All posts from
August 2009

Online Advertising: Factors That Influence Customer Experience

“In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web.” (Afshan KirmaniUXmatters)

Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality

“Many people enter the inside-out world of augmented reality (AR) by doing something as ordinary as visiting a major city like New York and trying to get to a local friend’s favorite pizza shop, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, via public transportation. Standing in Times Square on a summer evening, they might hold up a new smart phone and pan it slowly around the Square to see a pointer to the nearest subway entrance overlaid on their phone’s video display of the buildings around them.” (Joe LamantiaUXmatters)

Effective UX in a Corporate Environment: Part I

“Today’s consumers have growing expectations for higher quality and ease of use in new products. They typically evaluate brand values and product specs before paying top dollar for products. Companies are scrambling to align their brand touchpoints and gain loyal customers for their current and future product lines. Without strong brands, consumers buy with their wallets, not their hearts. They may miss product innovations companies have designed to fill major gaps in their markets and increase their market shares—even products they’ve painstakingly tested with users.” (Janet M. Six and Chris AnthonyUXmatters)

Managing UI Complexity

“Interface complexity is an issue every designer wrestles with when designing a reasonably sophisticated application. A complex interface can reduce user effectiveness, increase the learning curve of the application, and cause users to feel intimidated and overwhelmed.” (Brandon Walkin) – courtesy of lievenbaeten

The Case for Content Strategy – Motown Style

“Over the past year, the content strategy chatter has been building. Jeffrey MacIntyre gave us its raison d’être. Kristina Halvorson wrote the call to arms. Panels at SXSW, presentations at An Event Apart, and regional meetups continue to build the drum roll. But how do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really.” (Margot Bloomsteim – A List Apart)

The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design

“I live and breathe user experience design, and yet it took me two years to get myself the device referenced by almost every single presentation about user experience since 2007… Apple’s iPhone. My reasons were very specific and perhaps boring, but what is interesting is the perspective this wait has afforded me. Since it was released, the iPhone has grabbed an astonishing share of mobile Web traffic, been regarded as a ‘game-changer’ in both the design and business worlds, and has even been referred to as the ‘Jesus Phone’. Now that I’ve owned one for two weeks I’ve developed a different perspective. The iPhone is surprisingly difficult to use, but it sure is fun! And that is why it’s a game-changer.” (Fred Beecher – Johnny Holland Magazine)

Using the Internet: Skill related problems in users’ online behavior PDF Logo

“This study extends the conventional and superficial notion of measuring digital skills by proposing definitions for operational, formal, information and strategic skills. The main purpose was to identify individual skill related problems that users experience when navigating the Internet. In particular, lower levels of education and aging seem to contribute to the amount of experienced operational and formal skill related problems. With respect to information skills, higher levels of education seem to perform best. Age did not seem to contribute to information skill related problems. Results did reveal that age had a negative effect on selecting irrelevant search results. Individual strategic Internet skill related problems occurred often, with the exception of subjects with higher levels of education. Younger subjects experienced far less operational and formal skill related problems, but there was no difference regarding information and strategic skill related problems.” (Alexander J.A.M. van Deursen and Jan A.G.M. van Dijk) – courtesy of shuggie

Study: Expected versus experienced usability

“In this paper. we explore why consumers do not seem to have a very distinct preference for usable products, even though these make satisfy them more after purchase. We wanted to explore the hypothesis that this might be due to the fact that it might be to hard for consumers to judge before use whether a product is usable or not. We call the pre-use assumptions that people have about the usability of a product expected usability. Experienced usability is the opinion people have about usability after use. We wanted to explore what product properties influence expected usability, and whether and when there is a difference between expected and experienced usability. And what the consequences of that are.” (Jasper van Kuijkuselog)

Preso: Designing for Social Traction

“Here is the slide deck from a talk I gave last week at Delve, a two-day masterclass held in Brooklyn, NY. The talk is in three parts, with each part focusing on a specific problem in software. Each problem is a major hurdle in what I call the usage lifecycle, or the stages people go through as they use and adopt software over time. These three hurdles come directly out of the work I do with clients…I’ve been focusing almost exclusively on these specific problems…I hope the slides help you focus on them as well.” (Joshua Porter – Bokardo)

Mobile User Experience Research: Challenges, Methods & Tools

“The main goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from industry and academia, designers, and creators of mobile research tools to discuss methods, tools and infrastructure for mobile UX and HCI research. To achieve this goal, we plan to provide a forum for participants to share past experiences, success stories, failures and associated learnings, as well as recurring problems; to jointly prioritize these; to map out the dimensions required of mobile research tools, and translate some of these into draft requirements and low-fidelity prototypes for novel research tools.” (CHI ’09 Workshop)

Zooming out from the desktop: The use of metaphors in Human-Computer Interface design

“The desktop/office metaphor is at the base in the interface of the majority of computers currently in use. The desktop metaphor was introduced in late 1970s to make computers friendlier to office workers. Today this type of interfaces and metaphors are not adequate with computer users needs. This dissertation explains why this obsolete concept is still in use. Then some alternative, emerging interfaces are presented. The last chapter then describes the One Laptop Per Child project as an example of how interface design can successfully take different routes from what is considered the industry standard.” (Giuseppe Costanza)

Document Design Matters

“The classical approach to the data aspect of system design distinguishes conceptual, logical, and physical models. Models of each type or level are governed by metamodels that specify the kinds of concepts and constraints that can be used by each model; in most cases metamodels are accompanied by languages for describing models. For example, in database design, conceptual models usually conform to the Entity-Relationship (ER) metamodel (or some extension of it), the logical model maps ER models to relational tables and introduces normalization, and the physical model handles implementation issues such as possible denormalizations in the context of a particular database schema language. In this modeling methodology, there is a single hierarchy of models that rests on the assumption that one data model spans all modeling levels and applies to all the applications in some domain. The ‘one true model’ approach assumes homogeneity, but this does not work very well for the Web. The Web as a constantly growing ecosystem of heterogeneous data and services has challenged a number of practices and theories about the design of IT landscapes. Instead of being governed by ‘one true model’ used by everyone, the underlying assumption of top-down design, Web data and services evolve in an uncoordinated fashion. As a result, a fundamental challenge with Web data and services is matching and mapping local and often partial models that not only are different models of the same application domain, but also differ, implicitly or explicitly, in their associated metamodels.” (Erik Wilde and Robert J. Glushko)

Change: moving on to the next level

“The HCI community has always been quite successful in adapting to the constantly changing technological opportunities, human needs and trends in society. By discussing our work amongst colleagues we have incrementally improved our methods and techniques, but apart from that it is important to respond adequately to changing practices and thinking in other fields. At the moment there seems to be a big opportunity and urgency for HCI experts to contribute to the development of the relatively new field of service design. We should not let that opportunity go to waste. This talk is an appeal to the pioneers in the community to get involved in this new area. A lot of the thinking and practices of HCI naturally fit in, and may even lead the way for some of the other disciplines involved.” (Geke van Dijk – STBY)