Designing for Faceted Search

Added on 28 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Faceted search lets users refine or navigate a collection of information by using a number of discrete attributes – the so-called facets. A facet represents a specific perspective on content that is typically clearly bounded and mutually exclusive. The values within a facet can be a flat list that allows only one choice (e.g. a list of possible shoe sizes) or a hierarchical list that allow you to drill-down through multiple levels (e.g. product types, Computers > Laptops). The combination of all facets and values are often called a faceted taxonomy. These faceted values can be added directly to content as metadata or extracted automatically using text mining software.” – (Stephanie Lemieux – User Interface Engineering)

How to integrate interaction, visual and industrial design

Added on 23 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.” – (Kim Goodwin – Cooper Journal)

Designing for Big Data

Added on 23 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“This is a 20-minute talk I gave at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. In it, I describe two trends: how we’re shifting as a culture from consumers to participants, and how technology has enabled massive amounts of data to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Putting those things together has resulted in some fascinating innovations that echo data visualization work that’s been happening for centuries.” – (Jeffrey Veen)

Usability testing ≠ a good user experience

Added on 22 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Strategic user experience planning yields a unified and consistent user experience. And strategic design leads to great user experiences, ones that are characterized by delight, loyalty and stickiness. So how do you attain these? By designing the user experience for now, for next year… and for the year after that. And by designing the entire experience, not just your web site’s user interface, or your email campaign’s HTML.” – (Paul Sherman – Apogee)

Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework

Added on 20 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical framework).” – (dList) – courtesy of jjursa

People don’t want to search

Added on 17 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The premise is that people don’t want to search. Instead, people want to get their tasks done and get straight to their answers. So how to we do this? We move from a web of pages to a web of objects. People, places, businesses, restaurants are all objects that have attributes such as noisy or expensive (in the case of restaurants.) Intents of searchers are satisfied by presenting objects and attributes. It’s not exactly the semantic web but about finding implicit relations through web usage.” – (Ricardo Baeza-Yates – The Next Web)

The Stranger Side of CHI 2009

Added on 14 April 2009 Peter Bogaards
“At the Computer-Human Interaction 2009 conference last week, researchers showcased many new and innovative ways to interact with machines, from smarter Web browsers to new interactive tables. But the event is also an opportunity to demo more far-out ideas for computer interaction. Here are five of the more unusual projects on show at the event.” – (Technology Review)