Category: User Experience

  • Getting hip to the yubnub hub bub

    My pal Ted Nadeau just hipped me to yubnub, which bills itself as a social command line for the web. It looks like an extremely powerful meta-syntax for accessing searches and other web services via unix-y looking shorthands, regular expressions, and mini-scripts. It also seems to have a very active community rapidly extending its capabilities.…

  • Mommy, what's a pattern library?

    Interaction Design Patterns — maintained by Tom Erickson (tags: Interaction patterns design usability HCI ui reference UX webdesign web interface language) UI Patterns and Techniques: About Patterns another ui pattern resource (tags: patterns ui-patterns webdesign design interface reference) Interaction design pattern – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (tags: design patterns wikipedia interaction DesignPatterns interactiondesign informationarchitecture reference)…

  • Million-dollar product ideas

    Here’s three ideas for products that will make you millions if you can figure out how to manufacture and sell them: Self-disentangling (or non-tangling) iPod earbud cords Ear grease cleaner for mobile phones A remote that mutes the TV as it turns on its power. Send me a thank you note when you make your…

  • User experience is not about brands, is it?

    Peterme fights the good fight in Experience design is not about brands at the AP blog, defending “experience” jargon from the grasping advertising types.

  • Blogs due for an information design overhaul?

    John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg) The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?

  • Today ze show, tomorrow ze world!

    Unsurprisingly, Ze Frank is going all Hollywood in the near future. Last year at SXSW (at least I think it was last year, and not 2005), I ended up going out to dinner with my Austin guru, some folks from WorldChanging, and I think David Pescovitz or maybe I just chatted with him at some…

  • Scope and spec via task analysis grid

    Todd Warfel shared an interesting deliverable, The Task Analysis Grid, a sort of visual substitute for a requirements document, saying Personally, I’ve yet to come across a requirements document that is usable and doesn’t take a couple of days to get everyone on the same page. So, we use something different – a task analysis…

  • Speeding up the mobile web

    Mostly a note to myself: When I get a moment free I’m going to follow these instructions from OpenDNS: Instructions for faster DNS on your mobile. Seems at least worth a try.

  • Thirteen years ago I couldn't even spell Yahoo…

    Back in 1994, Richard Frankel and I (along with Briggs Nisbet and Martha Conway), launched a hypertext webzine called Enterzone. At first it ran on a server under Rich’s desk at Berkeley and its address (now obsolete), was enterzone.berkeley.edu. Eventually we got the ezone.org domain and moved it there. One of the features of that…

  • See me speak at South by Southwest

    In March I’ll be moderating a panel at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, called “Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online.” Confirmed panelists include George Kelly, Kaliya Hamlin, Ted Nadeau, and Mary Hodder. I’m anticipating a lively dialogue tackling how we project and define our identities online, what it means…

  • See, I have actually been blogging this past year

    While I’ve been neglecting this and many other of my Mediajunkie blogs in the past year and a half (excuse: full-time work, baybee), I have actually been blogging. While at Extractable I launched a spearheaded a user-experience focused blog called Extra! Extra! and wrote something for it nearly every workday for about a year. Actually,…

  • Extractable mobile website case study to be featured at IA Summit

    The IA Summit proposal review board recently approved a presentation I proposed on “Mobile IA” using as a case study the mobile website we developed for HTC America. There’s a lot of interest in the IA community about developing for new interfaces as the Web increasing goes mobile, into our media centers, and so on.…

  • How do UX roles intersect?

    A while back I wanted to comment on Elton’s entry, Information Architecture updated to 3.0, and draw on a post to the IxDA list by Jay Fienberg, talking about the Venn diagrams that might show how the various user experience roles and practices tend to overlap. It seems that each type of practitioner has a…

  • User research context map

    A while back Erik Guttman posted an item to IxDA list discussing the role user research plays in product design: I have repeatedly attempted to explain how user research can serve to identify, prioritize and clarify product requirements. I have difficulty for a variety of reasons. people confuse or fail to see the distinction between…

  • Subway-style map of Web 2.0 trends

    Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0” players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and…

  • First homework of the new year: Experience prototyping paper

    Read this, Experience prototyping, a PDF of a paper from the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems in 2000 (sponsored by SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction): In this paper, we describe “Experience Prototyping” as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or…

  • Conceding the death of trackback

    I held out long after all the cool kids had given up on trackback but I haven’t gotten a useful one since Prentiss Riddle pinged me about SXSW panel proposals and a trackback spam attack today finally convinced me to turn it off for all the blogs hosted at Mediajunkie. Ironically, this post will try…

  • Communicating Design: A book every user experience professional needs

    At long last, just in time for the holidays, I received a review copy of Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and the book has more than lived up to my high expectations of it. I tore open the envelope and nearly devoured the book in one sitting.…

  • From the pages of the medical journal 'Duh!'

    According a study commissioned by a hosting company, websites with poor usability cause stress for users: EETimes.com – Are you suffering from ‘Mouse Rage Syndrome? (via the ixda list).

  • IA for dashboards and portals

    Quick hit ‘n’ run linking: Joe Lamantia’s The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals at Boxes and Arrows.

  • What Is User Experience Design?

    Kimmy Paluch at Paradyme Solutions has a good article up that helps clarify the meaning of User Experience Design in regard to those other buzzword disciplines such as interaction design, information architecture, usability, and so on.