Intranet Usability Shows Huge Advances
“Measured usability improved by 44% compared to our last large-scale intranet study. The new research identified 5 times the previous number of intranet design guidelines.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
The Hot Strudel interviews BEEP
“There are very, very few projects where an IA can do all of the work; we have to work together with other user experience practitioners!” (Jan Jursa)
3rd information design international conference (Oct. 10-13, 2007)
EXTRA – “We are pleased to announce The 3rd Information Design International Conference, which, is a joint event with The 2nd Brazilian Conference of Information Design and The 3rd Information Design Student Conference [CONGIC]. Consecutively to these events, we are also glad to announce The IVLA 2007 – The International Visual Literacy Association Annual Conference, which is in its 39th edition. For the first time the IVLA Conference takes place in Latin America, and it is promoted in association to SBDI- The Brazilian Society of Information Design. As to encourage participation in the Information Design and the IVLA events, joint subscriptions will receive fee discounts!”
MIT’s ‘clutter detector’ could cut confusion
“The danger of clutter – especially on a visual screen – is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for web site and map designers, among others.” (MIT news) – courtesy of maria acosta
Interaction Experience: Pliability, Fluency and Other Experiential Qualities
“Everybody wants to design for good use experiences, but not many seem to know exactly what that means once we move beyond usability and usefulness. In this presentation, I introduce the notion of experiential qualities, which refers to attempts to characterize what ‘good use’ means for different genres of digital products and services. Two experiential qualities are introduced in more detail: (1) Pliability: the sense of captivating and malleable information in interactive visualizations, and (2) Fluency: a desirable characteristic in situations of multiple media streams fighting for the user’s attention.” (Jonas Löwgren – FromBusinessToButtons)
euro IA Summit 2007 Proceedings 
The proceedings of the third European summit on Information Architecture (21-22 September, Barcelona) are available for download. With its theme ‘Translating Information Architecture’ and under the great orchestration of Eric ‘FatDUX’ Reiss, 150 participants from 18 countries had two great days full of presentation, poster and panel sessions. See how they network at the Flickr picture impression ‘euroIA2007‘. Next year’s euroIASummit (26-27 september 2008) will be in Amsterdam! – (euroIA.org)
Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?
“Introductory text on Web pages is usually too long, so users skip it. But short intros can increase usability by explaining the remaining content’s purpose.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
HCI in SciFi Movies
“Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction.” (A. Butz, C. Endres, and W. Wahlster) – courtesy of michelvuijlsteke
iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
“Apple’s iPhone presents a revolutionary user interface and interaction model. Users can view webpages, use web applications, and use built-in iPhone features, such as the email application, the iPod, and the digital camera, wherever they go. Safari on iPhone, a unique implementation of Safari, is the application users use to browse the web on both iPhone and iPod touch.” (Apple Developer Connection) – courtesy of daringfireball
Ten Steps to Personas
“Any project that uses personas does not necessarily need to follow all 10 steps as long as the responsible party knows the consequences of skipping a step.” (Lene Nielsen – HCI Vistas)
Building Block Definitions (Containers)
“Joe Lamantia dives deep into the components of the building block system. Each has a place in his design framework for dashboards and portals. Get full coverage on how you too can use these same elements in your work.” (Joe Lamantia – Boxes and Arrows)
Processes + Patterns
“After explaining the concepts of patterns and collections, I spoke about how I thought process patterns and design patterns could be combined and about what the benefits would be to designers and team managers (and of course users and clients) once they were combined.” (Peter Boersma)
Playful IAs
“I had some great reactions to this talk and I want to thank all the people who engaged with me in discussions afterwards. It’s given me a good picture of what areas I should develop further in future subsequent talks. I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that contrary to what some people think, the IA community (the European one at least) is very much open to new ideas. That’s really nice to experience firsthand.” (Kars Alfrink – Leapfrog)
Information Design of the New Web
“People are changing the way that they consume online information, as well as their expectations about its delivery. The social nature of the Web brings with it an expectation of interaction with information and modern Web design is reflecting that. There are now alternate forms of navigation including the ability to browse by user, tag clouds, tabbed navigation etc. Advances in technology along with these shifts in user expectations are affecting the way that information is laid out on a webpage. Today’s websites are aiming for intuitive and usable interfaces which are continuously evolving in response to user needs. Website designers are approaching information design differently and designing simple, interactive websites which incorporate advancements in Web interface design, current Web philosophies, and user needs. Information design for the New Web is simple, it is social, and it embraces alternate forms of navigation.” (Ellyssa Kroski – InfoTangle)
SlideShare UX Presentations
A collection of presentations on the topic of User Experience. (SlideShare)
How Do Users Really Feel About Your Design?
“In this column, I’ll introduce you to a promising method that just might solve this problem. While this method has not yet been subjected to rigorous peer review or experimental testing, it offers an intriguing solution and is endlessly fascinating to me. And it just might prove to be the kind of powerful technique we’ve been looking for to illuminate users’ emotional reactions to our designs.” (Paul J. Sherman – UXmatters)
Universal Information Architecture Modeling Language
“UiaML is a symbolic modeling language like UML that is meant to be a supporting tool for information architects. At it’s current state UiaML supports low fidelity modeling. With future development of UiaML we hope to support high fidelity models, too.” (Alex Jongman)
CORE (Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation)
“Using a case study drawn from the Orbitz.com information architecture environment, our 2007 IA Summit poster uses visuals and text to describe a rules-based soft systems methodology for collaborative decision-making. In this case study, the Orbitz information architect was faced with a need to rapidly develop specifications for new web application features. Produced in the absence of use cases, functional requirements, or business requirements, these new specifications had to be both culturally and technically acceptable, and meet changing business and user needs.” (Joanna Wiebe and Scott Confer)
Simplicity Patterns
“The MIT Media Lab’s John Maeda lives at the intersection of technology and art — a place that can get very complicated. Here, he talks about paring down to basics, and how he creates clean, elegant art, websites and web tools. In his book Laws of Simplicity, he offers 10 rules and 3 keys for simple living and working — but in this talk, he boils it down to one simply delightful way to be.” (TED: Ideas worth spreading) – courtesy of digitalwebmagazine
UX Design as Communities of Practice
Including slides and audio – “The cluster of practices and professions we’ve come to think of as supporting User Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person’s discipline define that person’s work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues among communities of learning and doing, i.e. communities of practice. The communities of practice model gives us a better language for discussing our roles, our work and the future of our respective practices and disciplines. It also gives us a useful way of thinking about how to design for particular kinds of collaboration, especially emergent, collective work in support of improving a practice.” (Andrew Hinton – Adaptive Path UX Week 2007)