When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods
An Alertbox article by Christian Rohrer:
"Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases."
Nothing new here, but interesting classification:
- Attitudinal vs. Behavioral
- Qualitative vs. Quantitative
- Context of Website or Product Use
Permalink | Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Block reading: how we read on the Web
Gerry McGovern says that we don't scan a page, we scan blocks or sections of it.
"Over the years, I have found that people don’t really scan an entire webpage. Rather, they break the page up into various sections or blocks and then scan within these areas. The left column is where people expect to find the core navigation for the area they are searching for. So, for example, if they are searching for a product, and they are on the products homepage, they expect to find the main products listed in the left column."
Permalink | Sunday, October 05, 2008
Concept Design Tools
Victor Lombardi writes about developing design concepts early on in the process.
"Designers of digital products and services like ourselves can dramatically improve our work by generating more concepts early in our projects. In this article, I’ll try to make concept design easier to learn by illustrating three simple tools for generating concepts."
Permalink | Thursday, October 02, 2008
How to manage out of date content
Gerry McGovern urges the need to have a review process to check published content:
"Anything that does get published must have an identifiable owner. That owner must commit to regularly (every six months at least) checking their published content. It is absolutely no excuse for them to say they don’t have time. Don’t let them publish if they don’t have time to review and remove."
Permalink | Monday, September 29, 2008
Creating user-centered taxonomies
James Kelway from User Pathways tackles the creation and use of navigational taxonomies.
"This two-part article is a step-by-step guide for those wishing to create new taxonomies for their business unit or client. It will outline the many different elements that make up a quality taxonomy and the pitfalls you should be aware of when starting a new project."
Permalink | Thursday, September 25, 2008
Study on edubloggers
Kristina Schneider has just completed her Master's thesis on edu-bloggers and their motivations and perspectives on blogging. And yours truly was one of the bloggers Kristina interviewed. Cool!
"This study analyzed what it means to be a blogger in the field of training and development—an edublogger—as well as the credibility of blogs intended for the training community. The specific research questions were posed from the insider’s or emic perspective. The objective of this study was to attempt to paint a portrait of an edublogger and uncover areas for further research."
Permalink | Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Consumers Shun Companies With Poor Websites
From Rawnet:
"Some 78 per cent of British consumers have been put off by a company because of poor usability of its website, according to digital consultancy Rawnet."
Permalink | Monday, September 22, 2008
IDEO blogs
Two new blogs from IDEO
Permalink | Thursday, September 18, 2008
The Joy of Sketch : explorations in hand-crafted visuals
An inspirational article by Kate Rutter. She writes on the use of hand drawn visuals to capture or think-through ideas. Kate also mentions Mark Baskinger, who has written a good primer on sketching for ideas.
Permalink | Monday, September 15, 2008
Doing KM right
The Kinokuniya bookstore in Singapore is not known for their correct categorization, but guess they got this one right -- Running a Bar For Dummies in the KM section. Cool!
Permalink | Saturday, September 13, 2008
ASIS&T’s special issue on IA
ASIS&T's Aug/Sep issue is on IA. Some nice articles here including Gene Smith's Emerging Trends in Tagging and Nathan Curtis's Audiences & Artifacts.
Permalink | Thursday, September 11, 2008
40 Creative Design Layouts
"In the showcase below we present 40 creative out-of-the-box layouts that break the boring 2- and 3-columned, boxed layouts. We have collected pure CSS -designs, CSS+JavaScript -layouts as well as Flash -designs. Most designs presented below risk their site structure and content presentation with unusual approaches. That’s what makes them different. Hopefully you will find some creative ideas that you can develop further in your future projects."
Permalink | Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Areva infographic film
Areva, a company involved in nuclear energy, has created a new film to help users understand how nuclear energy is produced and used. Nice isometric drawings. [via Information Design Watch]
Permalink | Sunday, September 07, 2008
Site visit interviews: from good to great
Gret Higgins from Userfocus has written a good primer on interviewing skills required when doing site visits.
- Good interviewers build rapport. Great interviewers realise that rapport involves more than meeting and greeting.
- Good interviewers listen. Great interviewers realise that listening involves more than using our ears.
- Good interviewers are sympathetic. Great interviewers are empathic.
- Good interviewers are aware they might be biased. Great interviewers use their self-awareness to uncover blocks to listening.
- Good interviewers note inconsistencies between what someone says and what they observe. Great interviewers investigate these inconsistencies
Permalink | Friday, September 05, 2008
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
Ed Catmull describes the challenges Pixar faces in coming up with creative ideas. He focuses on the challenges between a great team and great ideas:
"If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works."
Here's another about convening a group when in need.
"When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late. The problem-solving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch."
Here's another about having daily reviews.
"This practice of working together as peers is core to our culture, and it’s not limited to our directors and producers. One example is our daily reviews, or "dailies," a process for giving and getting constant feedback in a positive way that’s based on practices John observed at Disney and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm’s special-effects company... There are several benefits. First, once people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. Second, the director or creative leads guiding the review process can communicate important points to the entire crew at the same time. Third, people learn from and inspire each other; a highly creative piece of animation will spark others to raise their game. Finally, there are no surprises at the end: When you’re done, you’re done. People’s overwhelming desire to make sure their work is "good" before they show it to others increases the possibility that their finished version won’t be what the director wants. The dailies process avoids such wasted efforts."
Permalink | Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Planning & coordinating content migrations
I've posted another article over at PebbleRoad. This is regarding content migrations. I thought I'd share what we are doing and in return get some feedback to improve our process.
"You’ve spent months researching and redesigning your intranet or website. The wireframes and the sitemaps have done their job in communicating the benefits of the new design to the stakeholders and you’ve got good feedback from the users. The new templates are done up and the CMS is getting tuned. It’s time to think about those 2000 or so pages of content that need to go into the new website. Yes, this is the content migration phase that’s been getting a lot of attention lately."
Permalink | Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Inner spam filters
In their article for Scientific American MIND titled, Your Inner Spam Filter (registration required), authors Andrew McCollough and Edward Vogel point out that there are two types of people: those who can remember large amounts of information (high-capacity individuals) and those who can't (low-capacity individuals). The draw on research and show that it's not that the high-capacity individuals have a larger store, it's just that they are better at ignoring the spam that comes their way! In fact they found that some low-capacity individuals were holding more information than high-capacity individuals. This is the same conclusion others have come to also. For example, Gary Klein, author of Power of Intuition, has put forth that expertise and experience is all about selecting the appropriate shortcuts through the flood of information. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is onto the same conclusion with his notion of 'thin-slicing' of information.
When it comes to training, there is a tendency to just focus on expert behaviour, the thin-slices. But that’s not quite the way to train the spam filter in my opinion. The filter needs to see the junk to know the junk. The training should allow for messy situations, but channel the behaviour in spotting patterns of what is relevant and what is not. Much like a sandbox.
Permalink | Monday, August 25, 2008
The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn
Great article from Scientific American on why we tell stories:
"We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy."
Permalink | Saturday, August 23, 2008
News you can use
Gerry Mcgovern has some real good advise for the online newsroom:
"In an age of attention deficit and impatience, news created on organizational websites and intranets needs to be brutally action-oriented and to-the-point It needs to help people do things. It needs to be practical and real. And it needs to be newsworthy-not simply put up because it's Tuesday and we need to publish something."
I've added this to my post on Designing the Online Newsroom.
Permalink | Thursday, August 21, 2008
The SEO Guide to Information Architecture
Adam Audette has written an extensive guide to blending SEO practices with IA.
"This article will explore the basic concepts of designing optimized site architectures for efficient spidering by search engines. Building an easily spidered site has ramifications in how pages, sections of a site, and entire domains are topically understood and categorized by bots, which influences indexing and rankings."
Permalink | Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Designing the online newsroom
I've just posted a new article over at PebbleRoad titled: Designing the online newsroom. I've been noticing that corporate and government websites do not focus much on this area and as a result miss out on a good opportunity to develop and grow an engaging communication channel. This article is a brief look at the problem from the design angle.
"The newsroom section in corporate and government websites is not just about press releases anymore and nor is it just for the press. The demand by a broad spectrum of customers to be updated on what’s happening at every front of the organization combined with the organization's need to promote and educate customers about new directions has expanded the role of the newsroom. In this article, we take a look at what goes into this enhanced newsroom and how to design for it."
Permalink | Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Kids reading more online - Good or bad?
This NY times article presents an interesting debate on whether the time kids are spending reading online is good or bad in the long term. I think that this whole debate is based on wrong categorization. Using old frameworks to evaluate new phenomenon is fundamentally wrong. Clayton Christensen's new book, Disrupting Class - How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, has a chapter on the current state of educational research. He points out that historically education research has been using outcomes of the research to point back to known situations or circumstances and not to new or changing circumstances that the kids find themselves in. Yes, kids are reading more, but they are also reading differently. Making meaning by "weaving" different definitions, perspectives and representations trigger different skills and aptitudes. These in turn warrant different ways of looking and measuring.
Permalink | Saturday, August 09, 2008
How buildings learn - 6 episodes on Google video
The BBC television series on Stewart Brand's iconic How Buildings Learn is now on Google video. If you like the book, you'll love these videos (iPod compatible):
- Part I - Flow
- Part 2- The low road
- Part 3- Built for change
- Part 4- Unreal estate
- Part 5- Romance of maintenance
- Part 6- Shearing layers
[Thanks Venkat]
Permalink | Friday, August 08, 2008
Content migration—the most overlooked phase
Barb Mosher has collected in-depth articles discussing the issue of content migration -- the process that maps old content into a new CMS or structure. Here are his main points:
- Plan, plan, plan
- Look into automated and semi-automated, but don’t expect miracles
- Inventory first
- Never migrate content as is — always expect changes
- Keep metadata top of mind
- Consider outsourcing for the simple tasks like cutting and pasting
(via ColumnTwo)
Permalink | Tuesday, August 05, 2008
When Play Becomes Work
Shankar Vedantam explores the widely accepted belief that extrinsic rewards can get people to do things. Research studies, Vedantam shows, points the other way around -- external rewards kill the inner drive.
"External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful -- tasks that telegraph something about a person's intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits."
Permalink | Sunday, August 03, 2008