Attention is the fundamental literacy

Added on 11 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Life online is not solitary. It’s social. When I tag and bookmark a Website, a video, an image, I make my decisions visible to others. I take advantage of similar knowledge curation undertaken by others when I start learning a topic by exploring bookmarks, find an image to communicate an idea by searching for a tag. Knowledge sharing and collective action involve collaborative literacies.” (Howard Rheingold – EDGE)

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre

Added on 7 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“What is Web 2.0 storytelling? As the phrase suggests, it is the telling of stories using Web 2.0 tools, technologies, and strategies. Since the name is fairly recent (and not yet widely used), it may not bear out as the best term for this trend. Another name may emerge, one better suited to describing this narrative domain. However, the term seems to have met with quiet acknowledgment to date, so it may serve as a useful one going forward. To further define the term, we should begin by explaining what we mean by its first part: Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly coined Web 2.0 in 2004,1 but the label remains difficult to acceptably define. For our present discussion, we will identify two essential features that are useful in distinguishing Web 2.0 projects and platforms from the rest of the web: microcontent and social media.” (Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine – EDUCAUSE) – courtesy of wolfnoeding

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Added on 6 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Information retrieval did not begin with the Web. In response to various challenges of providing information access, the field of information retrieval evolved to give principled approaches to searching various forms of content. The field began with scientific publications and library records, but soon spread to other forms of content, particularly those of information professionals, such as journalists, lawyers, and doctors. Much of the scientific research on information retrieval has occurred in these contexts, and much of the continued practice of information retrieval deals with providing access to unstructured information in various corporate and governmental domains, and this work forms much of the foundation of our book.” (Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze 2008)

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)

Designing & Selecting Components for UIs

Added on 6 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I have to think much harder when I design rich interfaces than when I work on standard Web applicaitons. With the increased flexibility and more components comes a higher risk of making silly mistakes. If I use a component inappropriately, users can’t figure out what to do, even though the components may look cool. The purpose of this article is to help designers avoid mistakes and to help them choose (or design) components based on sound, fundamental principles of usability.” (Donna Maurer Spencer – UX Magazine)

25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time

Added on 5 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy.” (Janko Jovanovic – Smashing Magazine)

What is Interaction Design History?

Added on 5 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The interesting question is how you separate interaction design history from the broader scope of computing history in general. User experience people gravitate toward the history of hypertext and the graphical user interface, direct manipulation and the mouse, the work done at Xerox PARC and Apple. In many people’s minds, that era marks the dividing line between the ‘us’ of the design community and the ‘them’ of computer scientists, because it’s the point at which it became possible to draw a separation between the work that was done to serve the needs of the machine, and the work that was done solely to meet the needs of the user.” (Karen McGrane)

Research Is Communication

Added on 4 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In actuality, the reason so many small software businesses fail so quickly is because they don’t understand that their knowledge of how to build a product is not sufficient to build success. The true vision of a multidisciplinary team of engineers, designers, product people, marketers, business people, and researchers is foreign to them. If some of the people creating software don’t understand our role, it’s not surprising consumers don’t.” (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain – UXmatters)

Controls are Choices

Added on 1 January 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designing Devices is a series of articles on how and why to create devices, written by me, Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio. This is a place for essays that I hope to eventually collect into a book in 2011. Like drafts, the articles will be constantly evolving, hopefully with your feedback.” (Dan Saffer – Designing Devices)

Information, Physicality, Co-Ownership, and Culture

Added on 29 December 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Tangible computing has a long history of interest in technology circles; like augmented reality and computer-supported cooperative work, it has long been the focus of research studies in academic institutions, and not ironically, the focus of a large quantity of science fiction movies, too. It is only in the past half-decade, however, that the stars have aligned to support tangible computing in practice.” (Richard Anderson and Jon Kolko – ACM SIGCHI Interactions XVII.1)