Category: User Experience

  • It's raining books on interaction design

    John Kolko, a teacher at Savannah College of Art & Design, is writing and self-publishing a book called Thoughts on Interaction Design. He’s also blogging the process as he goes along. (It’s his first book, his first attempt at publishing, and his first business, so he’s treating the entire experience as an experiment.) His book…

  • Hacker exploits Blogger bug to post fake entry to Google blog

    Film at 11: Official Google Blog: About that fake post

  • Open wifi spoofing

    Dan and I flew into JFK on JetBlue last night and we noticed that JetBlue offers free wifi in their waiting area, but while trying to access this service we noticed several open peer-to-networks labeled “Jet Blue hot spot” or variations on that name. None of these were the actual free access point (which was…

  • Part two of the chapter on competitive analysis from Dan Brown's 'Communicating Design'

    Digital Web has now published the second part of the Competitive Analysis chapter from Dan Brown’s book, Communicating Design.

  • Freehand and GoLive officially deprecated

    Todd Warfel reports that the inevitable bakeoff inside the Adobe-Macromedia merger has resulted in the winding down of FreeHand (in favor of Illustrator) and GoLive (in favor of Dreamweaver). (btw, I know this was in May – so I’m slow on the uptake – so sue me!)

  • What to do about clickfraud?

    This Slashdot article on an IE/Y!IM clickfraud exploit makes me wonder if the whole basis of online advertising is under assault, if there’s a chance we could see the sort of collapse that followed the banner-ad kiting practices of bubble 1.0, and if some new models of search engine ad-word placement are going to have…

  • Bad ad placement

    I was perusing my friend Levi Asher‘s digg page (he is “asheresque” there and elsewhere online), and I stumbled upon this nearly not-safe-for-work blog entry about a particularly unhappy juxtaposition of banner ads.

  • The return of the son of Friday UX Links

    We’re back… now, with less context! Better life through design Michal Migurski reviews Amazon’s EC2 6 Ways to fix a confused information architecture (useit.com) Push my button (beyond generic Submit buttons) Coding interviews with OneNote (I admit I’ve never cracked open OneNote) A discussion with danah boyd get caught up on what the wonder woman…

  • Hiring renaissance talent

    In response to a thread on the IxDA mailing list about how job ads seeking “Leonardo da Vinci” (that is, someone who can design, do illustrations, and write code) may be trying to pack too many requirements into a single req, Dave Rogers posted a link to an article her wrote nearly a year ago…

  • Class consciousness in web design

    Chris Fahey is in the middle of publishing a series of blog posts on the topic of class and web design. (In part two, he asks What class are you?.) Interesting topic (and somewhat taboo, here in the States, at least).

  • Jared Spool on 'embraceable change'

    Last year, Jared Spool wrote an essay about a disruptive intranet redesign in which he used the analogy of finding your well lived-in home entirely changed on waking up one morning (Designing Embraceable Change). In it, he discusses how to make it easier for people to embrace changes in their information spaces: To design for…

  • Survey results for third edition of the "Polar Bear Book" published at the IA Institute site

    Over the last few months I’ve posted notices here whenever Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (the legendary authors of the first two editions of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, aka the Polar Bear book) have announced another survey for their third edition. Now the IA Institute has published all of the survey…

  • Interactive CSS reference

    File under useful: CSS 2.1 Reference : Cultured Code

  • The case for real-looking wireframes

    In Boxes and Arrows, Stephen Turbek suggests making wireframes look as realistic as possible, and argues that the old idea of clearly distinguishing wireframes from design is actually counterproductive (Real Wireframes Get Real Results): How many times have you been asked, “So, is the new website going to be black and white too?” after presenting…

  • Round two of the 2007 SXSW Interactive panel selection process starts today

    The first round of panels proposed for SXSW Interactive 2007 were those proposed by past speakers (I had two proposals in that round). Voting for the first round is now closed. 2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker (Round Two) starts today, featuring panel proposals that were submitted in the last few months. Go check out…

  • Mini Friday UX Links

    Amazing amounts of work going on around here, so it’s been hard to find the time to blog (I know: excuses, excuses). Here are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about recently: Jared Spool’s new SpoolCast: I go to 20+ conferences a year and while many of the conferences have excellent programs,…

  • Joel Spolsky on painless functional specs

    From the oldie-but-goodie file, here’s Painless Functional Specifications from Joel on Software. Bonus: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

  • Brown University's new website

    There’s a lot of buzz in the interaction design world about the new Brown University website. Seems like they’ve broken out of the now-traditional, near-clich

  • Designing urls and other text strings

    Thomas Vander Wal explores the design implications of text strings (Domain of Digital Design Includes Strings). I used to think I was the only one who cared about the text in a file name or a url, but actually of course a lot of people do. Unfortunately, most CMS’s still produce butt-ugly urls, and I…

  • Paper-prototyping graphic resources

    Nice kit for putting together paper prototypes: Paper Prototyping Graphics (Design Usability Resources) from Information & Design, for the arts and crafts crowd.

  • Designing data tables

    LukeW (from Yahoo) explores some ideas for Refining Data Tables at UXMatters. (Nice illustrations, too!)