Category: User Experience

  • Usability and Right-side Blindness

    A week or so back I was reading another one of those “Top 10 mistakes of website design” articles. All the usual stuff was in there like skip intro, splash pages, popup windows, and intrusive animation but what really got me was the mention of “right-side blindness”. Most of these top 10 lists just regurgitate…

  • Tom Coates on the future of web apps

    Tom Coates of Plastic Bag (and now Yahoo!) has long been reliable for his occasional thoughtful long-form essays about the nature of the web as a medium. Back in February he posted one called Native to a web of data. Then a few weeks ago Christina Wodtke posted about it to the IAI list, summing…

  • Defending against 'Ajax abuse'

    Michal Migurski is annoyed with javascript delays and other “Ajax abuse” slowing down sites and points to a Safari plug-in that enables him to selectively turn of javascript at specific sites.

  • UK Design Council promotes the value of design to business

    Still working my way through interesting links I saved from the IA Institute members mailing list. Livia Labate posted this link to the “Value of Design” factfinder, a site that communicates the value of design to business. The site includes an interesting “Your Report” tool that enables you to cut and paste interesting tidbits and…

  • RFPs are like blind dates

    Joel sent around an interesting little white paper by Rebecca Churilla called Single Interactive Agency Looking for Clients to Build Lasting Relationships With, about how responding to an RFP can feel as nerve-wracking as a blind date, and how to make the “dance” of the requester and proposer work better for both parties.

  • A web-based card sorting tool

    A while back I posted an entry here about Uzanto’s MindCanvas, an application for doing user research. A week or so ago, Cody Burleson of IBM Global Business Services posted a link to the IA Institute members mailing list about a web-based card sorting product called Websort. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks…

  • How search engine spiders see us

    Raleigh, one of our web-production developers pointed me to this interesting tool that shows you what search engine spiders see: It gives one insight into how the heading tags work to ones advantage. Interestingly enough, as I was testing it, I noticed cnn.com doesn

  • Recordings from the IA Summit

    Livia Labate, from Comcast, posted recordings of a number of sessions from this year’s Information Architecture summit in her blog I think, therefore IA.

  • A sample chapter from 'Search Analytics for your Site'

    Lou Rosenfeld, one of the coauthors of the seminal “Polar Bear” book from O’Reilly, launched a press last year dedicated to developing and producing books on user experience strategy and design by means of user-centered design principles. One of the books coming out from Rosenfeld Media, Search Analytics for Your Site is coauthored by Rosenfeld…

  • Lockergnomies offer Windows Vista via torrent

    Chris Pirillo just IM’d me to point out the Windows Vista Torrent site: Per the official report, Microsoft is currently recommending waiting for a DVD version of Windows Vista Beta 2 due to extremely long wait times for the download directly from Microsoft. To help them with their dilemma, Windows enthusiasts Chris and Jake have…

  • How you know your intranet is working

    David Gammel, knowledge management guru, writes in his High Context Consulting blog (The One and Only Purpose for an Intranet): The sole purpose for an intranet is to facilitate the work of staff in pursuit of the organization

  • Siebel is now Oracle

    When arriving at work today I saw a large crane removing the Siebel sign from atop our neighbor’s building. Unfortunately I remembered to take a picture just after the sign was hidden from view behind the truck. Siebel was officially integrated into Oracle on June 1, 2006

  • Web 2.0 Controversy – Tim O'Reilly Responds

    In case you missed it, the Blogosphere was abuzz last week about the apparent trademarking of “Web 2.0” and subsequent cease-and-desist sent to IT@Cork (a non-profit networking organisation) who’d organized a recent conference. As a recap (clipped from) [The] upcoming Web 2.0 half-day conference is the target of a cease and desist letter from the…

  • A resource for enterprise search research

    Mark sent a link around the office to Enterprise Search Center, saying “This is a new site dedicated to corporate search technologies. Should be more and more useful as more articles are contributed.”

  • Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS)

    Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)? Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might…

  • Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard

    Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users writes about how Good usability is like “water flowing downhill”: I’ve talked about this many times before; my horse trainer’s mantra is, “Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard” – but the opposite is everywhere. It’s ridiculously easy for me to screw up the settings on…

  • Collaborative diagramming with Gliffy

    A month or so ago Dan sent me a link to Gliffy.com, an Ajax-y OpenLazslo-driven browser-based collaborative diagramming tool that could conceivably give Visio a run for its money (someday). Even with its limited initial feature set it makes fairly crisp looking diagrams with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Knowledging Across Life’s Curriculum has a brief…

  • ColorBlender.com

    ColorBlender is a cool Ajax-y service that suggests an entire palette of colors for you based on a dominant color that you enter (using RGB sliders). I’d still prefer a great visual designer come up with color ideas, but if you were on a budget and if you didn’t know the first thing about how…

  • Prototype JavaScript framework

    Prototype is “a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications,” sporting an “easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around.” Ruby on Rails features integrated Prototype support, the famous script.aculo.us library is built on Prototype (but I curse Joshua Schachter for ever starting that ridi.culo.us URL trend), Rico…

  • Adaptive Path starts blogging

    Subject says it all. (Here’s some of the thinking that went into the blog launch.)

  • Another vote for XHTML wireframes

    At the Blue Flavor blog, Nick Finck casts another vote for making XHTML wireframes. I have to admit I find this idea appealing. Granted (and he grants this himself), it may not be the right approach for every client, but the prospect of creating blueprints and schematics that don’t get thrown away after they’re approved…