All posts from
May 2007

The Periodic Table of the Elements

Added on 16 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“When the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev published the first version of his Periodic Table of the Elements in 1869, he couldn’t imagine that it would become in due time one of the most outstanding information visualisations and that many fields would use it more than one century later as a visual metaphor.” (Juan C. Dürsteler – InfoVis)

PLATO People: A History Book Research Project

Added on 16 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of instant messaging, chat rooms, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations. This site offers information regarding a book being researched and written about the PLATO system and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s.” (About PLATO People)

IndieHIG

Added on 16 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“The IndieHIG project is an initiative created out of the necessity to document the new look and feel aspects of the Mac OS X experience, outside of the supervision of Apple itself.” – courtesy of slashdotorg

The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision

Added on 15 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“When you create an experience vision, you try to picture mentally what the experience of using your design will be like at some point in the future. As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future.” (Jared Spool – User Interface 12)

Zen and the Art of IA

Added on 9 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
Book review on ‘Designing the Obvious‘ (Hoekman 2006) – “Zen is the art of practicing meditation in everything you do and existing solely in a mental space. Envisioning surroundings as full of peace creates an image of actions as poetry. If information architecture is poetry, it gives just meaning, placement, and timing to an overall message or theme. The flow of numbers, letters, images and sounds together form a medium for the mind, a zen space of constant understanding.” (Clifton Evans – Boxes and Arrows)

Everything and the Kitchen Sink

Added on 9 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
Book review on ‘The Persona Lifecycle‘ (Pruit and Adlin 2006) – “Pruit and Adlin use the lifecycle as a metaphor to frame the different stages personas go through, from birth to retirement. To highlight their process, a fictional case study runs throughout the book tying everything together. Because design doesn’t happen in a vacuum, the authors talk about how to ease the adoption and communication of personas at different levels of your organization. In fact, the book covers the two most important facets of personas: making them and getting them used.” (Austin Govella – Boxes and Arrows)

When ROI Isn’t Enough: Making Persuasive Cases for User-Centered Design

Added on 8 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Making the case for user-centered design (UCD) is a topic of recurring discussion for UX professionals. Much of the discussion has centered on strictly objective approaches such as cost-benefit or return-on-investment (ROI) analysis. However, recent commentary suggests proving ROI is not always enough. For example, Dray, Karat, Rosenberg, Siegel, and Wixon have raised concerns about significant weaknesses of the ROI argument, including their concern it ties UCD to tactical, not strategic initiatives.” (Colleen Jones – UXmatters)

Different

Added on 8 May 2007 Peter Bogaards
“There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user experience document,” Donald Norman recalls. Rolston elaborates: Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is how people like to do things.” (Daniel Turner – Technology Review)