Category: Design

Interesting stats from this article: Poor Usability implicated in Rejection of Mobile Internet: Three quarters (73%) of people with access to the Internet through their mobile phone are not taking advantage of it. Amongst the reasons for not using mobile Internet were being frustrated by slow-loading pages (38%), problems with navigating websites from a phone…

Steve Mulder recently announced to the IA Institute and IxDA mailing list that his book on user research and personas, The User Is Always Right, is now available: If you attended the IA Summit in Vancouver, you might have heard me give a preview of some of the book’s content on adding more science to…

CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents. Our sense is that we are…

Dan, I’m still waiting for the review copy of your book, Brown, published an excerpt from his just released Communicating Design in Digital Web Magazine, called Competitive Analysis, discussing different ways to compare competing sites and present your findings. Some interesting visual thinking there. Can’t wait for the book, hint, hint.

Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting post about quick and intense usability iterations: I definitely see the strong advantages of the intense sessions mixed with the usual longer term development. Finally it seems a broad section of the development world is finally learning that the best way to build out stuff is to sit with…

Luke Wroblewski has some interesting thoughts about two orthogonal roles in the user-experience design process: Product Leads & Strategic Designers. I’m not sure whether I’d classify myself as one or the other, though. As director of strategy here at Extractable I’m clearly a strategic designer in this scheme, but I think I’d be equally interested…

It’s interesting to see the slightly stylized map of continental US emerge from this data-driven map of Flight Patterns.

Liz Danzico of Boxes and Arrows interviews Dan Saffer about his Interaction Design book in Newsweek. Pretty mainstream, huh?

Digital Web Magazine has a brief article with tips on designing for the mobile interface.

We talk about what screen resolution to design for a lot of the time, and the compatability cops are always trying to keep us mired in the past, man, but now usability (and hairstyle) guru Jakob Nielsen gives us permission to optimize for 1024 x 768 (Screen Resolution and Page Layout (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)). Of…

Postdated edition: 10 Foot World, Inc. (all about applications for Media Center’s ’10 foot interface’ 10 foot interface showdown A microstudy of tagging (Gene Smith discusses the physical tagging of nametags at this year’s IA Summit – includes an inset picture of my own tag cloud) SEO page ‘strength’ gauge (via atomiq) Writing vs. rewriting…

The Iconfactory (via Digg, or reddit, or something)

Seattle edition: User Interface Design – Taking the Good with the Bad (good Digital Web article about the inherent tradeoffs in UI design and why you can never please everyone Part one of jjg’s conversation with Steven Johnson Part one of Dan Saffer’s conversation with Dan Brown (they both have web design books out or…

In response to a recent post by Thomas Vander Wal, in which he said, “One approach, which seems to be growing in popularity is [to build] sites that work and Ajax and scripting to augment and improve simplicity,” Austin Govella replied, writing The term of art for this is “progressive enhancement”. Often in contrast to…

Dan Klyn assembled a set of guided navigation UI widgets at his Wildly Appropriate blog back in January, introducing them by writing, “For a good long while now I’ve been meaning to create a spreadsheet or Flickr set or something which could serve as a systematic and comprehensive roundup of the UI widgets that folks…

Shiv Singh, who writes AARF’s Workplace Blog, points to a report on intranet best practices his enterprise solutions group just published. Downloading the full report requires registration, or you can listen to a three-part podcast summarizing the findings. Details can be found in Singh’s Corporate Intranets Best Practices post on his blog.

Adrian Chong posted to iaslash a set of links to writings by Christopher Fahey about the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research: Design vs. Science, Research as a Design Tool, Research as a Political Tool. Chong says: As designers look towards user research for the objective truth, Christopher questions the motives behind the research. He…

A client asked my opinion of the best b2b sites out there. I’m not good at answering questions like that, especially not on the spot. Perhaps I’m too much of a relativist. So I checked some old notes and polled my colleagues and here are some that stood out: Salesforce.com for its marketing front-end CDW…

Brief I’m-on-the-road edition: Digital Web Magazine – Code Reviews: Write Better Code Overnight At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3 – New York Times The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation? (“Designers, welcome to the brave new world of spec work.”) People and the Public (“throws an especially harsh light…

So maybe this will become a tradition: Thomas Vander Wal discusses the concept of being a Technosocial Architect (“To many people technology gets in the way of their desired ease of use of information. Those of us who design and build in the digital space spend much of our time looking at how to make…

In other realms, they say when it makes Newsweek or Time (especially the cover), a phenomenon is over. Let’s hope that’s not the case for the hipster design-y sites picked in this Newsweek Design Dozen article (forward by Chris).