Designing for Web 2.0
Luke Wroblewski has a presentation on using the visual communications ecosystem when designing web applications.
In the presentation I point out how the ability of visual communication to express core customer and brand messages across multiple forms of media has not changed much. However, shifts from locomotion to services, from pages to rich interactions, from sites to content experiences, and from content creation by webmasters to everyone online have introduced unique opportunities and constraints that the presentation layer of Web applications needs to account for.
Permalink | Friday, April 27, 2007
Measuring the Success Of a Classification System
Iain Barker has written an insightful article on using card sorts to evaluate and measure the effectiveness of the top level navigation in websites.
Permalink | Friday, April 27, 2007
When Observing Users Is Not Enough: 10 Guidelines for Getting More Out of Users’ Verbal Comments
Nice article to get one's bearings when preparing for user research engagements.
To help you get more out of users’ verbal comments, this article will provide ten guidelines and various interviewing techniques I’ve learned from experience. These techniques work best if they are used with genuine empathy for users. If users feel that you are not genuine—even if you are not aware of it or try to hide it—these techniques won’t work. I’ve described most of these techniques within the context of usability testing, but some techniques are also applicable to other user research activities—such as field studies and task analyses—and to stakeholder interviews.
Permalink | Saturday, April 21, 2007
Google Lays Out Its Mobile User Experience Strategy
Google breaks down mobile user behavior into 3 groups: "repetitive now", "bored now" and "urgent now".
The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.
The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.
The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.
Permalink | Friday, April 20, 2007
Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier
James Robertson has published an article on the need to use a different approach when looking into enterprise IA design issues. He advocates the use of Needs Analysis and Strategy & Scoping research at the start of the design process.
Permalink | Thursday, April 19, 2007
It’s all about location, even in a goat farm
When it's feeding time, the goats in the front of the barn get all the hay. So how does one design the feeding experience? This goat farm I visited put the "kids" in front and the exotic species at the back. This makes many to purchase more hay packs to feed that one with the "really long ears". Nice strategy, seems to work like a charm.
Permalink | Sunday, April 15, 2007
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Good article by Jason Beaird on what makes beautiful websites tick. He uses the same principles of good design (symmetry, balance, grid, etc.) and applies it to the web.
Permalink | Sunday, April 15, 2007
Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful
Jakob Nielsen's latest alert box is on using breadcrump navigation and not messing with its well-established format.
Breadcrumbs won't help a site answer users' questions or fix a hopelessly confused information architecture. All that breadcrumbs do is make it easier for users to move around the site, assuming its content and overall structure make sense. That's sufficient contribution for something that takes up only one line in the design.
Permalink | Sunday, April 15, 2007
What’s the organising principle here?
Found this at a local toy shop. I wonder what organising principle he was thinking about?
Permalink | Wednesday, April 11, 2007
UX Methods
Jess McMullin of nForm has created a UX method deck of 16 deliverables and ideas that UX professionals can use.
Permalink | Monday, April 09, 2007
The Luxury Touch
A Strategy+Business article that looks at how luxury brands manage their service frontiers.
Companies like Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom, and Lexus can guarantee service that goes the extra mile because, in effect, they’ve programmed their organizations to foster customer-centered behavior in employees at all levels. Although there’s no single process for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, four principles are common to nearly all top-performing luxury brand companies:
They create a customer-centered culture that identifies, nurtures, and reinforces service as a primary value.
They use a rigorous selection process to populate the organization with superior sales and support staff. The impulse to care about accommodating customers cannot be taught to people who are not predisposed to it.
They constantly retrain employees to perpetuate organizational values and to help them attain greater mastery of products and procedures.
They systematically measure and reward customer-centric behavior and excellence in sales and service to enforce high standards and reinforce expectations.
Permalink | Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Setting Up Business Stakeholder Interviews - Part I
Michael Beavers has written an article on holding stakeholder interviews. Part I explains how to "pay special attention to the influence of company politics on stakeholder interviews and how you can avoid some of the biggest pitfalls by properly recruiting subjects and setting up your interviews in a way that minimizes the effects of client bias."
Permalink | Friday, March 30, 2007
IA Summit 07 presentations
Slideshare presentations from the IA Summit 07 are now online.
Permalink | Thursday, March 29, 2007
When effectiveness and efficiency go bad
This is a nice story of living in a networked world -- where a nodal efficiency can lead to the downfall of the entire network.
Singapore is well-known for its strict anti-piracy laws and its allegiance to upholding intellectual property rights.
A study by research consultancy firm Spire of some 40 global companies operating out of Asia concluded that when it came to producing pirated goods, Singapore was a distant last.
The International Chamber of Commerce had earlier given it high marks for protecting IP -- ranking it ninth out of 82 countries.
If you were a customs officer and saw a shipment from Singapore and if you were aware of its envious standing, what would you do?
You would let it pass, right?
Pirates are using the same strategy to sneak goods to other countries via Singapore and that too in an efficient and effective manner.
In 2004, more than 300,000 pirated DVDs seized by British customs had come on ships from Singapore.
These numbers ranked Singapore in the top three countries -- with Malaysia and Pakistan -- in terms of the number of pirated DVDs seized at points of entry (in the UK).
And the irony of it all is that Singapore's efficiency is proving to be one of the bottlenecks in stopping these shipments.
And, in the buzz of activity at the Singapore port, which prides itself on its quick turnaround times, some point to the obvious dilemma: It would be virtually impossible — and extremely disruptive — for the authorities to go around examining every consignment that is being transhipped.
This story goes to show how having a systems viewpoint is so important in our age -- we need to be looking at the forests more often.
Permalink | Monday, March 26, 2007
Choosing an Accessible CMS
Joshue O Connor has written a report on research done by The Centre of Inclusive Technology to see how several popular content management systems stack up when it comes to support for accessibility. Here are the CMSs they looked at: Jadu, Mambo, Joomla, Quick and Easy, Expression Engine, Plone, Drupal, Textpattern, Xoops and Typo3. [via Max Design]
Permalink | Thursday, March 22, 2007
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