FlowingData

Added on 12 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“FlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better – mainly through data visualization. Money spent, reps at the gym, time you waste, and personal information you enter online are all forms of data. How can we understand these data flows? Data visualization lets non-experts make sense of it all.” (Nathan Yau)

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)

Peter Merholz: The Want Interview

Added on 5 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they’re shifting away from ‘user experience’ and towards ‘experience design’. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful ‘customer journeys’ by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three ‘waves’ – and predicts the fourth.” (Want Magazine)

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)

Findability and Exploration: The future of search

Added on 4 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The majority of people visiting a news website don’t care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very specific topic. They might just be wandering around. Or they’re visiting your site because they’re interested in one specific event that you cover. This is big. It changes the way we should think about news websites.” (Stijn Debrouwere) courtesy of petermorville

In Search of Novel Ways to Design Large Cultural Web Sites

Added on 4 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In this paper, we illustrate how Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), combining lightweight information architecture with advanced search paradigms (like faceted search) and interactive visualization strategies, can be used to better support a number of communication goals. The examples are taken from the new Web site for the Directorate General of Antiquity of the Italian Ministry for Culture Heritage (to become public in Autumn 2010), where both a huge amount of content (the Italian archeological heritage) and a variety of users’ profiles (from scholars to amateurs and tourists) are managed.” (Stefano De Caro, Nicoletta Di Blas, and Luigi Spagnolo ~ Museums And The Web 2010) courtesy of petermorville

Doing User Research Faster and Cheaper

Added on 3 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Despite our seeing some initial signs of a recovery, for most people the economy still sucks. Companies have less money to spend and are more cautious about how they spend it. Companies that haven’t already cut user research from their project plans altogether are asking researchers to achieve the same results for less money, in less time—or just to do less. Is it possible to scale back user research and still provide value? If so, how can we do things faster and cheaper?” (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters)

Achieving Design Focus: An Approach to Design Workshops

Added on 3 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Stakeholders with business, design, and technology viewpoints can pull products in different design directions—sometimes without knowing how the design work fits into an overall strategy. This can leave stakeholders feeling lost and unhappy. Creating a focus around design goals and asking and answering the hard design questions as a team is an effective way of coalescing a team around one design direction. At the same time, it can create a more optimal and fun working environment. In this article, we’ll describe a design workshop approach that can help you find that design focus.” (Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong – UXmatters)

Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology

Added on 3 May 2010 Peter Bogaards
“As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients’ products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology.” (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

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)