The Value of Education in Research and Human Factors

Added on 6 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Education is always enriching. It increases your capabilities and improves the quality of your work. As UX professionals, it is essential that we continue to improve our educations and develop new skills. For people who do user research as a part of their jobs, we highly recommend getting formal research education. Even if it is just a single class in experimental methods, research education improves your ability to do your job effectively and gives you the flexibility to deviate from the standard kinds of studies we all tend to do on a day-to-day basis. We work in an innovative industry, so it is important for us to be able to innovate new user research methods. Having an understanding of the fundamentals of research would enable more user researchers to innovate effectively and advance the whole field of user research.” (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters)

Recruiting Better Research Participants

Added on 6 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Recruiting the right participants is the foundation of effective user research, because your research results are only as good as the participants involved. Representative, well-spoken, and thoughtful research participants can provide invaluable feedback. Yet finding and recruiting such ideal participants and getting them to show up for their sessions is sometimes difficult.” (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters)

Maturing a Practice

Added on 1 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The authors of this paper position pratice-led research (PLR) as an effective agent in the transformation of the seemingly inherent and natural acts found in casual practice into the formal arrangement of accepted truths and regulated practices of a discipline for user experience design (UXD) and information architecture (IA) communities of practice. The paper does not intend to exhaustively define discourse analysis, discipline practice or pratice-led research per se, but rather to introduce practitioners and the fields of UX and IA at large to the basic concepts of PLR so as to begin establishing discussion and awareness.” (Hobbs, J., Fenn, T., & Resmini, A. ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

Beyond Findability: Search-Enhanced IA for Content-Intensive RIAs

Added on 1 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This paper details a way to extend classic information architecture for web-based applications. The goal is to enhance traditional user experiences, mainly based on navigation or search, to new ones (also relevant for stakeholders’ requirements). Examples are sense making, at a glance understanding, playful exploration, serendipitous browsing, and brand communication. These new experiences are often unmet by current information architecture solutions, which may be stiff and difficult to scale, especially in the case of large or very large websites. A heavy reliance upon search engines seems not to offer a viable solution: it supports, in fact, a limited range of user experiences. We propose to transform (parts of) websites into Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), based, beside other features, upon interaction-rich interfaces and semantic browsing across content. We introduce SEE-IA (SEarch-Enhanced Information Architecture), a coherent set of information architecture design strategies, which innovatively blend and extend IA and search paradigms.” (Spagnolo, L., Bolchini, D., Paolini, P., & Di Blas, N. ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

Topic Maps: From Information to Discourse Architecture

Added on 1 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Topic Maps is a standards-based technology and model for organizing and integrating digital information in a range of applications and domains. Drawing on notions adapted from current discourse theory, this article focuses on the communicative, or explanatory, potential of topic maps. It is demonstrated that topic maps may be structured in ways that are ‘text-like’ in character and, therefore, conducive to more expository or discursive forms of machine-readable information architecture. More specifically, it is exemplified how a certain measure of ‘texture’, i.e. textual cohesion and coherence, may be built into topic maps. Further, it is argued that the capability to represent and organize discourse structure may prove useful, if not essential, in systems and services associated with the emerging Socio-Semantic Web. As an example, it is illustrated how topic maps may be put to use within an area such as distributed semantic micro-blogging.” (Lars Johnsen ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

My Heart is in The Work

Added on 1 July 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In 1900, Andrew Carnegie quietly declared that his ‘heart is in the work’ – that he had found an endeavor worth pursuing, and that he would passionately follow-through on that endeavor until it was complete. We interaction designers feel that passion on a daily basis, as we’ve found ourselves at the heart of industry, policy, and culture. Our endeavors are worth pursuing and we approach them with the whole of our hearts. We build the artifacts and frameworks that support engagement, that keep us entertained, aroused, engaged and productive. We are building the culture we live in, and we possess the capability to enable massive change in an increasingly fragmented and tense world. This talk will examine our ability to affect change at the intersection of experience, behavior, meaning, and culture, and will emphasize our responsibility to approach our work with philanthropic enthusiasm that would make Carnegie proud.” (Jon Kolko – IxDA)

Inside The Mundaneum

Added on 29 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“On the night of June 1, 1934, a Belgian information scientist named Paul Otlet sat in silent, peaceful protest outside the locked doors of a government building in Brussels from which he had just been evicted. Inside was his life’s work: a vast archive of more than twelve million bibliographic three-by-five-inch index cards, which attempted to catalog and cross-reference the relationships among all the world’s published information. For Otlet, the archive was at the center of a plan to universalize human knowledge. He called it the Mundaneum, and he believed it would usher in a new era of peace and progress. The Belgian government, however, had come to view Otlet and his fine mess of papers, dusty boxes, and customized filing cabinets as a financial and political nuisance.” (Molly Springfield ~ Triple Canopy)

Don’t listen to Le Corbusier – or Jakob Nielsen

Added on 24 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This is what psychology and neuroscience tell us: the beauty and the rot is all mixed up. You can’t have a human without both. (…) The voices of interaction design pretend to be scientists. They take eye tracking studies, and scrolling studies—and never mention how well-done the content in question might be, or whether it was exciting and relevant to the test subject.” (Cheerful)

Anatomy of a Noob: Why your Mom Suck at Computers

Added on 23 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The words metaphor and intuitive are often used in UX. They are the metrics that we use to judge the quality of a solution. But is this quality really as universal as we might like to believe? (…) Understanding something intuitively really means that you understand it holistically. If you understand it holistically you can fill in the gaps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your design intuitive or improve on it, not at all. Just understand that you are doing it for the natives not for the noobs.” (Thomas Petersen ~ Black&White)

Zombie Personas

Added on 22 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This is by far the nerdiest episode we ever did, so fasten your seat belts. In his session at UXcamp, Tom said: “Personas – love ’em or hate ’em – you can’t not use ’em. Either you have zombies, or you have living ones.” In this recording of his session he talks about different kinds of zombies like Mirror Personas, Undead Personas, Unicorn Personas or Stupid User Personas. He gives advice on how to avoid these fellas and how to make good use of living personas during a project. As a bonus, Tom explains why 37signals doesn’t need personas at all.” (UX Café)

International UPA 2010 Conference: Research Themes and Trends

Added on 21 June 2010 Peter Bogaards
“For the first time in its history, the International Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference took place outside of North America. While this certainly shifted the percentage of attendees from different geographic regions, all reports are that the conference was well attended, with crowded presentations filled with attendees from Europe, North America, and Asia.” (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters)