Timeline

Added on 24 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Every evolving field has its milestones, none of which exists in a vacuum. The timeline on this page shows a few significant events in science and technology that have shaped the field of technical communication. The timeline also indicates concurrent markers in the development of technical communication in general and the Society for Technical Communication in particular.” (STC@50)

Reflections on the User Centered Design Perspective in Research on Wireless Applications

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“When new ideas and visions emerge from collective thinking and from a better understanding of current limitations related to technological achievements, the challenge remains as to ascertain how to put these ideas and visions into practice. That opens new research issues. My argument in this paper is that this principle is applicable also to the development of User Centered Design. UCD, of course, may contribute to the improvement, consolidation and verification of ideas and visions in the field. Yet, in order to be certain that UCD perspective is widely accepted and can properly influence the direction followed by technology and service development, we should be able to demonstrate that the approach will be useful and that it can be successfully implemented in relevant projects.” (Michele Visciola – ACM Ubiquity)

The Game Design Patterns Project

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“The focus of the Game Design Patterns project is on studying computer games in terms of interaction, components and design goals with the intension of creating the basis for a common language for game designers. As the basic building block for this language the project uses the concept of Design Patterns, originally developed by Christopher Alexander et al. Design Patterns is a semi-structured formalism that has been used for similar causes in areas such as architecture, software engineering, human-computer interaction, and interaction design.” (PLAY Research Studio) – courtesy of purse lip square jaw

Are You Cultured? Global Web Design and the Dimensions of Culture

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“When a company decides to globalize its site, the Web team often learns the taboo colors and appropriate dress codes of a given culture, translates the text, and launches. But cultural differences run deeper than visual appearance or language; they reflect strong values. Rarely do globalized sites incorporate the nuances of a culture’s social hierarchy, individualism, gender roles, time-orientation, or truth-seeking attributes.” (Aaron Marcus – New Architect)

The Semantic Blog

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“When the mainstream trade press first started writing about XML, one of the key benefits invariably cited was precise search. You don’t hear much about that any more. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the wrong idea, but XML-savvy search requires an investment in data preparation that virtually nobody was or is willing to make.” (Jon Udell – XML.com)

Site Navigation: Keeping It Under Control

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“Navigation is the section of the page that controls what appears in this content area. The beauty of this is that the page content is malleable. The architecture is not, and should represent a strong, extensible foundation that will last at least ten years. It’s like building out floors in an office building. You can change the functionality of the floors as needed without changing the structure of the building.” (Indi Young – Adaptive Path)

Trust by Design

Added on 22 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“I’ve become a big fan of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and the Web Credibility Project. Their studies regarding how people evaluate a web site’s credibility show the critical importance of information design and structure. Users trust sites that are well-designed and well-organized. Poor navigation is the key element that decreases earned web credibility.” (Peter Morville – Semantic Studios)

Branding & the User Interface – Part 1: Brand Basics

Added on 15 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“What is brand? More than just a corporate logo, ‘brand’ is that tangible – and intangible – something that makes your product jump off the shelf and keep consumers and customers coming back for more. This article is the first in a series that describes concrete aspects of branding, sheds light on how interaction design and brand are related, and provides a primer for talking about the religion that is brand.” (Nate Fortin – Cooper)

Towards a General Relation Browser: A GUI for Information Architects

Added on 11 April 2003 Peter Bogaards
“The paper presents the case of ongoing efforts to develop and test generalizable user interfaces that provide interactive overviews for large-scale Web sites, portals, and other partitions of Web space. The interfaces are called Relation Browsers (RB) because they help people explore the relationships across different attribute sets, thus enabling understanding the scope and extent of the corpus through active exploration of different ‘slices’ defined by different attribute value juxtapositions. The RB concept is illustrated through discussion of six iterations over a five year period that included laboratory usability studies, a field test, and implementations with a variety of data management problems. The current application to design concepts in a digital government setting is discussed, and the concept of the RB as the basis for an interface server is presented.” (Gary Marchionini and Ben Brunk – Journal of Digital Information 4.1)