputs and outputs stay focused on making things *usable*, that is, making it so that people are able to use the product. Able as in physically able, cognitively able.” (PeterMe)

Inside Panther: A look at the Finder and System

Added on 3 July 2003 Peter Bogaards
“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)