Category: User Experience

  • DHTML drag 'n' drop folder tree

    Check out this Folder tree with Drag and Drop capabilities based on unordered list tags.

  • HCI due for a quantum leap?

    At ACM Queue, John Canny, the Paul and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, writes about the future of human-computer interaction, For many years HCI has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Is this about to change?. He begins by making a case for the centrality of HCI in product design: [I[t’s not a…

  • Mobile web held back by poor usability

    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…

  • 'The User Is Always Right' and other thoughts about personas

    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…

  • The effect of tabbed browsing on web analytics

    There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.

  • dotMobi or not dotMobi – that is the question

    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…

  • Online project management

    Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information – infinitely preferable to an endless…

  • Axure RP Pro 4.2 is Now Available!

    On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely…

  • Dan Brown on competitive analysis

    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.

  • Web 2.0 contrarianism

    I did like Lost in Translation, but I agree with I think about six of the Eight Things I

  • Mobility Today Podcast interview with David Smith

    David Smith is the director of marketing for HTC America, whose site we are redesigning. (We recently relaunched the site with an interim design but we’ve got great things in the works for later this year.) HTC makes incredible smartphone and pocketpc “converged devices” and generated a lot of buzz on enthusiast blogs and websites.…

  • Converged mobile devices = iPod killers?

    This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice. I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the…

  • IE7's CSS fixes

    Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).

  • MobileCrunch blog

    Since we began working with HTC and since I got my Cingular 2125, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the topic of developing sites for the mobile web, and with developments in the mobile space in general. Recently Dan pointed me to the relatively new MobileCrunch blog, and I’ve become, well, addicted. Recommended.

  • Two good articles in ASIS&T's Bulletin

    Austin Govella writes about rich interfaces on the web (think AJAX, Flex, etc.), and Samantha Starmer explains how to sell IA to executives.

  • Digg's emergent IA

    Gene Smith writes in his Atomiq blog The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click – about as simple as it gets – and yet it’s the central component of the community.

  • Rapid usability iterations

    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…

  • LukeW's UX-role taxonomy (or 'Product Leads and Strategic Designers')

    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…

  • Usability for CUs, a 12-Step Program

    David Rubini at online banking company Digital Insight has some words of wisdom for Web site operators of the Credit Union industry. The short of it is: 12 Steps to a User-Friendly Web site In order for an online banking to be successful, it must be effective, efficient and satisfying to the user. Developers and…

  • Rashmi Sinha's 'Designing for Social Sharing' slides

    I think Sinha summarized some of these thoughts on one of the tagging panels at the IA Summit this year. It looks like she has now developed this strand of thought into a focused presentation: (My slides for WebVisions: Designing for Social Sharing). I wonder if she has considered turning these thoughts into a book?

  • Visualizing flight patterns

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