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Technology

Understand The Web

Added on 11 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Perceptions of the web are changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.” (Ben Ward) courtesy of rogerjohansson

The Anatomy of a Website

Added on 10 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task. Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article’s comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components.” (Alexander Dawson – Six Revisions)

A Brief History of Markup

Added on 4 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“HTML is the unifying language of the World Wide Web. Using just the simple tags it contains, the human race has created an astoundingly diverse network of hyperlinked documents, from Amazon, eBay, and Wikipedia, to personal blogs and websites dedicated to cats that look like Hitler. HTML5 is the latest iteration of this lingua franca. While it is the most ambitious change to our common tongue, this isn’t the first time that HTML has been updated. The language has been evolving from the start.” (Jeremy Keith ~ A List Apart)

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)

Case study: Agile and UCD working together

Added on 31 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods. This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success.” (James Kelway – Boxes and Arrows)

Common Ground

Added on 31 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In the modern, agile world, programmers defend themselves against changing requirements by showing customers the program as often as possible, and by being able to make rapid changes to suit the customers expressed needs. Interaction designers defend themselves against uncooperative programmers by doing ever more detailed design and documenting it with greater accuracy, detail, and precision.” (Alan Cooper)

Seven Contexts for Service System Design PDF Logo

Added on 29 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multidevice, and location-based and context-aware services. This paper examines the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose a unifying view that spans them, especially when the service-system is information-intensive. A focus on the information required to perform the service, how the responsibility to provide this information is divided between the service provider and service consumer, and the patterns that govern information exchange yields a more abstract description of service encounters and outcomes. This makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the substitutability of stored or contextual information for person-to-person interactions.” (Robert Glushko 2009)

UX Design versus UI Development

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“One of the more interesting tensions I have observed – since getting into user experience design about five years ago – is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves – and sometimes rightfully so – to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint. It’s not the value they add, just the mechanics of delivering the creative concepts.” (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)

The Future of User Interfaces

Added on 12 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“User interfaces – the way we interact with our technologies – have evolved a lot over the years. From the original punch cards and printouts to monitors, mouses, and keyboards, all the way to the track pad, voice recognition, and interfaces designed to make it easier for the disabled to use computers, interfaces have progressed rapidly within the last few decades. But there’s still a long way to go and there are many possible directions that future interface designs could take. We’re already seeing some start to crop up and its exciting to think about how they’ll change our lives. In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we’ll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future).” (Cameron Chapman – Six Revisions)

iPad Interesting Moments

Added on 8 February 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The use of real world style transitions (flipping bookcase over, flipping pages, spreading stacks, rotating orientation, collecting selected elements into stacks) work extremely well with a multi-touch interface. I am using my physical body not a mechanical mouse so the response should feel more real world. This is also what Apple mentions in their UX guidelines.” (Bill Scott – Looks Good works Well)

Interviewing the front-end engineer

Added on 6 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Interviewing a front-end engineer is an interesting task primarily because most are self-taught. Startups and large companies alike have equal trouble finding quality front-end engineers simply because they don’t know what to look for and which questions to ask. Having been around the industry for a while, I’ve developed my own methods for interviewing front-end engineers that I find to be very effective.” (Nicholas C. Zakas – NCZOnline)

Using Microformats: Gateway to the Semantic Web

Added on 2 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“In this podcast Karl Stolley discusses his article, Using Microformats: Gateway to the Semantic Web, which appears in the September, 2009 issue of Transactions on Professional Communication. In the article Stolley explains and describes the use of several microformats, which make information marked up in HTML available for use in applications outside of traditional web browsers. Because microformats consist of minor additions to the HTML backbone of common webpages, they represent a simple but significant move toward what Tim Berners-Lee has called the Semantic Web—but without requiring the technical and practical shifts and time demands of a complete XML-based semantic web development approach.” (Karl Stolley – IEEE Professional Communication Society)

50 Most Usable RIAs

Added on 3 September 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Bill Scott and I have reviewed hundreds of RIAs while compiling examples for our book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, and subsequent talks and articles. We recently realized that we had amassed quite a list of applications. Thinking other designers and developers might be interested in these resources, we applied two simple criteria to identify the top fifty.” (Theresa Neil – InsideRIA)

The Art and Science of Experience Design

Added on 1 September 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Businesses that historically have approached things in a purely scientific manner are now trying to engage their users at a more fundamental level. Through great experiences. And great experiences, the way in which these stories unfold, have this innate ability to change or enhance the way in which people view and interact with their world. We’re not advocating that we throw our concerns about platforms and technology considerations out the window but rather how best to combine them with thoughtful, engaging design principles. The Art and Science behind great experiences balancing one another in harmony, embodied within the end product.” (Christian Saylor – InsideRIA)