History of the button
“Tracing the history of interaction design, software/web design and the future of environmental design through the humble button.” (About HotB)
All posts from
June 2006
Ambidextrous Blog
A blog accompanying the magazine – “Ambidextrous is a forum for the cross-disciplinary, cross-market community of people with an academic, professional and personal interest in design. The magazine is geared toward high subscriber participation and interaction. It is expressly designed to be informal, irreverent, and fun to read.” (Ambidextrous)
Definition of User Experience Revisited
“(…) I like the tight coupling between user experience and the organization (the sender, the product). But then, it’s not really a tangible, easy-to-use definition. I want something that everybody can understand. Users, web developers, designers, business analysts, clients must all be able to agree on the same definition and understand the definition in the same way. In my opinion this tends toward being too philosophical.” (Jesper Rønn-Jensen – justaddwater.dk)
Where Visual Design Meets Usability: An Interview with Luke Wroblewski (Part II)
“Visual designers with experience in or an understanding of business, engineering, usability, or information architecture can better account for those considerations within a product design. This point is especially important when you consider the visual design of a product is the voice of the interaction design, information architecture, and the business.” (Joshua Porter – User Interface Engineering)
TEDTalks
“Each year, TED hosts some of the world’s most fascinating people: Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses. The talks they deliver have had had such a great impact, we thought they deserved a wider audience. So now, for the first time, we’re sharing them with the world at large. Each week, we’ll release a new talk to inspire, intrigue and awaken the imagination. For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish.” (Technology Entertainment Design)
Conversation with Michael Bierut – Part II
“One of the hard lessons I had to learn as a designer starting out was that good design is not a self-evident imperative for most people. I tell students that they are spending time and money in design school acquiring an abnormal sensitivity to design that most regular people should not be expected to share.” (Peter Merholz – Adaptive Path)
Senior managers: you can’t keep ignoring the Web
“The Web deserves professional management because the Web is central to the future of the organization.” (Gerry McGovern)
Free Download: Part I of Found and Lost
Search is a conversation, a marketplace, mostly friction, and not discrete. – “A ‘video’ by John S. Rhodes revealing the future of search, why failure drives success for Google and Yahoo, and how search ultimately molds the way we act, feel and think. You can download Part I of Found and Lost, 15 minutes long, absolutely free.” (John Rhodes – UX Reports)
Understanding XForms: Components
“Big complex data models look really imposing and impressive, but at the end of the day, XForms got their start largely because the existing HTML forms just weren’t expressive enough. Consider some of the more vexing problems associated with typical web forms. Suppose that you wished to…” (Kurt Cagle – O’Reilly XML Blog)
Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test?
“When collecting usability metrics, testing 20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation
“Public language is a cognition-enhancing tool — it is a species of external artifact whose current adaptive value is partially constituted by its role in re-shaping the kinds of computational space that our biological brains must negotiate in order to solve certain types of problems, or to carry out certain complex projects. This computational role of language has been somewhat neglected (not un-noticed, but not rigorously pursued either) in recent cognitive science, due perhaps to a (quite proper) fascination with and concentration upon, that other obvious dimension: the role of language as an instrument of interpersonal communication. In this chapter, I try to display the broad shape of the alternative orientation. I discuss the views of some recent (and not-so-recent) authors, who recognize in various ways, the potential role of language and text in transforming, reshaping and simplifying the computational tasks that confront the biological brain. I then pursue this idea through a series of examples involving planning, concept learning, the construction of complex thoughts and the capacity to refelect on our own cognitive profiles.” (Andy Clark)
Where Visual Design Meets Usability: An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part I
“When properly applied, visual design is all about communication. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the web sites we design.” (Joshua Porter – User Interface Engineering)
On the architecture and design of information environments
“Though it’s common practice, thinking of information retrieval exclusively as ‘search’ is an arbitrarily narrow way of framing an area of capability with strong impact on overall perceptions of user experience quality and effectiveness. In the long term, it limits opportunities to offer customers more effective solutions to broader and more fully understood needs that involve information retrieval, but are motivated by other goals. This narrow view is especially limiting for the user experience architect, as it implies an immediate focus on the search aspects of information environments.” (Joe Lamantia) – courtesy of donnamaurer
Ted Nelson’s Computer Paradigm, Expressed as One-Liners
“The purpose of computers is human freedom.” (Theodor Holm Nelson)
The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture
“Of course there is a great deal of relevant research, as can be said of any area. However, this relevant research is scattered across many disciplines and over numerous journals, using various names and taking multiple forms. Seldom does it establish an explicit connection to IA, let alone describe itself as IA research.” (Karl Fast – ASIS&T Bulletin June 2006)
UXnet incorporates
“(…) we are honored and motivated to be providing the leadership for UXnet in these formative years.” (UXnet) – congrats to dirk et al.
Fine Typography for the Web
“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy – the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand – and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines.” (Dave Shea)
The Usability of Ajax: A Primer for Usability Professionals and First Hand Account
“You can’t just ask Dreamweaver for the code – it’s currently a hand coding exercise.” (John Whalen – HFI)
2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science
“(…) awarded to Donald Norman for the development of the field of user-centered design, which utilizes our understanding of how people think to develop technologies designed to be easily usable.” (The Franklin Institute)
Peter Morville at the Enterprise Search Summit
“In a world where people have so little attention to give, we must help people find what they want when they want it—when they are interested. We must shift from push to pull so people can pull things when we want it.” (Mike Moran – Biznology) – courtesy of keithinstone
