Wireframing With Patterns
Lindsay Ellerby shares her experience and techniques of building wireframes using patterns.
Permalink | Wednesday, March 21, 2007
IIT Mumbai bans blogging & gaming
Mr Prakash Gopalan, dean of student affairs at IIT Mumbai, has this to say about blogging and gaming.
Mr Prakash Gopalan, dean of student affairs at IIT Mumbai, told Singapore's 938Live radio station in an interview that school authorities had been observing a slight decline in academic standards.
"Even more worrisome was a declining level of participation in cultural activities … not too many people were showing up at our playgrounds in the evenings and working out and things like that," he said.
"So we started probing (why this might be). And obviously, it all pointed to an increasing use of Internet services like browsing, chatting and gaming."
Mr Gopalan said about 4 to 5 per cent of ITT Mumbai's 5,000 students had been "seriously affected" by the excessive time they spent online, leading to psychological problems in some cases.
Permalink | Thursday, March 15, 2007
By any medium necessary: How interaction designers can save the world
David Fore of Cooper Design tells us to how interaction design can serve organizational needs and how interaction designers should always keep that in mind:
An interaction designer's approach must bear this in mind, providing level-headed insight to executives and precise direction to developers, so that the interests of the business and users are kept foremost in everyone's mind.
Permalink | Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Corporate Wikis Go Viral
More upbeat news from the trenches, this time with Nokia and old-time favorite Dresdner Kleinwort.
Today, Nokia estimates at least 20% of its 68,000 employees use wiki pages to update schedules and project status, trade ideas, edit files, and so on.
Permalink | Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Research Is a Method, Not a Methodology
Dan Saffer on what its much better to treat research activities as a tool in the design arsenal rather than a methodology that must be strictly adhered to. This sentiment is growing among designers and is something that needs to be communicated to clients as well.
Permalink | Monday, March 12, 2007
How to write good FAQs
Caroline Jarrett advises us on how to separate the FAQ wheat from the chaff.
Permalink | Friday, March 09, 2007
Wasting talent
John Hagel has written a thought-provking entry (actually all his entries are like that) on how companies fail to understand the dynamics of talent:
Corporations around the world face a systematic and sustained squeeze on profitability. This squeeze comes from two different directions simultaneously – customers and talent.
Our performance measurement systems are woefully unprepared for this squeeze – indeed, the squeeze is occurring precisely because most managers are not measuring the levers that count for sustained profitability. We are saddled with accounting and measurement systems that measure last century’s drivers of profitability, not the drivers of twenty-first century profitability.
Permalink | Friday, March 09, 2007
Improving the User Experience with In-page Navigation
I've written an article on in-page navigation over at PebbleRoad. Here's the introduction:
In-page navigation techniques are used to layout web content on a page. When used properly they improve the user experience. But when misused they just add to the anxiety. This article chalks out the different in-page navigation options available to us and offers some tips on using them effectively.
Permalink | Thursday, March 08, 2007
Ira Glass on Storytelling
Nice videos describing the essence of stories as used in broadcast from the host of This American Life. [via Ancedote]
Permalink | Monday, March 05, 2007
The best user manuals EVER
Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has a post on her learning journey with the "Parelli Natural Horsemanship", a firm that sells horse-related products. She describes the quality of the learning material she received from Parelli. I've long been a proponent of using physical learning artifacts to support e-learning, for example, with booklets, guides, stickers and posters. These not only make the learning material sticky but also act as discussion points to kick-off a conversation with colleagues.
Permalink | Sunday, March 04, 2007
InformationWeek on Enterprise 2.0
InformationWeek has published a detailed research report on Enterprise 2.0. The finding:
The usual impediments. Business technologists are concerned about security, return on investment, and their staffs' skill in implementing and integrating new Web tools.
[However]
Reticent companies ignore the movement at the peril of their competitiveness. Within a few years, rich, collaborative software platforms that include a slate of technologies like wikis, blogs, integrated search, and unified communications will be the norm. Employees will expect to work that way, and it'll be up to IT to solve the still significant problems and deliver.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Social Software in Libraries
This book looks interesting. Libraries seem to be ideal places for social tools to make an impact, but like everything else, it matters how the strategy is crafted and the implementation is done. This book hopefully shows the way.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Non hierarchical navigation
Paul Boag writes about a case he faced that did not fit a hierarchical navigation model. His alternate model deals with using search, breadcrumbs and tagging to navigate the content space.
Permalink | Friday, March 02, 2007
Wikipatterns
Atlassian wiki evangelist Stewart Mader has just launched Wikipatterns. This website is a collection of do's and don't's that you can refer to when starting on a wiki project. But instead of just listing points out, they describe it in terms of patterns and anti-patterns. For example, People Patterns include:
- WikiGnome: A WikiGnome is a person who performs small edits on a wiki to continually improve its overall quality.
- WikiFairy: A WikiFairy is someone who makes format changes to make the wiki more visually appealing.
And People anti-patterns include:
- WikiTroll: A WikiTroll is someone who constantly criticizes the effort.
- DoItAll: A DoItAll will not let the community get involved and will do the needful on his own.
Permalink | Saturday, February 24, 2007
IBM on Business Collaboration
The current issue of IBM Systems Journal is on business collaboration. [via Martin White]
Permalink | Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Learning More While Working
This CIO article states what we already know for a long time - corporate training is not enough and is not effective as it is made out to be.
I have 20 percent that seem to find a way to take advantage of every opportunity for education, learning and/or training,” said another respondent. “The shame is that they are only responsible for 20 percent of the output. The 80 percent who deliver day in and day out you almost have to order to go for training.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 21, 2007
How Not to Talk to Your Kids
A fantastic read by Po Bronson on the perils of praising your kids. [thanks Venkat]
When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart.
But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
Permalink | Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Improve the writing in your organisation
Here's a template to write 100 word articles. Pretty neat. [Phil Turner]
Permalink | Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Customer-Controlled Innovation
Patricia Seybold writes at length on her pet topic: how collaborating with customers leads to innovation and profitability. She describes several case studies of customer led innovation and gives us a strategy for making it happen in our organizations.
Enlightened CIOs are getting in front of this "engaged customer" parade to provide the leadership, tools, and resources that let their companies reap the rewards of customer-led innovation. In many of the organizations I studied, CIOs play a crucial role in integrating online-community platforms with their firms' customer self-service infrastructures.
Permalink | Monday, February 19, 2007
Finding the Right Job for Your Product
In this MIT Sloan article, the authors argue that a different kind of understanding is required to find the right product for the right market. This understanding, called the job-based structure, is knowing how the product fits into the daily lives of customers who just want to get their jobs done.
Customers simply need to get things done, whether that be fixing their car, staving off boredom, or finding something fun to do with their kids. These situational needs for which customers are looking to “hire” products or services go unnoticed during traditional market research and segmentation. As a result, the true breadth of competition often goes unnoticed too. When companies understand what they are up against in the mind of the customer, they can piece together the real size of the market in which they compete.
[free download available for limited time period]
Permalink | Saturday, February 17, 2007
Tutorials on Microformats
Roger Costello has written a tutorial on Microformats. This stuff is going to go mainstream this year with talk of Firefox gearing up to provide support for it in upcoming versions.
[thanks maxdesign]
Permalink | Friday, February 16, 2007
DOM Scripting & Ajax workshop with Christian Heilmann
After a successful first event on CSS with Russ Weakley, my company PebbleRoad is announcing the second event in the Web Standard Series: DOM Scripting & Ajax workshop with Christian Heilmann. Do consider attending this event If you're in the SE Asia region and would like to learn the right way to script web pages and build interactions. More details are given in the event writeup.
To get a sampler on what we’ll be covering, view these 10-minute screencasts on DOM Essentials made by Christian Heilmann.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 14, 2007
InfoVis Diagram
The folks at infovis take a shot at explaining the cognitive processes that take place during visualisation. Here's a nice quote:
Information Visualisation acts as a vehicle for the building of knowledge, revealing the underlying patterns in data.
Permalink | Wednesday, February 14, 2007
A perfect mess - the hidden benefits of disorder
This is an interesting book from an information architect's point of view. The authors take the stand that there are costs associated with order and sometimes these costs outweigh the perceived benefits. More interestingly the authors list out the benefits of disorder: flexibility, completeness, resonance, invention, efficiency and robustness. They provide many examples of each benefit from Arnold Schwarzenegger's impromptu work habits to Alexander Fleming's bacteriological lab where he accidentally discovered penicillin. I haven't finished the book yet, but it's proving to be an interesting read.
Permalink | Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Fantastic video on the state of the web. [thanks Venkat]
Permalink | Thursday, February 08, 2007