Category: User Experience

  • Extractable reprazent

    uploaded by erin_designr. Erin Malone took this nice pic of me at the IA Summit. The summit was great. Learned a lot. Met very cool people. I’ll probably write up some key takeaways as I digest my thoughts over the next week or so. tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

  • Blogging’s impact on PR (and vice versa)

    The other day I ducked down to my room on the 8th floor of the Hyatt Regency Vancouver to get some money to buy drink tickets at the welcoming cocktail party at the IA Summit. Ran into David Weinberger, who’s been refining the plenary keynote he’ll be giving to kick off the official proceedings tomorrow.…

  • Using comics to illustrate scenarios

    I just spent all day in a seminar led by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao, both currently at Yahoo! Local, on the subject of Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques and I came away from it with some great ideas about how to communicate web interface and functionality ideas at the early, prototype stage of…

  • Now we're talking old school

    Tanya Raybourn (Pixelcharmer) points to Waterfall2006 in her Field Notes blog: This one, Waterfall 2006, sounds unmissable. After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You

  • Posters for the 2006 IA Summit

    I’m headed up to Vancouver tomorrow for my first IA Summit. I’ll be presenting two posters there this time (one was submitted on our behalf by a former colleague). For posterity (and in case I lose the poster tube on the plane) here are links to the Acrobat files containing the two posters. Social Software…

  • Be more productive by slacking off

    I know it’s probably just because I’m racing around to get a bunch of things done between trips (to Austin, Vancouver, and Utah), but this article (Be smarter at work, slack off) sounds like the perfect advice to me right about now.

  • Let's say there are four modes of seeking information

    If we accept that it’s true that these are the “four modes of seeking information”: Known-item Exploratory Don

  • Time between conferences

    Here’s a snapshot of my panel at South by Southwest Interactive (D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer). Now I’ve got a few days to be productive before I’m off to Vancouver for the IA Summit.

  • Safe by a mile

    The redesigned Safe Credit Union web site is live and looking great. Awesome job Extractable!

  • User feedback for Basecamp

    I have to admit I’m almost relieved to learn that everything Jason Fried et al. touch does not automatically turn to gold. People love, love, love 37 Signals’ hosted Basecamp project management service (we’ve considered adopting it here at Extractable), but IA guru Christina Wodtke recentply posted her Top Six Pet Peeves with Basecamp.

  • Link digest for March 13

    I was joking with a coworker about how the new hotness is Trashing Web 2.0. But seriously, there’s some interesting stuff out on the web when you go looking for it. Mobile Web 2.0 is all about AJAX for Mobile Devices although TS in engineering points out that the phone we both own (Audiovox SMT5600)…

  • Notes on "Web Standards and SEO: Searching for Common Ground, Part 2" panel at South by Southwest (day 3)

    Panelists Aaron Gustafson: Sr Web Designer/Dev, Easy! Designs LLC Ed Shull: CEO, USWeb (Web marketing) Eric Meyer: Complex Spiral Consulting, Standards Nazi Andy Hagans: works in SEO, blogs at Performancing.com white hat vs. black hat SEO Shull: cloaking (visible only to search engine) linkspamming comment spamming hiding tables in javascript to make the content show…

  • Ajax

    For today’s daily Ajax news I recommend Scot Hacker’s notes from a panel I wasn’t able to attend yesterday. tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

  • Choosing a design partner

    I thought it might be interesting to listen to the panel on how large enterprises ought to choose their design partners. The lineup had changed a bit from what was listed in the SXSW directory. The moderator was now Maddie Coover of Alamo Design and formely of Omnicom (the owner of Agency.com). The panelists were…

  • Jason Fried / Jim Coudal keynote at SXSW interactive

    I’ve been posting raw notes from panels all morning. I blogged about Beyond Folksonomies over at the blog for my book, The Power of Many and I blogged a presentation by a Harvard psychology professor about why people make poor decisions, How to Do Precisely the Right Thing… on my personal blog. I’ve just been…

  • Nice collection of web articles

    Mark sent around a link to a collection of articles of web design and development, saying, “Scan down the page past the HTML tools and there are some great articles on this page.”

  • Mindjet to beta-test Mac version of MindManager

    I use Mindjet’s MindManager program for brainstorming and notetaking, and for building sitemaps. Up to now it’s been a Windows-only application. Now, it appears that Mindjet is about to start beta testing a version for the Mac.

  • Ray Ozzie demos a "live clipboard" for the web

    At O’Reilly’s ETech conference, groupware guru Ray Ozzie (of Lotus and Groove and now Microsoft) demonstrated a proof of concept of a “smart” cut-and-paste feature for the web (using RSS as the transport mechanism). According to Scott Rosenberg, he demonstrated the clipboard using Firefox. He also posted links to live screencasts and a web-based demo.

  • CMS Journal adopts free content model

    The Rockley Report features “content management case studies, best practices, and lessons-learned” and it’s now available for free.

  • Oracle UI guidelines

    A discussion on a BayCHI mailing list led an Oracle UI engineer to post a link to these user interface guidelines. They present a fascinating look at a meticulously documented set of user-interface standards. The documentation specifies overarching standards, page elements, page-type templates, and numerous process flows. The description of partial page rendering provides a…

  • Avoiding too-long lines of copy

    Max Design recommends using the max-length attribute (no relation) to achieve the ideal line length for content. Svend Tofte shows how to accomplish the same result (max-width) in Internet Explorer.