All posts from
April 2010

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 3

Added on 30 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Navimation: Exploring Time, Space & Motion in the Design of Screen-based Interfaces

Added on 30 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Screen-based user interfaces now include dynamic and moving elements that transform the screen space and relations of mediated content. These changes place new demands on design as well as on our reading and use of such multimodal texts. Assuming a socio-cultural perspective on design, we discuss in this article the use of animation and visual motion in interface navigation as navimation. After presenting our Communication Design framework, we refer to relevant literature on navigation and motion. Three core concepts are introduced for the purpose of analysing selected interface examples using multimodal textual analysis informed by social semiotics. The analysis draws on concepts from multiple fields, including animation studies, ‘new’ media, interaction design, and human-computer interaction. Relations between time, space and motion are discussed and linked to wider debates concerning interface design.” (Jon Olav H. Eikenes and Andrew Morrison ~ IJDesign Volume 4 No. 1, 2010)

Developers, UX is not UI, learn that and stop trivializing!

Added on 29 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“And while this might be just my personal feeling, I am under impression that this kind of misunderstanding and trivialization of UX comes mostly from the developer-centric cultures like ones from Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Reason more for those companies to keep investing and educating all parties involved – you owe that to the customers and to the community of practice! Good things have been done so far – but obviously much more needs to be done.” (UX Passion)

The Differences Between Good Designers and Great Designers

Added on 28 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Four years ago Cameron Moll gave a presentation on 9 skills that separate good designers and great designers. It’s a great talk and if you have the chance I suggest you at least check out the PDF slidedeck. I think the points he makes in the presentation are still relevant today and go a long way in educating us in how designers should be approaching their interactive designs.” (Drawar)

Usability Do’s And Don’ts For Interactive Design

Added on 27 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“We often talk about how to make our websites more usable, whether it’s tweaking the HTML structure of pages to benefit the user’s process or figuring out how best to display a message via CSS. But we never bring this thought process into our jQuery-based (and other JavaScript-based) elements. How can we enhance the user experience and usability of our jQuery events? Below, we’ll briefly discuss ways to look at the code and the result of our interactive designs and, thus, improve their usability.” (Smashing Magazine)

Search Patterns is Customer Behavior and Business Insights

Added on 27 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
Interview with Peter Morville about his new book Search Patterns – “(…) I’m a skeptic when it comes to grand visions of The Semantic Web. In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or ‘ontologies’) that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don’t scale, and they can’t keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge.” (Bridgeline Digital)

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 2

Added on 26 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

The Promise of Using UI Patterns for Large Software Packages Revisited

Added on 26 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In this case study, we reflect on how a UI pattern-based design for building standard business software affects the user experience and the user-centered design process. We learned that pattern-based design does not optimize the user experience per se. Additional factors, such as user-centered design, prototyping tools, and management support determine the success or failure of the pattern-based approach. Interweaving the factors in the right way is a prerequisite for success.” (Annette Stotz and Udo Arend – SAPDesignGuild)

Intentional Communication: Expanding our Definition of User Experience Design

Added on 26 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Design and content. Content and design. It’s impossible (and stupid) to argue over which one is more important than the other – which should come first, which is more difficult or ‘strategic’. They need each other to provide context, meaning, information, and instruction in any user experience (UX).” (Kristina Halvorson – interactions XVII.3)

Designing For A Hierarchy Of Needs

Added on 26 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the idea of a design hierarchy of needs rests on the assumption that in order to be successful, a design must meet basic needs before it can satisfy higher-level needs. Before a design can ‘Wow’ us, it must work as intended. It must meet some minimal need or nothing else will really matter. Is this true? Or could a design that’s hard to use still succeed because it makes users more proficient or meets certain creative needs? Do you have to get all of the low-level needs exactly right before considering higher-level needs? To answer these questions, let’s start by looking at Maslow’s hierarchy.” (Steven Bradley – Smashing Magazine)

A DIY Guide to Content Strategy

Added on 23 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“You’re a web professional: a designer, developer, information architect, or strategist. Your team has the web design disciplines covered: research, strategy, user experience design, standards-based development, and project management. But something’s going wrong with your projects; the user experience just isn’t meeting your expectations. You’re reasonably sure you know why: there’s a problem with the content. You realise that your team could use some help from the discipline of content strategy, but for whatever reason, hiring a dedicated content strategist isn’t a feasible option. So what can you do to add some content strategy to your projects? Learn how web professionals can practise content strategy for ourselves, through advocacy, improved design processes, and community engagement. And when we have the luxury of a dedicated content strategist, learn how we can engage with the discipline in our everyday practice.” (Jonathan Kahn)

Podcasts from the IA Summit 2010: Day 1

Added on 23 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table. As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)