All posts from
August 2007

Ambient Findability and The Future of Search

Added on 31 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“At the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet, the user experience is out of control, and findability is the real story. Access changes the game. We can select our sources and choose our news. We can find who and what we need, when and where we want. Search is the new interface of culture and commerce. As society shifts from push to pull, findability shapes who we trust, how we learn, where we go, and what we buy. In this cyberspace safari, Peter Morville explores the future present in mobile devices, search algorithms, ontologies, folksonomies, findable objects, digital librarianship, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web. Reflect with Peter he challenges us to think differently about the power of search – and findability – to redefine our sources of authority and inspiration in an increasingly digitized and networked information environment.” (Peter Morville – Google Video) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Getting A Form’s Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Applications (Part 1)

Added on 30 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Although I have focused solely on financial applications, this does not mean that you can’t use these strategies to improve the usability of the forms outside of the banking domain. As usability practitioners, we need to first and foremost understand the user’s intentions and expectations, in order to provide an online experience that accommodates them.’” (Afshan Kirmani – Boxes and Arrows)

Success Stories

Added on 30 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Designing Interactions gives access to a very detailed and adept summarized history of commercial interaction design. It’s an invaluable resource to anyone who wants to know what happened to get us to this point, especially with the computer interfaces. But, again, it does beg the question to be answered, ‘Why did these few people have such an effect, something that more designers producing more varying designs could have had?’” (Clifton Evans – Boxes and Arrows)

XcD

Added on 27 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“The scope of human-computer interaction design has widened to include concerns with fun, emotion, beauty, aesthetics and values. There is an increasing emphasis on holistic approaches to user experience and what is now called experience design. A number of frameworks and theoretical approaches to experience design have been developed and a range of methods and techniques have also been proposed. This website is part of the work carried out on the EPSRC grant Theory and Method for Experience Centred Design. This site links to our own work and that of others on theory and method for experience centred design or XcD as we seem to have started calling it.” (Mark A. Blythe)

Design for the Dream Economy

Added on 24 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy.The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It’s not only about meeting people’’s practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience.” – (Pat Jordan – uiGarden.net)

All The Knowledge of the World

Added on 23 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“A documentary about Paul Otlet, often considered the father of information management, narrated by W. Boyd Rayward, his biographer. In the late 1800s and early 1900s Otlet pioneered the field of what we today call information science, but what he called documentation. A hundred years before the development of the Internet, Otlet used terms like web of knowledge, link, and knowledge network to describe his vision for a central repository of all human knowledge. In English and French. Produced for Dutch television in 1998.” – See also Françoise Levie’s documentary film ‘The Man Who Wanted To Classify The World‘ (€ 28 plus shipping and handling) – (Internet Archive)

Foundations of Interaction Design

Added on 23 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“It’s also important to note that Interaction Design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It’s not Information Architecture, Industrial Design or even User Experience Design. It also isn’t user interface design. Interaction design is not about form or even structure, but is more ephemeral – about why and when rather than about what and how.” (David Malouf – Boxes and Arrows)

Multi-Touch Systems That I Have Known And Loved

Added on 23 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“Since the announcement of the iPhone, an especially large number of people have asked me about multi-touch. The reason is largely because they know that I have been involved in the topic for a number of years. The problem is, I can’t take the time to give a detailed reply to each question. So I have done the next best thing (I hope). That is, start compiling my would-be answer in this document. The assumption is that ultimately it is less work to give one reasonable answer than many unsatisfactory ones.” (Bill Buxton)

Content management by redefining the document

Added on 22 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
Keynote by Ted Nelson – “Content Management is not just a corporate issue. Authors and families, as well as companies small and immense, have the same problem on one scale or another. Here is the problem: The curation and presentation of media, even as the media change. Whether the media are family pictures and family trees, or fleets of brochures and web pages, they need to be saved, shown and repeatedly edited. And not only long-term media assets, but day-by-day communications and presentations and changes, may need to be tracked and managed.” (cmf2006)

Conference Review UPA 2007: Part I/II

Added on 21 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“This year’s theme focused on Patterns and how they serve as ‘blueprints for usability’. Conference co-chair, Carol Smith articulated the pertinence of this theme. “As usability professionals, our ability to observe users and to discover their patterns of interaction is integral to our work. By defining these patterns, we can then leverage that knowledge to create usable interfaces that are familiar and useful to our users.” – (Joi L. Roberts – UXmatters)

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

Added on 21 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

2Collab beta

Added on 17 August 2007 Peter Bogaards
“2collab is a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize your favorite internet resources – such as blogs, websites, research articles, and more. Then, in private or public groups you can decide to share your bookmarks with others – stimulating debate and discussion. Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. You can browse public groups and bookmarks, but must register (your name and email address) to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.” (Elsevier)