Category: User Experience

  • The paradox of choice

    Dan’s favorite blog, Signal vs. Noise, recently addressed the interface problem caused by giving people too many choices. I’ve also heard this problem referred to as “analysis paralysis.” The interface designer, in the view of 37 Signals (the owners of the SvN blog), needs to ask as a sort of “benevolent dictator” to deliver a…

  • Steal enterprise intranet ideas from the consumer world

    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.

  • A rolling content inventory

    I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:…

  • Friday UX links

    Here we go again. Big list this week. Many stolen from the usual suspects: Label placement in forms Traffic log patterns (I always feel like there’s a lot of great untapped data in traffic logs) Metrics, registered users and social ecosystems (bigger is not always better) Everyday IA Flick group (via bloug) Does the US…

  • Is user research just 'smoke and mirrors'?

    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 faceted metadata navigation system

    Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).” Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved…

  • Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner

    Yahoo has pulled it’s trip planner out of beta. This site is a really interesting mashup of internal Yahoo products. It uses Maps, Flickr, Travel Content and 360 for blogging. Too bad they didn’t use the cool FLEX interface for maps.

  • Great b2b sites?

    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…

  • Friday UX links

    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…

  • Redesigned Visa Europe Launched

    Today Visa launched their redesigned Visa Europe site. Extractable was heavily involved in the building of this site (though not the design). This included some of our most advanced CSS/XHTML work ever, TeamSite templates, app development and daily support with a international client.

  • Oz-IA 2006 – September 30th and October 1st

    Eric Scheid, from the IA Institute, announces Oz-IA 2006, a first-ever Australian IA conference, to be held in Sydney: As well as conveniently following on from this year’s Web Directions conference), this event is scheduled for the same weekend as the EURO IA conference. Keith Instone has already suggested a live link between the two…

  • Extra! Extra! now has a blogroll

    Today I added links to some of the IA, UX, and design sites I read regularly, many of which I’ve gleaned links and content from in the past. They are listed in the blog’s sidebar under the heading “Blogroll” and contain many blogs, and a few web magazine and link aggregators.

  • Corporate blogging ROI

    Scott Weisbrod posted this link to Forrester’s Charlene Li’s Calculating the ROI of blogs – it’s not about the math to the IA Institute’s mailing list a while back, singling out this quotation: …because a blog’s ROI is built around building a closer relationship with your blog’s readers, be it your most ardent customers or…

  • Friday UX links

    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…

  • Google offers new Checkout service

    Seen in PCWorld.com: The Web has long needed a universal checkout process. eBay’s PayPal and other online payment services rely on the various “shopping cart” applications of the Web sites they serve. While browser add-ons such as Siber Systems’ RoboForm can complete much of the order-processing information that different sites require, they exhibit little consistency…

  • What's the big IDEA?

    I’ve been meaning to mention the IA Institute’s upcoming IDEA 2006 conference. (It stands for Information: Design, Experience, Access.) It’s being held at the Seattle Public Library, Central Library on October 23-24. I have a feeling I’ll be too busy to make it, but it looks intriguing and I’ll at least try to follow it…

  • Newsweek picks cool design sites

    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).

  • Corporate web 2.0

    Dan noticed this article in which CNET says big business is embracing Web 2.0, which in this context seems to refer to the two-way web (or, as one author put it, the Living Web): Though it lacks a precise definition, Web 2.0 generally refers to Web services that let people collaborate and share information online.…

  • Friday UX links

    Dan Brown’s “quick and dirty Visio callout”, an elegant solution to a common document-design problem Digital Web Magazine reviews Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking (“does a great job of tracking and reporting search engine rankings across websites”) Digital Web tutorial on ‘The Pinball Effect’ (example) UX Matters on ‘Deconstructing the Mobile Web (“The mobile Web is…

  • Taking the desktop metaphor somewhat literally

    Lifehacker links to a video demonstrating a proof of concept caleld BumpTop desktop. I’m not sure I’d actually want to manage my work this way but some aspects of the demo are fairly compelling. (via antiweb)

  • Opera 9 is out

    It’s amazing that Opera‘s still around. Some say it’s the most standards-compliant browser, and Opera Mini is supposedly a great browser for handheld devices. On the IAI list they’re talking about how they’re using personas for marketing (though it’s just an assumption that these same personas were part of their process for tweaking the browser’s…