Category: User Experience

  • Narrating wireframes for rich internet applications

    And if you are doing “traditional”* Visio wireframes for a rich web application, this article at Boxes and Arrows has some suggestions about how to narrate the interactive sequence in a slide presentation to your client. * Yes, I realize it’s ridiculous to talk about traditions for a medium that is only 15 years old.

  • Flash animation of New Orleans flood

    The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which published continually – on the web only at times – throughout the Katrina and Rita hurricanes last year, has posted a Flash animation showing how New Orleans flooded.

  • Why you shouldn't start with a Content Inventory (or should you)?

    Leisa Reichelt, a Digital Experience Architect, writes Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory at her blog, disambiguity. This has spurred an interesting debate in blogs and mailing lists, with a response at Donna Maurer’s blog and further discussion elsewhere (read the comments on the blogs for more). Naturally, once the rhetoric has…

  • Survey results for the third edition of the Polar Bear book

    Rosenfeld and Morville have posted the results of their first two surveys toward a new edition of their seminal Polar Bear Book. (My responses to the first survey were noted in this entry here at Extra! Extra!)

  • Movie of Jess McMullin's "How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through Play"

    Bryce Johnson has posted a video recording (in two formats) of Jess McMullin’s session from the IA Summit, Game Changing: How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through Play: One of the sessions I saw was Jess McMullin

  • Yahoo Tech launches with advisor personas

    Yahoo! has launched Yahoo Tech (I’m only willing to type the exclamation point once per sentence at most! oops), a site consisting of “Reviews, help, and how-to advice for buying and using personal electronics.” One interesting touch from a user-experience design perspective is their use of tech advisor personas to offer advice tailored to your…

  • IA and UI as building blocks of SEO

    In SEO, Information Architecture and Interface Design, Shari Thurow writes: The most important building block of SEO is the information architecture. If you want your HTML/XHTML, audio, video, and image files to generate qualified search engine traffic, the key ingredient to making these files appear relevant are the information architecture and the interface that communicates…

  • Craig McLaughlin to Judge 2006 WebAwards

    Congratulations to Craig for being selected as a judge for the 10th annual Web Marketing Association International WebAwards! The WebAwards is the standards-defining competition that sets industry benchmarks based on the seven criteria of a successful Web site. It recognizes the individual and team achievements of Web professionals who create and maintain outstanding Web sites.…

  • IA Summit Wrapup at Boxes and Arrows

    The venerable user experience webzine Boxes and Arrows has come out with its comprehensive wrapup of the 2006 IA Summit. A few of the writeups there are by me (coverage of a pre-conference session on prototyping with comics that I first wrote about here on this blog, coverage of two presentations, and coverage of a…

  • Cleaned a lot plates in Memphis

    Philip, Anjali, Gaven, Dan, Chris, Marsha, Joel, and I had dinner at the Young Avenue Deli tonight. Great food and nice divey atmosphere. We also played a little Galaga (vintage video game) and pocket billiards, although the cue ball kept going down into the coin-op vault.

  • UX Magazine hot off the presses

    UX Magazine – The User Experience Magazine writes about getting Dugg after their launch and having to locate a new webhost to deal with the influx of traffic. Not bad for a fledgling webzine. Fundamentally, the magazine is a blog. The articles are short and the site is powered by TextPattern. But the homepage presents…

  • Yahoo! Next lets you preview what's to come

    I stumbled across Yahoo! Next last night. Similar to Google Labs, this is a glimpse into what Yahoo! is working on. It’s a collection of some pretty nifty beta services. I particularly like the Open Shortcuts.

  • First page of search results, please

    Todd just sent around this BBC News article discussing a US study that found thatsearch users stop at page three and that, in fact, “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results.” This jibes with my own personal experience. I rarely even go…

  • Social and Personal Search (at BayCHI)

    Dan and I are heading down to PARC this evening for Beyond Search – Social & Personal Ways of Finding Information, a BayCHI event: Several exciting developments in social search and personalization help users find information: recommendations based on personal tastes, social trends, tags, ratings, popularity, and friends tastes. These methods go beyond the classic…

  • DCamp is BarCamp for Experience Design

    I’ve been itching to attend an unconference since I heard about the first BarCamp, but they were mostly very heavily coder oriented and I’m a floaty-on-the-surface presentation-layer kind of guy, but then I read Rashi Sinha‘s announcement of DCamp (or maybe I saw the announcement in the BayCHI newsletter first) and I decided this sounds…

  • OLE 2.0

    On their blog, the Zimbra folks explain a technique they called ALE (for Ajax Linking and Embedding). I saw Zimbra demo’d at South by Southwest. It looks like a pretty cool next-generation groupware application, a potential Outlook killer, with easy drag and drop from numerous external applications into a calendar, address book, phone dialer, and…

  • On Nudity and CSS

    Today (April 05, 2006) has officially been earmarked as CSS Naked Day. The aim of this project is to promote web standards by showing the world what each site looks like sans markup. Those who sign up for the project agree to remove all CSS styling from their website for that day. The result is…

  • A design pattern for info inboxes

    Dan Brown is a brilliant information architect and content management strategist with a forthcoming book called Communicating Design, about producing IA deliverables for websites. On his blog, Green Onions, he posted a few months ago about an emerging design pattern he’s identified related to managing incoming information. He describes the object model thusly: The People…

  • 37 Theses

    New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from: [I]t’s hard to deny…

  • How to Print Selective Sections of a Web Page using CSS and DOM Scripting

    Shimone just sent this guide to printing sections of a web page around to our developers’ list with the comment, “You know this is going to come up.”

  • Making user research fun (for the users)

    Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials…