All posts from
January 2005

Designing the Future: Exploring China’s Design Transformation

Added on 10 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
GK VanPatter interviews Lorraine Justice – “I was also frustrated with the universities and the corporations in the US. I worked in both for many years and the structure and atmosphere was not inclusive for design. People were protecting their own turf on all accounts and didn’t have room for the new guy (design). Many of us in the design profession spent every day promoting design through our work and other venues, but people are loathe to give up what little power and security they perceived they would lose if they made design important. I did see improvement over the last twenty years, but what alarmed and amazed me is that the Chinese government understood design and all its implications.” (NextD Journal 5.2)

Information Visualization and the Challenge of Universal Usability

Added on 9 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Information Visualization aims to provide compact graphical presentations and user interfaces for interactively manipulating large numbers of items. We present a simple ‘data by tasks taxonomy’ then discuss the challenges of providing universal usability, with example applications using geo-referenced data. Information Visualization has been shown to be a powerful visual thinking or decision tool but it is becoming important for services to reach and empower every citizen. Technological advances are needed to deal with user diversity (…) but also with the variety of technology used (…) and the gaps in user’s knowledge (general knowledge, knowledge of the application domain, of the interface syntax or semantic). We present examples that illustrate how those challenges can be addressed.” (Catherine Plaisant – Univ. of Maryland – HCIL) – courtesy of usabilityviews

Can many agents answer questions better than one?

Added on 4 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“The paper addresses the issue of how online natural language question answering, based on deep semantic analysis, may compete with currently popular keyword search, open domain information retrieval systems, covering a horizontal domain. We suggest the multiagent question answering approach, where each domain is represented by an agent which tries to answer questions taking into account its specific knowledge. The meta–agent controls the cooperation between question answering agents and chooses the most relevant answer(s). We argue that multiagent question answering is optimal in terms of access to business and financial knowledge, flexibility in query phrasing, and efficiency and usability of advice. The knowledge and advice encoded in the system are initially prepared by domain experts.” (Boris Galitsky – First Monday January 2005)

Crafting a User Experience Curriculum

Added on 3 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“What user experience information is most essential? What core user experience concepts and skills should be conveyed to every member of a web development team? As I pondered these questions, it occurred to me that I was missing something important. I was forgetting that user experience is not just about concepts and skills, it is also about perspective. I needed to teach the students to think like user experience professionals. In fact, I needed to do that first, because this would make it easier for the students to acquire the necessary concepts and skills.” (Jason Withrow – Boxes and Arrows)

Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

Added on 2 January 2005 Peter Bogaards
“This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. Metadata allows systems to collocate related information, and helps users find relevant information. The creation of metadata has generally been approached in two ways: professional creation and author creation. In libraries and other organizations, creating metadata, primarily in the form of catalog records, has traditionally been the domain of dedicated professionals working with complex, detailed rule sets and vocabularies. The primary problem with this approach is scalability and its impracticality for the vast amounts of content being produced and used, especially on the World Wide Web. The apparatus and tools built around professional cataloging systems are generally too complicated for anyone without specialized training and knowledge. A second approach is for metadata to be created by authors. The movement towards creator described documents was heralded by SGML, the WWW, and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. There are problems with this approach as well – often due to inadequate or inaccurate description, or outright deception. This paper examines a third approach: user-created metadata, where users of the documents and media create metadata for their own individual use that is also shared throughout a community.” (Adam Mathes – Graduate School of LIS, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) – courtesy of joe tennis