All posts from
January 2006

Euro IA Summit Wrap-Up

Added on 31 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“This was an excellently organized and successful first European IA summit. It gave Europe a platform to show its unique accomplishments, raised awareness of how much IA is going on in Europe, and ultimately put European IA on the IA map without being a subset of the North America summit. (…) there was a definite need to recognize the European identity framed by what Europe can potentially do better than, say, the U.S., such as with mobile technology or with multilingual and multicultural issues. This awareness of a divide was perhaps the single negative aspect one could attribute to the summit, and it was also one of the most revealing. Europe needn’t live in the shadow of North American summits, but will Europeans harness their unique competencies?” (Deborah Gover – Boxes and Arrows)

Wildly Appropriate

Added on 29 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
Dan Klyn’s blog on information architecture and such – “(…) I’m feeling the need to use a work-centered blog as the hub for the professional work I’m doing and as a tool to communicate within a more IA-centric space.” (Dan Klyn)

Improve the usability of search-results pages

Added on 27 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Product search is the cornerstone of many Web applications. A user’s ability to select what he or she is looking for among millions of search results can make or break the user experience. A cluttered search-results page that is missing the essential filtering and sorting controls squanders customer loyalty and bankrupts sales revenue.” (Greg Nudelman – JavaWorld) – courtesy of webword

Web Authoring Statistics

Added on 27 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“In December 2005, we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata. (…) You will need a browser with SVG and CSS support to view the result graphs correctly. We recommend Firefox 1.5.” (Google Code) – courtesy of justaddwater

A New Perspective on the Experience Economy

Added on 25 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The main questions we will discuss in the sections of this paper are: (1) What is the nature of human experience? (2) What is the process of creating meaning? (3) What are the characteristics of meaningful experiences? (4) What are the starting points in bringing about meaningful experiences? (5) What are the design principles of meaningful experiences (6) What are the stages in designing and developing meaningful experiences?” (Albert Boswijk et al. – European Centre for the Experience Economy)

Color Theory for Digital Displays: A Quick Reference

Added on 24 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
Part I and II – “Computer monitors display information using the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) color model. An RGB monitor synthesizes colors additively by selectively illuminating each of its pixel’s red, green, and blue phosphor dots at varying levels of intensity. The light from a pixel’s three phosphor dots blends together to synthesize a single color. In additive color synthesis, all hues of the visible spectrum of light are mixtures of various proportions of one, two, or three of the primary colors of light: red, green, and blue. (…) Our perception of hues, values, and chroma levels depends upon their interaction with adjacent hues, values, and chromas, which can result in color-contrast, value-contrast, and chroma-contrast effects, respectively.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)

Sixth Annual Weblog Awards: Finalists

Added on 24 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“It’s now the sixth year of the world’s most established weblog awards, the Bloggies. Personal Web publishing never stops growing, and that means this year the public will have more contenders than ever to select from when choosing the year’s best weblogs. 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 have their champions; now it’s time for you to do your part for 2006.”

suggestusability

Added on 22 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Share, Suggest and showcase the usability Ideas and your views of the product displayed in this blog. Lots of experts are expected to view this blog and suggest the usability ideas instantaneously with their experience. Most often product will be showcased and share your thoughts and suggestion of user experience with the product.” (Rajesh Anandakrishnan)

Visual Strategy

Added on 18 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Visual strategy, understood as the coordination of eye and head movements in order to perform a visual task when looking at our environment, turns out to be a feature as personal as the way we walk or write. Information visualisation enables the creation of a visual map that makes the way we see easily understandable.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – Inf@Vis!)

UX Magazine (beta)

Added on 18 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“UX Magazine was created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience. Extraordinary user experiences should be the goal of every interaction you deliver to your users at any level. All too often, businesses (large and small) get it horribly wrong. It’s painful to watch and even worse when it happens to you.” (About UXMag) – courtesy of nickfinck

Experientia interviews Richard Eisermann

Added on 17 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Richard Eisermann is Director of Design and Innovation at the UK Design Council. In this interview, he discusses how the Design Council is using a design approach to help business, public services and educational institutions develop new products, services and strategies or redevelop existing ones, and how Italy can use some of the same ideas in its own approach to innovation.” (Mark Vanderbeeken – Experientia)

Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags?

Added on 17 January 2006 Peter Bogaards
“In this article we look at what makes folksonomies work. We agree with the premise that tags are no replacement for formal systems, but we see this as being the core quality that makes folksonomy tagging so useful. We begin by looking at the issue of ‘sloppy tags’, a problem to which critics of folksonomies are keen to allude, and ask if there are ways the folksonomy community could offset such problems and create systems that are conducive to searching, sorting and classifying. We then go on to question this ‘tidying up’ approach and its underlying assumptions, highlighting issues surrounding removal of low-quality, redundant or nonsense metadata, and the potential risks of tidying too neatly and thereby losing the very openness that has made folksonomies so popular.” (Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin – DLib Magazine 12.1)