The Difference Between Usability and User Experience
“User experience takes far more effort to do well, but the results have far better impact.” (Jared Spool – User Interface Engineering Brain Sparks)
Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums
“Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community. In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic.” (Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel – First Monday 12.3)
LIFT 2007 Videos
“Here you can watch and download the videos of the presentations given at the conference over the years.” – including Adam Greenfield (Studies and Observations), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), and Florence Devouard (WikiMedia). (LIFT07)
Web Typography Sucks
“It’s all our fault!” (Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton)
Deep Context
“(…) by exposing ourselves to different cultures, we develop a deeper understanding of our own, and this will make us better designers. When we create an information architecture for a website—irrespective of its intended target audience – we will inevitably be called on to express the contextual assumptions that allow the website’s messages to be properly understood. Knowing that these assumptions exist (and understanding how the various audiences may interpret them differently) is the first step in creating sites that communicate more effectively across cultural lines – even if they are within our own society.” (Jorge Arango – Boxes and Arrows)
Content Analysis Heuristics
“Many Web professionals consider content inventories critical parts of most projects. Are there certain specific things to look for during a content inventory? Fred Leise definitely thinks so. He proposes a set of content analysis heuristics and discusses how to utilize each one.” (Fred Leise – Boxes and Arrows)
UX Zeitgeist
“UX Zeitgeist combines input from the UX community with data from a variety of web services to generate an unequaled collection of UX books and related topics. UX Zeitgeist also profiles the trends that describe the field’s evolution.” (Louis Rosenfeld – Rosenfeld Media) – congrats!
10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities
“Several usability findings lead directly to higher sales and increased customer loyalty. These design tactics should be your first priority when updating your website.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
The Future of the World Wide Web
Testimony of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (CSAIL Decentralized Information Group – Massachusetts Institute of Technology) before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce (Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet). Hearing on the ‘Digital Future of the United States: Part I – “(…) some of my experience of having designed the original foundations of the Web, what I’ve learned from watching it grow, and some of the exciting and challenging developments I see in the future of the Web.” (Tim Berners-Lee)
Marc Hassenzahl on User Experience
Instructional Text in the User Interface: Some Counterintuitive Implications of User Behaviors
“User assistance occurs within an action context—the user doing something with an application – and should appear in close proximity to the focus of that action – that is, the application it supports. The optimal placement of user assistance, space permitting, is in the user interface itself. We typically call that kind of user assistance instructional text.” (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)
UIE Web App Summit 2007 (Part I/II/III)
“The UIE Web App Summit took place at the Monterey Marriott, in Monterey, California, U.S.A., on January 21st through 23rd, 2007. It drew a capacity crowd of 218 people, who had traveled from far and wide to attend the event. While most attendees came from the United States and Canada, nine came from the UK and Europe and four hailed from Oceania and Asia.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)
Better Content Management through Information Architecture
“Content Management Systems promise so much: content is easier to publish, easier to update, and easier to find and use. Lots of promises, but do CMSs really deliver? Masood Nasser examines why Content Management Systems often fail and shows how Information Architecture can come to the rescue.” (Masood Nasser – Boxes and Arrows)
By any medium necessary: How interaction designers can save the world
“The job of interaction designers is to provide pleasure and power to people through the design of products, services, tools, and processes that satisfy their goals. With the discipline of interaction design still in its infancy, some people believe the medium in which we work is pixels. But this is manifestly untrue.” (David Fore – Cooper Newsletter)
Ajax and the Old World
“Today, complex layout methods have made it possible to borrow from interaction patterns of desktop applications, including drop down menu bars, expanding trees and tabs. It’s this exact inevitable shift of desktop application design patterns to the page metaphor that has more than often led to confusion amongst both web designers and end users. In this era of AJAX en RIAs, the possibilities for user interface designers have become infinite. Hence the question arises: Have all of these developments actually led to an improved user experience?” (Cornelis Kolbach – cornae)
Web 2.0: What Is It Really?
“To truly do Web 2.0, you must do something that absolutely can not be done without the Web. It’s as simple as that.” (Sean Carton – clickz) – courtesy of usabilitynews
Five Principles to Design by
“(1) Technology Serves Humans. (2) Design is not Art. (3) The Experience Belongs to the User. (4) Great Design is Invisible. (5) Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication.” (Joshua Porter – Bokardo)
Taxonomy Out of the Box
“Taxonomies – at least some of them – reveal the order of things. They increase knowledge by manifesting multifaceted relationships among things. In that light, tagging and folksonomies look like the vulgarizing of knowledge, and well-bred taxonomies turn up their perky noses at the ill-manner interlopers. But the new taxonomizing does more than increase knowledge. It reveals meaning.” (David Weinberger – ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007) – courtesy of theiainstitute
More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture
“How ‘information architecture’ is defined much too broadly, frames design in the wrong way, and suffers from infoprefixation.” (Joshua Porter – Bokardo)
The Architecture of Complexity: Albert-László Barabási
“(…) apparently unrelated networks behave in similar ways and have similar structures – they’re the result of similar laws. This knowledge allows us to have common thinking about networks. But many questions remain. How are the networks used? What are the dynamics of how they’re being used at the smallest scale?” (Albert-László Barabási – ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2007)