International Sites: Minimum Requirements
“Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
All posts from
August 2005
Usability Testing for e-Learning
“Usability testing has long been a part of the software and product design world. Jakob Nielsen brought the concept of usability to the Web, making Web pages simple to navigate and intuitively organized so that users can easily find the information they’re looking for. While this definition may be considered sufficient in the world of software, the definition of usability in the e-learning world should encompass a few more components than simply good user interface design.” (Shailesh Shilwant and Amy Haggarty – CLO) – courtesy of usernomics
State of the Mobile Web
This is the first article in the four-part series on Mobile Web Design. – “(…) if we learned only one thing from the ‘desktop web’ standards movement in recent years, it’s that even the most behemoth organizations listen if the wheel squeaks loudly enough. And where listening ears are found, there lies also the potential for change.” (Authentic Boredom)
Making Meaning: The Business of Experience Design
by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea – “A book about how people make meaning in their lives and how companies can use this understanding to create more meaningful and successful products and services. (…) The biggest driver for experience is innovation.” (Making Meaning) – courtesy of cph127
Digital Information Design Camp
“Many traditionally trained, professional designers wonder what the next generation of computing technologies might bring to their field. At the same time, many digitally trained, professional designers feel that they have missed out on some of the cornerstones of a traditional design education. To work towards a common ground between the digital and traditional design sensibilities, during the summer of 2005 Professor John Maeda organized the first ‘Digital Information Design Camp’, a three-week-long exploration, completely in cyberspace.” (John Maeda – AIGA)
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)
Web Accessibility: A Broader View
“In this paper, we take a broader view, discussing an approach that costs developers less and provides greater advantages to a larger community of users. While we have quite specific aims in our technical work, we hope it can also serve as an example of how the technical conversation regarding Web accessibility can move beyond the narrow confines of limited adaptations for small populations.” (John T. Richards and Vicki L. Hanson – IBM Accessibility Center) – courtesy of joeclark
Designing From the User’s Experience
“Innovation emerges from truly understanding the fit between product and person. The understanding of real experience with a product and its fit to a lifestyle, affords insight into product and interaction design, feature priorities, and adoption cycles.” (Peter H. Jones – DMI) – courtesy of uxnet
IA in Germany: Chances and Perspectives
“Andrew Dillon declared in his closing keynote speech at the Montreal IA Summit (2005) that IA was entering its second phase. IAs are seeing more and more job opportunities as well as more professional recognition, and the field itself seems to be progressing. Not so in Germany. Here, IA is barely on the map.” (James Kalbach – Boxes and Arrows)
Users, activities, practices etc.
“(…) activity theory is always already part of user-centred design, and vice versa. They are part of the same tree: a mental or cybernetic species. Whether modelling users or activities, the models are systemic, relatively stable, quantifiable, hierarchical, discrete, and often predictive. More importantly, they make it difficult to imagine other ways of understanding.” (Anne Galloway – purselipsquarejaw)
We Are the Web
“Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy. (…) In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture. (…) Our Machine is born. It’s on.” (Kevin Kelly – Wired Magazine)
Visualizing the Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge
“A pen and ink sketch of 1943, the year before Otlet died, brings together his ideas on a global networked world.” (Envisioning a Path to the Future)
Designing for the Personal InfoCloud
“Presented to Vera Rhoads User Interaction with Information Systems class in the Master of Information Managment program at University of Maryland. This was presented to the class on July 26, 2005 and included elements from previous folksonomy presentations.” (Thomas Vander Wal)
User Experience Strategy
“A design-focused approach to product strategy (…) employs direct customer observation, cross-disciplinary perspectives, and a willingness to rapidly build, iterate on and tear-down prototypes. One could argue it is the essence of trial and error problem solving.” (LukeW – Functioning Form)
Hierarchy versus Facets versus Tags
“Because hierarchies has been the designated one size fits all solution to all our organizational needs, we break our semantically pure hierarchies by overstretching their bounds. As a result, we end up with messy hierarchies that are unusable and unmaintainable.” (OSAF Projects wiki)
