Category: User Experience

  • Ever wondered where Google is heading?

    Check out this zoomable whiteboard image showing the Google Master Plan. I’m not really sure where the cattle mutilation fits in….

  • Prototyping tools

    Scott McDowell has written an article for Boxes and Arrows called Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge about tools for prototyping rich interaction designs. We recently adopted Axure here at Extractable and we’re very jazzed about the way it’s enabling us to do IA work and interaction design and tie together wireframes with sitemaps and…

  • Hey, look – it's another book on interaction design

    This one, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design is new from Peachpit: In this unique book, Dawes invites readers inside a series of his personal projects to get a view of his process–his creative seeing, making, and playing. He encourages designers to look beyond the normal tools of their trade to find…

  • Pictures from the Extractable holiday party

    One advantage оf seasonal decorating is thаt іt іѕ, by dеfіnіtіоn, tеmроrаrу. Thіѕ gіvеѕ you рlеntу оf freedom tо еxреrіmеnt wіth nеw ideas аnd соmрlеtеlу transform your lіvіng ѕрасе оn a ѕhоrt-tеrm bаѕіѕ. It’ѕ аlѕо an орроrtunіtу to get сrеаtіvе with your hоmе’ѕ dесоr tо create wаrm, inviting рlасеѕ fоr family and friends tо gаthеr.…

  • Lance Arthur is back and says web design is dead (film at 11)

    The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and…

  • Berkeley J-School new media lecture series

    I might wan to attend some of this year’s UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Winter New Media Lecture Series: Sunday, December 10, 2006 – Wednesday, December 13, 2006 North Gate Hall Library, Hearst at Euclid Avenue, Berkeley Featured speakers are Howard Rheingold, “Smart Mobs” author; Travis Fox, Washington Post; Robert Hood, msnbc.com; Al Bonner,…

  • Yahoo redesign driven by data

    Mark noticed this Businessweek article on how Yahoo! mined their user-click data to inform the redesign of their home page (How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift): To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users’ clicks. “We have this culture of data,” Bhat explains. “It is…

  • Hammers vs. saws

    Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit: But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t…

  • IAI website redesign documents

    I wrote a little blurb for the IAI Newsletter this month introducing the information architecture deliverables we’re using to guide the relaunch of the Institute website: WEBSITE REDESIGN We’ve all heard the cop out about the cobbler’s children having the worst shoes. Most of us have probably made that excuse about our own neglected personal…

  • Polar Bear the third out now

    Congratulations to Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville on the release of the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web! At a time when people who do information architecture (please don’t call them information architects!) are having yet another one of their many identity crises, questioning the value or the future of their…

  • Kid-friendly faceted navigation

    Dan Brown, author of *Communicating Design* points us to this interesting example of a search interface for navigating a children’s library.

  • Selling information architecture

    A recent discussion on the IA Institute mailing list revolved around selling the value of IA to executives. One reason why we address IA and other user experience concerns within the context of web strategy here at Extractable is because it helps communicate the value of the planning process in terms of aligning with business…

  • Microsoft licensing the Office 2007 ('ribbon' etc.) interface

    Via the IxDA list I noticed this item on the Jensen Harris’ An Office User Interface Blog explaining how application developers can license and implement the new Microsoft Office 2007 interface, “including the Ribbon, galleries, [and] the Mini Toolbar.” Here are more details on the licensing process and the place where you actually go to…

  • Stakeholder mapping

    On the IA Institute mailing list Patrick Walsh recently asked, “Is Stakeholder Analysis/Mapping a commonly used tool by IAs? It helps to identify all relevant stakeholders at the start of a project and can help ensure that they do not get overlooked.” He also pointed to a 2004 article in Boxes and Arrows by Jonathan…

  • The interface of a cheeseburger

    Via Scot Hacker’s foobar blog I landed on this interesting set of interface musings at Information Architects Japan, starting from the universal cheeseburger interface and meandering on through iPod and Zune. I like the quotation Scot selected: The cheeseburger has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no…

  • Microsoft Buys Firefox!

    What a surprise! Just a few weeks after launching the first update to Internet Explorer in years, Microsoft has announced that it has purchased Firefox from the Mozilla foundation. Bill Gates says that this is part of Microsoft’s plan to open source all of their software and move towards an MS Linux 2007 platform. :-)

  • Fast Design = Good Design

    Joshua Porter wrote a terrific article about Netflix and their Fast Iteration process. Since UIE is more of a design and user experience shop, the article focuses primarily on creative designers, but I think that the concepts apply equally to developers. At Extractable, we are always trying to move away from a classic waterfall process…

  • Sitemap Format Standardized

    Terry let us all know that today Yahoo, MSN and Google have agreed on a standard Site Map format. Using a sitemap.xml file will facilitate search engine crawlers to index your site and help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

  • Audio from the IDEA conference

    I meant to post this a week or so ago, but Peter Merholz has put up the audio from presentations at this year’s inaugural IDEA conference in Seattle on the conference blog, saying If you have only 30 minutes, then listen to Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote. Honestly, though, there’s lots of great stuff here. Interaction…

  • What makes good design?

    On the IxDA list, LukeW asked which metrics or criteria can be used to judge “good” interaction design. Kim Goodwin wrote an excellent reply, saying “A few of us at Cooper were kicking this question around with Hugh Dubberly several years ago. We came up with 4 criteria we felt applied to all sorts of…

  • Zune's user interface

    Engadget posted a video showing a complete interface walkthrough for Zune, demonstrating its UI and wireless sharing feature (via Edwin Booth, who posted the link to the IxDA list, saying, “If you’ve used Windows Media Center, it’s very similar”).