iTunes U now home to K-12 educational curricula
"The initiative, which launched July 1, brings the creation of a K-12 destination to iTunes U, with a broad range of content from a number of state and district agencies--including Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Utah--as well as museums and other education-oriented institutions. As of the launch today, there are 11 sub-portals within the iTunes U K-12 destination."
Permalink | Wednesday, July 02, 2008
NY Times redesign
"In this seminar, we will discuss the process we followed during the recent redesign of The New York Times, including research we conducted, forward-looking concepts we developed, and prototypes we created and refined."
New York Times Redesign - case study
Permalink | Monday, June 30, 2008
KM Method Cards
It’s 7 am on a wonderful Sunday morning in NYC. I’m getting prepared for meeting tomorrow. I’ve brought along the KM Method cards that Straits Knowledge’s Patrick Lambe presented me 2 weeks ago. These cards describe 80 approaches, methods and tools that can be used in a KM context.
I’ve used these cards once before to help me look for solutions to a problem I was facing. The problem was this. In my company, PebbleRoad, we spend a lot of time discussing and brainstorming on an ad-hoc basis. This is done mostly to think-through problems and discuss ideas. All of this is good, but when there’s just three of us in the company, there’s added pressure on managing our time. And then there’s this nagging feeling: I’ve just spent 30 minutes discussing this, did I provide any value?
This is when I opened up the KM cards deck and started browsing through. I picked up the Peer Assist card. Although I know about Peer Assists from a subject matter basis, this time around I was looking for a solution to my problem. So even when the Peer Assist Card mentioned that Peer Assists are done by inviting others from outside the group to provide value, I thought that we could use the same approach for seeking ideas from within the group. Within the next 10 minutes we set up a simple protocol for 'Calling and Hosting Peer Assists at PebbleRoad' that listed what was to be done by the host and what was expected of the peers. We put this up in our internal blog. A few days later we followed the protocol when we had a wireframe discussion, and this time around it felt much better and quicker.
This is where the value of the cards lie: it provides an easy way to quickly navigate through ideas and to try something out. It is also a good learning tool for those who aren’t familiar with KM approaches and techniques.
Back to my meeting tomorrow. This time around I am using the cards to craft a research plan, specifically around gathering insights from subject matter experts. I do believe I won’t be using any single approach, but then, that’s the fun I'm looking for.
The KM Method Cards product page.
The KM Method Cards quick reference (PDF file, print this out, you’ll need it).
Permalink | Sunday, June 29, 2008
Wells Fargo ATM design case study
An in-depth article that describes how Pentagram redesigned the interface of Wells Fargo's ATMs.
"The design team learned that the single-most used feature of an ATM is the cash withdrawal. The objective for the new UI was to continue to offer quick and easy cash withdrawals, while making the other services more visible and accessible. Some of these services, such as purchasing stamps and printing account statements, can be convenient for customers and they save a trip to the post office or branch office. For Wells Fargo, it is an additional source of revenue."
Permalink | Friday, June 20, 2008
Writing an Interface Style Guide
Jina Bolton writes about keeping the interface relevant and useful even after the launch. Her key -- interface style guides.
"Interface design standards enable brand stewardship. Commonly documented in a design “style guide,” these standards inform clients and content editors of branding guidelines for typography, whitespace, color, etc. The design style guide provides a reference in which developers can describe the way the interface is intended to look, and helps designers to be consistent as the interface is updated so that, in turn, the interface continues to feel consistent."
Permalink | Saturday, June 14, 2008
Jakob Nielsen on e-learning
Jakob Nielsen flags out e-learning in his recent article on Writing style for print vs. web.
"I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don't believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience."
Permalink | Saturday, June 14, 2008
Yahoo design stencil kit
Yahoo!'s design pattern library is home to the Design Stencil Kit -- a collection of stencils for OmniGraffle, Visio, Illustrator and Photoshop that covers most of the patterns in their library. Nice work guys!
Permalink | Thursday, June 12, 2008
Jonas Lowgren: Two perspectives of Interaction Design
Jonas Lowgren, Professor of interaction design at Malmö University, Sweden has written an article that describes 2 historical perspectives of interaction design. One views interaction design as a "design discipline, distinguished by its focus on the digital design materials: software, electronics and telecommunications". The other views interaction design as an extension of HCI -- "usability and usefulness of digital products and services."
Permalink | Thursday, June 12, 2008
Harvard Business Review: Design Thinking
Some quotes from this design thinking article from HBR by Tim Brown (IDEO):
"Design thinking is a lineal descendant of that tradition. Put simply, it is a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. Like Edison’s painstaking innovation process, it often entails a great deal of perspiration."
"Thus Edison’s genius lay in his ability to conceive of a fully developed marketplace, not simply a discrete device. He was able to envision how people would want to use what he made, and he engineered toward that insight. He wasn’t always prescient (he originally believed the phonograph would be used mainly as a business machine for recording and replaying dictation), but he invariably gave great consideration to users’ needs and preferences."
Permalink | Sunday, June 08, 2008
Web 2.0 how-to design guide
Scratch Media: "In this tutorial, I describe various common graphic design elements in modern web ("2.0") design style. I then attempt to explain why they work (i.e. why they have become common), as well as how, when and where you might use each element in your designs."
Permalink | Saturday, June 07, 2008
UK university lectures on iTunes
From the BBC: "University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes."
I have been listening to some of these lectures on my iPod and many of them are really good. Learning on the go has come a long way and it seems that iTunes is a good platform for educational institutions to be jumping on to.
Permalink | Friday, June 06, 2008
Social Media in Plain English
From Common Craft: "This video focuses on basics of social media: new technology that makes everyone a producer and tools that give everyone a chance to have a say."
Permalink | Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Don’t design ‘what if’ navigation
Gerry McGovern describes what the pattern community call the hub-and-spoke navigation system. In large websites, where there are a lot of options, the hub-and-spoke arrangement does bring order and clarity to the page. But it does have a downside. What if someone comes directly to the website from, say, a Google link. He will surely miss the other options. This is where the global navigation, or the one in vogue these days -- 'pre-footer' navigation -- can come to the rescue. For more of these patterns, check out Jennifer Tidwell's book Designing Interfaces.
Permalink | Sunday, June 01, 2008
Predictably Irrational
I really enjoyed Dan Ariely's book -- Predictably Irrational -- on everyday decision-making. He goes on to show how bad we're really at when making decisions and that we are predictable in making these decisions -- that is we make them time and time again, sometimes even when we have the knowledge of making such deviations. There book website has many demonstrations that we can take to test out some of our decision making flaws.
Permalink | Sunday, June 01, 2008
How to be a UX Team of One
The title does not do justice to this presentation by Leah Buley. I intentionally skipped the link several times, thinking it would be another regurgitation of obvious ideas. I viewed it only after my colleague posted it on our internal blog. And yes, it's a very good presentation about techniques of brainstorming for ideas and how to go about them. Leah emphasizes a lot on sketching, something I've personally taken up passionately. She also talks about the 'diamond' technique (she does not use the name though) brainstorming process -- first start with divergent ideas, then after analysis, start to converge on possible solutions.
Permalink | Saturday, May 31, 2008
iPrepNS
iPrepNS is our latest project. It is a website with information to help pre-enlistees and their parents better prepare for Singapore National Service. It was officially launched by the Minister of Defense (Singapore) yesterday. It was a challenging project as we had present the formalities National Service in Singapore -- from the process to the procedures to what really happens during camp training -- and make it more transparent and accessible to the target audience.
The target audience are male teenagers (Singapore citizens and Permanent Residents) who are coming face to face with National Service for the first time and who are about to spend the next 2 years of their lives in the system. Much of National Service is about training, but there are many changes that take place during this period, both physical and psychological. We had to present all of this and more in a style that would relate to the target audience.
We undertook an extensive research phase that took us from document and media analysis to interviews with pre-enlistees and their parents to observing the system at work from the ground level. We spent much of our time in the camps, looking at training events, observing the physical and psychological strains on the recruits and talking with the people who are in charge on the ground.
There is much more to the design from content analysis to copywriting to branding, which we'll publish later as an in-depth case study.
From a technical point of view, we tried to be as compliant to Web Standards as possible, using sIFR, CSS and valid XHTML. Using Flash for critical elements, especially the masthead story, was the part that gave us the big problems.
Check out these pages:
Permalink | Thursday, May 29, 2008
Information design patterns
Christian Behrens has created a Flash based website to publish his Masters thesis on The Form of Facts & Figures -- a collection of information design patterns.
Permalink | Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Customer-Centered Innovation Map
Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick write on innovation opportunities by analyzing how customers "get the job done";
"Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently. For example, when an anesthesiologist checks a monitor during a surgical procedure, the action taken is just a means to an end. Detecting a change in patient vital signs is the job the anesthesiologist is trying to get done. By mapping out every step of the job and locating opportunities for innovative solutions, companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings."
Related concepts:
Permalink | Friday, May 02, 2008
IA Summit 08 podcasts are up
Boxes and Arrows is slowly putting up the IA Summit 08 podcasts. Yum!
Permalink | Thursday, May 01, 2008
User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing
Faceted browsing is going to become quite the norm for navigating large data sets -- health information, consumer products, etc. This article takes a good look at some of the interface implementations of faceted browsing.
Permalink | Thursday, May 01, 2008
Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability
From Jakob Nielsen Alertbox:
"Users scan lists by moving their eyes rapidly down the left edge. Menu items that are right-aligned make scanning more difficult."
Note that Jakob Nielsen is not talking about left-hand or right-hand menus. He is just talking about the alignment of menu items.
Permalink | Wednesday, April 30, 2008
What is Design? (Yes, all 10 definitions!)
Frank Spillers takes on the task of defining 'design' from the usability consultant's point of view. He breaks the definitions down to those for the Mind, those for the Heart and those for the Body. Nice.
Permalink | Sunday, April 27, 2008
1968—The Year That Rocked Our World
AARP magazine has a multimedia section on one of America's most turbulent years -- 1968. Check out the interactive timeline.
Permalink | Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Building a collaborative workplace
A white paper from Anecdote on "why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability".
"Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless."
Permalink | Monday, April 21, 2008
Cover-flow on the web
Like to see the cover-flow interface on the web? Check out: http://creativspace.at/. The images are pulled from Google Image search.
Permalink | Monday, April 21, 2008