All posts from
June 2007

Interview with Brenda Laurel

“What do Aristotelian poetics have to do with human-computer interaction? Quite a bit, if you think about it like Brenda Laurel does. From an early interest in interactive theatre and interactive fiction, through falling in love with computer graphics and learning to code, and a long career designing computer games, Brenda has kept the cultural aspects of HCI at the forefront of her work. In this interview she talks about her work designing games for girls, and about working with others who inspired her (including Timothy Leary).” (Tamara Adlin – UX Pioneers)

On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

“Whether the emergence of a self-conscious experience design community reflects a canny land-grab on the part of a few visible and reasonably influential practitioners, an underlying recognition that our technosocial practices have transcended the rather limited model of the ‘user’ ultimately derived from old-school human-computer interaction studies, boredom with a thoroughly mapped landscape, or something else entirely, it’s undeniably been a successful way of framing things.” (Adam Greenfield – Speedbird)

Audio interview with David Sless

“Here in conversation with Conrad Taylor, he explains how for him information only has a meaning within a context; how information designers improve data collection and presentation by redesigning pathological forms and statements; the historical roots and ethical stance of the information design movement; how the automated production of text layouts from computer systems (bank statements, dynamic Web pages) calls for a closer relationship between professionals in IT and design; and how all designers of information systems have an obligation to use benchmarking and testing to prove that they are making things better. David also explains his philosophy of design with reference to an approach to linguistics that emphasises pragmatics rather than semantics and syntactics; the later thought of Wittgenstein; an understanding of language as a collaboratively designed artefact; and Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about the relationship between reader and text.” (Radio KIDMM)

Form Development Best Practice Slides

“As a number of people have asked about form development best practices in the comments on this site. I thought it would be useful to include Aaron Gustafson’s ‘Learning to Love Forms’ talk from WebVisions 2007. The big news is that Aaron has agreed to lend his expertise to my upcoming book and will be writing a ‘perspective’ on Web form development best practices.” (LukeWRosenfeld Media)

Mobile Social Play

“So I’ve been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB).” (Kars Alfrink – Leapfrog)

What Does Rich Mean?

“Amid the hype of Web 2.0, ‘rich’ has become the prime buzzword for fresh, sexy digital products, marked by glossy buttons with AJAX actions. But what does rich really mean? Using the concepts of Classical rhetoric as a framework, Uday Gajendar looks to transcend the hype and dig into the value of richness for digital products.” (Uday GajendarBoxes and Arrows)

What if Jakob Nielsen had a blog?

“Some have criticised Jakob Nielsen for having an ugly site and people have wondered if useit.com would benefit from a design makeover. Well I have got tired of waiting for Jakob to start a blog version of useit.com so I decided to build it myself.” (Chris McEvoy) – Appears to be a little outdated though, but still interesting enough to be mentioned.

Four Factors of Agile UX

“Drawing lessons from my experience with this kind of agile approach, I can state that its advantage is certainly the ability to produce a satisfying result despite time and budget constraints—even though the result is not perfect and will certainly need refinement later on. Another advantage of this kind of project is that both our team and our client’s team got to know each other better and learned how to exploit each person’s know-how, improving the overall ability of the design team.” (Luca MascaroUXmatters)

The Intranet Maturity Framework

“Over the years, Avenue A | Razorfish has designed and built enterprise wide intranets for industry leading companies across the United States. In defining the strategy, designing the user experience and building these solutions leveraging enterprise strength software packages, Avenue A|Razorfish has been able to observe not only how enterprise intranets are being implemented and used but also how they are maturing over time. These insights have been encapsulated into a proprietary framework, that shows how, why and with what business benefits intranets grow over of time. The Intranet Maturity Framework, which is described in this report, summarizes best practices along the dimensions of intranet sponsorship, governance, user needs, experience design, technology implementation, training, adoption, and ROI metrics.” (Avenue A | Razorfish Enterprise Solutions)