Category: User Experience

  • Rahel Bailie discusses World Usability Day

    Chip Gettinger of Astoria Software interview Rahel Bailie about World Usability day, noted via Scott Abel, the content wrangler, who writes: In addition to providing a succinct overview of usability, Bailie discusses why understanding the user experience is critical for information experts, content management professionals, and content management technology vendors alike. Is usability related to…

  • The right way to do a 10-foot interface

    Todd, our resident Windows guru, directed our intention to the Xbox Live Video HDTV and HD movie download platform written up at Engadget recently. Todd says, “See how simple it is? It doesn’t have a lot on the screen. There are muted colors in the background making it easy to identify the things that are…

  • South by Southwest panel approved

    One of the two panels I proposed for SXSW next spring garnered sufficient votes to make the cut. It’s the one on identity, presence, attention, trust, privacy and so on, called “Every Breath You Take.” I’m excited about moderating this panel and I’m in the process of pulling together the other panelists, which I’ll announce…

  • Google release Gmail mobile client

    Gmail works pretty well on mobile devices already, but Google just announced a Java client application for mobile (Official Google Blog: Gmail mobile client is live) that runs on hundreds of devices. I visited the download page on my phone and it automatically detected that I was connecting via an HTC 2125 and supplied me…

  • What World of Warcraft can teach web developers

    I’ve often said that game interfaces tend to more forward-looking than those of productivity applications and that younger people are having their expectations set by the experiences they have playing games on their computers, on their TVs, on their playstations and mobile devices, and online in general. Usually I haven’t pushed this idea too much…

  • Google buys JotSpot

    Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.

  • Berners-Lee: Evolve HTML incrementally

    Tim “Invented the Web” Berners-Lee on a way to evolve HTML without the abrupt disorienting changes characterized by the switch the XHTML: Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

  • Jacco Niewland releases swipr, a Visio plug-in for information architects

    According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.” Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set,…

  • Yahoo's time capsule

    Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).

  • Everyday IA group on Flickr

    For pictures of information architecture in everyday life, check out the Everyday Information Architecture group on Flickr.

  • From Red Herring: Google Gets Customizable

    Users can create customized search engines for their sites to focus on any kind of content. In another round of battle against Yahoo, Google has introduced a customized version of its search engine that will enable bloggers and other web site operators to offer a specialized form of Google to search for specific kinds of…

  • Where no user has gone before

    This article in UX Matters talks about designing breakthrough products and offers some interesting ideas on innovation and solving problems that sometimes people don’t even realize they have. Bonus Extractable content: One of the case studies is Vocera, a client of ours that makes a Star Trek-like ubiquitous communication system. The homepage of the website…

  • Screen Size and Productivity Revisited

    Usability guru Jakob Nielsen defuses Apple’s large display sales ploy with an insightful article here. So much for my new 30″-er on the company tab.

  • Christian Crumlish Elected To IAI Board

    Extractable’s Director of Strategic Services, Christian Crumlish, was recently named to the board of directors for the Information Architecture Institute. The Information Architecture Institute is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 1000 members in 60 countries. Christian will serve on the board from…

  • W3C roadmap for accessible RIAs

    Rich Internet Application (RIA) formats, such as Ajax, Flex, OpenLazslo, XAML, and so on, are all the rage on the Web these days, but sometimes the tradeoff involved in moving from a clunky-feeling page-at-a-time forms-driven web interface model to the more snappy thick-client feel of RIAs is a loss in accessibility (as well as issues…

  • Google's new AdWords optimizer

    TechCrunch tells us: Google will soon begin offering AdWords advertisers a new tool to experiment with a variety of different landing page layouts in order determine which one gains the most conversions from site visitors. Google Analytics Senior Manager Brett Crosby unveiled the tool, called Google Website Optimizer, this morning at the eMetrics summit in…

  • Coming soon: a bunch of books on designing for mobile

    I’ve been hearing rumblings about a bunch of books in the pipeline of various publishers on designing for the mobile interface, including one to be called Designing the Mobile User Experience and another called Mobile Web Design. There are others too, but I don’t have links handy (yet). Update: Scott Weiss just posted about a…

  • IE 7 is Being Released

    Today Microsoft is intending to release the latest version of Internet Explorer. IE 7 features a cleaned up appearance, tabs (a favorite feature of Mozilla Firefox), RSS feed support, better printing and most importantly, improved support for HTML and CSS standards. CNET reports that Yahoo! has beat Microsoft to the punch by release their own…

  • Challenges to innovation

    Scott Berkun writes about Why innovation efforts fail, citing a few common problems (“task forces and committees are separate from the real teams,” suggestions are vetoed, innovation must be a core value and not an add-on). He also identifies a few factors that help innovation succeed (startign with a pilot project, willingness to accept risks,…

  • What the mobile user wants

    We’re not the only shop working on mobile user interfaces these days and we’re learning quickly as we go and absorbing advice and insight from multiple sources and directions. Here’s an article published last week in UX Matters called Designing the Mobile User Experience with some good food for thought.

  • Flash video takes over the planet

    Nice article (well part 1, at least) on the sudden rise and total domination of Flash video over the last year or so: The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1