Top 100 User-Centered Blogs
From Virtualhosting.com comes this list of the top 100 user-centered blogs. Great page to bookmark.
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Microsoft and Nokia Go User-Friendly
Interesting movement taking place on the mobile front:
"Competing makers of smartphones—wireless handsets that double as mini computers—have gotten the message. And in the wake of the iPhone launch, many are taking pains to improve their own software and hardware to eliminate the often arduous or non-intuitive task of gaining access to even the most basic information."
Permalink | Monday, October 22, 2007
Learning theories
Stanton Wortham from Wharton/University of Penn describes the popular learning theories in use today and the assumptions they make about how people learn. He describes these theories in 4 videos. Very refreshing stuff.
Permalink | Friday, October 19, 2007
Clay Shirky on arrogance and humility in design
This statement by Clay Shirky is a classic:
"Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer."
Permalink | Monday, October 15, 2007
Websites May Require Visually Impaired Access In California
This legal case between the National Federation of the Blind and Target might turn out to be the tipping point for similar accessibility rulings in other countries and governments.
"The case centers on Target not providing basic accessibility to vision impaired users via the use of alt tags for images, keyboard options for navigation and missing navigation headers."
Permalink | Monday, October 15, 2007
Information architect as a change agent
Matthew Clarke nicely brings out the connection between IA and change management. This connection is going to get stronger in the future. I would like to add Kotter's classic book, Leading Change, as one of the best books on the subject.
"This business context, in which organizational factors contribute more to the success or failure of projects than technical factors, is far from unique. In such a context it is insufficient for the IA to contribute just their technical input to the system design: the effective IA must also play a role as an agent of change. Sometimes this role is within the product development team: educating and channeling the team to “take on board” good IA practices. At other times this role is oriented towards the customer: educating the end users and preparing the soil in which the new system will be planted."
[via ColumnTwo]
Permalink | Thursday, October 11, 2007
Step Two: Intranet redesign for Canon Australia
Nice case study of the Canon Australia intranet. The problems faced and the methodology to solve these problems are explained well. For example, there is the typical taxonomy problem - you create two seemingly distinct levels but then find items which can occupy both levels. The solution they went with was to use the levels as the organizing principle and provide cross-links as the safety net.
There are, however, some topics that do not fit cleanly into either section. Examples include: health and safety, environment, facilities and corporate philosophy. The information architecture attempts to address this by separating these subjects into the aspects which directly affect staff (placed in Info for staff) and aspects that relate to corporate policy and 'PR' (placed in About Canon).
Additionally, cross links between the two sections attempt to get staff to the right information if they happen to look in the 'wrong' section.
Permalink | Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Building a culture of collaboration
CIO has an article on the difficulties in getting people to collaborate and share in the enterprise.
"You can't snap your fingers and say you're going to be collaborative," says Ed Colbert, SPHR, director of organizational effectiveness for Dow Corning Corp. in Midland, Mich. Dow's workforce has been collaborative for decades.
"The culture has to focus on the organization first," he says. "People have to have common goals. This is the first requirement for collaboration."
Permalink | Tuesday, October 09, 2007
UC Berkeley puts courses on YouTube
TechCrunch reports on UC Berkeley's YouTube experiment.
"The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have been previously available elsewhere, including iTunes and Google Video; perhaps it’s a first for YouTube."
Permalink | Thursday, October 04, 2007
Filling Much Needed Holes
Don Norman gives a scathing commentary on our rush to meet or close every unmet need in product or services. Some needs, he says, are best left unmet.
"We teach our students – and our executives – to do field observations, to define and create, to brainstorm and innovate. Come up with the better idea and the world will rush to your door. We take existing products and tweak them, modify them. We add intelligence and features. The world of products grows ever more complex every year, every hour.
But most innovations fail. Most new products fail. What does that tell us about the unmet needs? Maybe most of them deserve to be unmet. "
Permalink | Sunday, September 30, 2007
Instructional video websites
There seems to be a lot of interest in instructional videos. Graspr just joined the fray. Others well-covered websites are:
[Via TechCrunch]
Permalink | Wednesday, September 26, 2007
UXWeek sessions online
Presentation slides and audio (for some) are up from the recent UXWeek conference. Real nice.
Permalink | Saturday, September 22, 2007
What a Knowledge Sharing Policy Might Look Like
This guide by Patrick Lambe is very timely, going by the growing interest in collaboration and knowledge sharing. It clearly shows that there is more to knowledge sharing than just plugging in the latest software.
Permalink | Monday, September 17, 2007
Demystifying Data Analysis
A good article by Rachel Hinman on a process to take you through field research.
I usually wiki my notes from an interview. This gives my team an opportunity to review the notes and add in any missing pieces or new insights. Next, I go through the notes and highlight the ones that matter to the project. Then I collect all the highlights and present them with supporting notes. But I like the 'Emerging Insights' theme that Hinman uses to present her findings. It makes the presentation more direct and appealing.
Permalink | Monday, September 17, 2007
Ross Dawson on Web2.0 and KM
I'm at an IKMS session, listening to Ross Dawson talk about Web2.0 and KM. Here are the main points:
Interesting slide on how the value of the economy has increased dramatically over the years but the actual weight of products created has only marginally increased. Knowledge and services make up for the difference.
Web2.0 is about participation. In the past, we were cast as passive consumers, but now we are becoming active producers. In this way, Web2.0 is a social revolution.
The real turning point for this social revolution was Blogger and other free blogging platforms.
All this participation also results in a coherent structure or output, for example, a wikipedia article.
There is also a bit of exhibitionism in all these environments. We like to say and broadcast what we do and think.
Facebook is popular because it created a platform that enables anyone to create applications.
IBM's QEDWiki is a tool that allows brining together different applications and content. Gartner predicts (arguable) that IT budgets are going to fall over the years because of such new tools.
Knowledge management is more like media management. Its constructive to think about the merging of social media and mainstream media.
Because we are so busy, media is becoming shorter. Things are getting more and more concise.
It is essential that the human interactions be designed and understood to be better enabled (social network analysis).
Energy is the primary driver in social networks.
Permalink | Thursday, September 06, 2007
Management by numbers - when they don’t count
Interesting post by Bob Sutton. He explains that qualitative data provides better insights than quantitative data in these 3 conditions:
- When you don't know what to count (much of design research fits in here)
- When you can count it but it does not stick
- When what you count doesn't count
[Via Ancedote]
Permalink | Friday, August 31, 2007
Home Page Design
Daniel Szuc has written an article on factors to consider when designing a home page. He also explains how these factors show fare in popular websites such as Flickr and Blogger.
Permalink | Friday, August 31, 2007
Performing a project premortem
Gary Klein provides a nice summary of the pre-mortem concept:
"A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure."
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Forrester Research: Taking Web Sites Beyond Useful And Usable
Forrester Research extends useful and usable website metrics to include desirable:
"[M]any Web sites make users struggle to complete simple goals, have little to no emotional punch, and fail to embrace the diversity of consumers' wants and needs. To make matters worse, today's Web organizations must often backburner projects that would improve their sites' desirability factor in order to fix more pressing problems. As a result, the topic of desirability largely remains a mystery in the user experience community. We've explored three tactics for creating desirable online experiences: 1) providing engaging content and functionality, 2) focusing on aesthetics, and 3) incorporating elements of game design."
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Zeldman: don’t design on spec
Jeffrey Zeldman elaborates his stance on not to design on spec:
- It's a lot of unpaid work
- Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving.
- t’s unsafe for agency and potential client alike.
Permalink | Thursday, August 30, 2007
Intranets: what staff really want
Gerry McGovern did a survey and found out that staff really care about a few things that matter to them: finding people and finding forms and procedures.
"First and foremost, staff see the intranet as a practical place that should make it easier for them to do their jobs. While things like wikis, blogs and personalization got some votes, they were way down on the list when compared to finding people and forms."
Permalink | Monday, August 20, 2007
Corporate web standards
I'm quite late in spotting this one, but I think the concept of corporate web standards has legs:
"Now that web standards have become the norm for corporate websites, many in-house developers are discovering a new phase of acceptance and implementation within many large online organizations—corporate web standards."
Permalink | Saturday, August 18, 2007
Users cut back on using Web for communications, e-commerce
"Internet users spend almost half their time online reading and watching content, dwarfing the time spent searching for information, communicating with others and buying products, according to a four-year analysis of Internet activity released Monday."
This report has significance on the design of pages, especially destination pages, which is where the actual content is presented. If the purpose is for reading, then destination pages need to be simple, clean and clear. Some websites are already implementing such designs, including CNN.com. But if you want an excellent example, take a look at Garrett Dimon's website.
Permalink | Tuesday, August 14, 2007
WNYC - Radio Lab
This is a really good podcast on everyday science topics such as time, stress, morality, etc.
Permalink | Sunday, August 12, 2007
Cases2.0 - A repository of Enterprise 2.0 case studies
Andrew McAfee along with Social Text are building a repository of case studies on Enterprise 2.0.
Permalink | Sunday, August 12, 2007