Work | Play | Experience
“The showbiz approach to customer experience design: What theatre, film and stand-up comedy can teach us about impressing customers.” (Adam Lawrence)
Creating a Digital World: Data As Design Material
“The common wisdom is that we now live in the age of information; the freedom and access we have to data is unprecedented in history; and the efficiency and convenience of online commerce, research, and communication has already transformed our lives for the better.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)
When Information Architecture Can Fall Short
“Information Architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.” – the conversation is the interesting part. (Jeff Sexton – Future Now’s GrokDotCom) – courtesy of michelvuijlsteke
Ten Futuristic User Interfaces
“Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough. To gain the interest in a new product or technology, users need to understand its advantages or find themselves impressed or involved.” (Smashing Magazine)
The Story of the Ribbon
“(…) I presented a session at MIX. I talked a bit about the general design process we used to come up with the Office 2007 user interface, to iterate on it, and to evaluate it. As part of the discussion, I showed for the first time some of the early prototypes we worked on (and abandoned or refined) along the way. It’s always fun to present substantially new content, and this was my first time giving large portions of this talk. The audience was great and, although you can’t hear them on the video, they seemed to be into it and enjoying the presentation. It was a lot of fun!” (Jensen Harris)
Managing User Experience Teams
“(…) aims to tap the collective expertise of the user experience community to develop a guide on how to manage UX teams. Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin – two seasoned user experience team managers – will be sharing their insights and facilitating the discussion as we create this guide.”
Rethinking the Progress Bar
“This paper describes an experiment that sought to identify patterns in user perception of progress bar behavior. The results are then analyzed to classify behaviors that perceptually speed up or slow down process execution. We conclude with several design suggestions, which can be applied to applications that employ progress bars and contribute to an overall more responsive, pleasant and human-centric computing experience.” (Chris Harrison) – courtesy of annekevandelangkruis
Planning out a website
“This article is going to look at the early stages of planning out a web site, and a discipline that is commonly referred to as Information architecture, or IA. This involves thinking about who your target audience will be, what information and services they need from a web site, and how you should structure it to provide that for them. You’ll look at the entire body of information that needs to go on the site and think about how to break that down into chunks, and how those chunks should relate to one another.” (Jonathan Lane- The Web Standards Curriculum)
IDEA 2008: An Interview with Bill DeRouchey
“Bill has over fifteen years experience as a writer, information architect, product manager and now senior interaction designer with Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon. With Ziba, he frames and details the experience, flow, and interaction on consumer and medical products. Bill also writes about the variety and history of interaction design in everyday experiences on his blog, Push Click Touch, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He is determined to stretch how people think about interaction design, from beyond the pure digital to any interaction between humans and the artifacts they create. Bill is on the Board of Directors of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, and serves as Treasurer.” (Russ Unger – Boxes and Arrows)
The Site Map: An Information Architecture Cop-Out
“These days, there are two predominate ways that users get to a web site. Either they type the URL into the address bar, bringing them to the site’s home page, or they come to the site through an aggregator or referral, such as Google, often taking them to a specific page within the site. For some sites, the home page is the most popular route, but increasingly, users link deep into the site.” (Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering)
Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS
“Although I’ve been a Windows power user for years, the transition to Mac couldn’t have been easier and more pleasant. I don’t want to turn this article into some endless rambling about how great Mac is, but as the user of both systems I can speak from my own experience quite objectively. Let’s take a look at some of the spots where Apple really has done it better in terms of user interface and usability.” (Juul Coolen – Smashing Magazine)
Ten Best Application UIs of 2008
“Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Evaluating User Experiences in Games
Proceedings and papers of the CHI 2008 workshop on April 5, 2008 in Florenze (Italy)
Is the Future of the Internet the Future of Knowledge?
“US-based panel speakers Lawrence M. Sanger, PhD and Andrew Keen discuss issues of legitimacy, credibility, regulation and censorship on the Internet. What role do truth, trust and expertise have to play in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and news through the Internet? What (or who) should we believe and why? Is the Internet’s role in shaping knowledge creation and dissemination broadly a force for good? Doesn’t participation educate? Doesn’t such an array of easily accessible knowledge and information have a potentially democratising effect? Should knowledge and news production by non-professionals on the Internet be limited in any way? This panel discussion was part of the Weidenfeld Scholars’ Speaker Series in Oxford, sponsored by the Weidenfeld Institute for Strategic Dialogue (London) and organized in collaboration with the OII.” (Oxford Internet Institute)
Tamara Adlin interviews Peter Morville
“(…) I wanted to push the awareness of the term and concept of findability as high as usability. Folks like Jakob have done an amazing job of getting that word usability into everybody’s heads, and I’ve been on a campaign to do the same with findability.” (UX Pioneers)
Nielsen Norman Group: The First Decade
“Started in 1998, the company is now 10 years old and has a long list of accomplishments. (…) Whatever the general outlook, I think the future is extremely bright for usability, for the simple reason that it works and has hugely profitable ROI for companies that embrace it.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
The SEO Guide to Information Architecture
“This article will explore the basic concepts of designing optimized site architectures for efficient spidering by search engines. Building an easily spidered site has ramifications in how pages, sections of a site, and entire domains are topically understood and categorized by bots, which influences indexing and rankings.” (AudetteMedia) – courtesy of thehotstrudel
Design for Emotion and Flow
“The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described focused attention as ‘psychic energy’. Like energy in the traditional sense, no work can be done without it, and through work that energy is consumed. Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience. In this state of consciousness, people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance. Hours pass by in what seems like minutes. We tend to enter these states in environments with few interruptions, where our attention becomes focused by a challenge that we’re confident we can handle with our existing skills. Feedback is instantaneous, so we can always judge how close we are to accomplishing our task and reaching our goal. The importance of the task influences our level of motivation and perceptions of how difficult the task will be.” (Trevor van Gorp – Boxes and Arrows)
Exploratory Search in Different Information Architectures
“The ASIS&T 2008 IA Summit, Experiencing Information, emphasized users who want to know, do or share something. A user experiences information by creating, organizing, browsing and searching for information. These actions contribute to the notion of exploratory search that can be described as an information process in which the importance of a search system’s query-document matching power is diminished in favor of the user assuming a more assertive role in making decisions about the search results and the next steps toward fulfilling their information needs. A straightforward and common way to distinguish an exploratory search system is to examine the presentation of search results. Typically some browsing facilities to supplement or replace the popular list-based result pages are introduced and they feature grouping as a primary mechanism for search result display.” (ASIS&T Bulletin 34.6)
Sustainable Product Design: Terry Swack on the Importance of User Experience
“A 25-year veteran of the design and technology industries, Terry Swack hopped on the Internet bus a little earlier that most of us. As founder, in 1994, of web strategy firm TSDesign, and later Green Building Blocks and BlueEgg, she has witnessed firsthand consumers’ enthusiasm for (and resistance to) adopting new green products and technologies. She now heads up Clean Culture, a customer experience research and strategy consultancy focused on making clean tech and sustainable products more understandable and desirable. We asked Terry how the concept of user experience has helped shape her approach to product design.” (Sustainable Life Media)