Collaboration Sessions

Added on 8 July 2005 Peter Bogaards
How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes – “Collaboration Sessions are highly interactive meetings (or more accurately, work sessions) with representation from each discipline. These meetings address everything from strategic planning to the design of site sections and page details. For example, a team working on the Travel section of our site used this technique to brainstorm a new line of business and then used it to help design page details. This method is most helpful for redesigns, new features, and controversial or strategic sections of a site. Typically, an interaction designer or product manager leads the meeting at the beginning of the Design phase.” (Sasha Verhage – Boxes & Arrows)

Less is more in Web search interfaces for older adults

Added on 7 July 2005 Peter Bogaards
“We have previously found the elderly users to face several usability problems with the current search engines. Thus, we designed an elderly–friendly search interface, Etsin. To evaluate the success of the design, a usability study was conducted for comparing the usability of Etsin and Google. The participants faced fewer usability problems when using Etsin than Google and they valued the clarity of the Etsin interface. In conclusion, elderly users benefit from a simplified search engine interface that is easy to understand and that takes into account age–related issues.” (Anne Aula and Mika Käki – First Monday 10.7)

Tagging for Fun and Finding

Added on 3 July 2005 Peter Bogaards
“We all grew up knowing about tags. We had tags in our clothes, we had them on our holiday presents, we played a game called tag, and some even used spray cans to tag their turf. All of these uses of tag have different meanings, but unless we understand the context and/or the person using the word tag we do not know what they mean. This can be a problem with tagging on the web, but like everything else there are two sides to the story and there are some great benefits from tagging, if it is done well.” (Thomas Vander Wal – OK/Cancel)

Seminar on Cognitive Modeling for UI Design

Added on 29 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“This seminar presents the current state of the art of evaluating user interface designs using models of human performance that are based on cognitive architectures. Such models can yield usability results without the delay and expense of user testing of prototypes, but because they are new and still under development, whether and how to apply them is a challenge. This seminar will survey current theory and practice; no ‘how-to’ of actual model construction will be presented; rather the goal is to enable a good choice of whether a modeling approach will be useful, and which type of model would be best to pursue.” (School of CS – CMU)

Lazy, stupid and evil design

Added on 26 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Evil design is perpetrated by people who are deliberately doing the wrong thing, and this harms everyone. Nielsen cites pop-up windows as an example. Users now expect pop-ups to be unwanted ads, and close them without looking at them. As a result, good designers can no longer use pop-up windows even when they would be a good solution.” (Jack Schofield – Guardian Unlimited)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Relinquish Control

Added on 26 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Relinquishing control is a scary prospect because it diminishes certainty. With control comes predictable outcomes that you can bank on. But in this increasingly complex, messy, and option-filled world, we must acknowledge that our customers hold the reins. Attempts to control their experience will lead to abandonment for the less onerous alternative. What we can do is provide the best tools and content that they can fit into their lives, and their ways.” (Peter Merholz – Adaptive Path)

The Meta Data Support Model: Part 1/Part 2

Added on 22 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Knowledge management, information architecture, content management, search engine technology and portalization are just a few of the evolutionary benefits of implementing meta data at the enterprise level. The meta data product line serves as the foundation from which processes and services can be built.” (Metadata Portal) – courtesy of columntwo

Towards a Sociology of the Mobile Phone

Added on 21 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Use of the mobile phone is an immensely significant social and cultural phenomenon. However, market hype and utopian dreams greatly exaggerate its importance. The fundamental issue for sociology is the process of change. Bound up with contemporary issues of change, the mobile phone is a prime object for sociological attention both at the macro and micro levels of analysis. This article considers the strengths and weaknesses of four methods for studying the sociality of the mobile phone (social demography; political economy; conversation, discourse and text analysis; and ethnography), the different kinds of knowledge they produce, and the interests they represent.” (Jim McGuigan – Human Technology) – courtesy of annegalloway

Return of Ideas

Added on 19 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“Some time ago I wrote about the great conference in New Zealand, ‘Better by Design’, and recommended that people would go to their site and look at the slides. I suppose a lot of you did, and I would now like to give you some heads-up for reading even more informational stuff. Peter Zec’s slideshow ‘Return of Ideas’ is now online and I really recommnd you go there and read the slides – it’s killer stuff. Infact it’s 110 pages of killer stuff. Free.” (cph127)

European IA Summit: Building Communities

Added on 16 June 2005 Peter Bogaards
“The first European Information Architecture (IA) Summit’s focus is on building the IA community in Europe. The objective of the event is to bring together a number of disciplines and practitioner communities by providing a stimulating environment for debate and an opportunity for establishing cooperation. This community is not just limited to language or region, but all encompasses our specialization’s like designing for mobile devices, and multilingual solutions. We are calling for papers that reflect those communities of practice, language and location.” (ASIS&T) – Highly recommended.