Partial Recall

Interaction Designers are Idiots

The title is not true, but it does grab your attention, huh?

Nice use of Twitter - @shorterjakob:

New Alertbox: IxDA mailing list people are f%&$ idiots: http://tr.im/nOtp

So I saw some retweets of this synopsis of Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox. What made me laugh is that it’s so true. Folks in the UX industry should know that the best designs are those accompanied by user observation and other types of user feedback, but some design teams feel that such UX methods slow the process down and are unnecessary. In addition, the reality is that for some teams, not every design can be tested or observed, so designers are often left with providing “expert review.” Unfortunately, expert review is not necessarily a stopgap measure when it’s success as a tool is not as proven as other methods. I think we as designers and UX professionals need to be reminded that although we may be very talented, if we are not the target user, we cannot assume we have the right design unless there is validation by observing our users. Nielsen brings all folks in the UX industry back to earth by reminding us that the user is always right.

In addition, what Nielsen and Jared Spool emphasize is that there’s nothing more important than observing users. Nielsen argues that even observing 2 users with the design can dramatically influence your success (compared to expert review) at deploying the best design. Nielsen’s point is not to denigrate interaction designers. Instead, his point is OBSERVE, OBSERVE, OBSERVE. Design without observation is merely art. Design w/ observation is a good product.

Tags: [Jakob Nielsen, usability, expert review, Partial Recall, user observation, interaction design, IxD]

Links for 2009-06-08

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations [Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox - Jun 09, 2009] - Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions.
Visual thinking school [Dave Gray, Squidoo] - Visual thinking is a broad discipline with many facets. The list of links you see below is a set of mini-course modules on various subjects. If you’re new to the subject you might want to start with Introduction to visual thinking.
Usability Test Moderation: the Comic

Links for 2009-06-05

Windows User Experience Design Principles [Microsoft Developer Network] -
The Importance of Analytics in User Experience UX specialists have got to get a whole lot better at analytics. Why not get started by reading this presentation by Louis Rosenfeld?
American Airlines Web Site: The Product of a Self-Defeating Design Process [Fast Company - Jun 02, 2009] - Designer Dustin Curtis was so disgusted with the American Airlines Web site that he redesigned it, and posted the results as an open letter to the company. Guess what? One of AA’;s designers responded with a long defense about why better design dies a slow death at places like AA.

Links for 2009-05-29

Google Wave Preview - Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Watch the demo video below, sign up for updates and learn more about how to develop with Google Wave.
User Interface Prototyping and Wireframes [FlairBuilder] - FlairBuilder is a cross-platform tool for rapid authoring of interactive wireframes and software prototypes.
Dilbert on User Experience

Links for 2009-05-26

20 Websites to Help You Master User Interface Design [Six Revisions - Oct 15, 2008] - The following websites deal with interface design, user experience, user-centered design, usability, and everything in between – all with the goal of enhancing the user’s interface.
Handbook of Usability Testing: Templates and Forms
Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design [Frontend - 2009] - The use of personas as a method for communicating user requirements in collaborative design environments is well established. However, very little research has been conducted to quantify the benefits of using this technique. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using personas. An experiment was conducted over a period of 5 weeks using students from NCAD. The results showed that, through using personas, designs with superior usability characteristics were produced. They also indicate that using personas provides a significant advantage during the research and conceptualisation stages of the design process (supporting previously unfounded claims).

Links for 2009-05-22

Wiki Patterns [Wikipatterns] - Wikipatterns.com is a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption. It’s also a wiki, which means you can help build the information based on your experiences! Beyond this site, there are many other additional resources.
Dave Gray’s reading list [Squidoo] - A lot of people have asked Dave Gray to recommend books on visual thinking, visual learning, the brain, business, etc., so he’s compiled this list. He’s added a brief note to each book so you can see why he think it’s important.
Flavour Extended: The Ultimate Icon Set For Web Designers
Free download: Good vs. Great Design (summary)
5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours? [UIE - Jan 21, 2009] - Over the last few years, we’ve been studying the process designers (and their teams) use to make important decisions like these. In the course of our work, we’ve discovered there are five common styles of design that almost every team uses: (1) Unintended, (2) Self, (3) Genius, (4) Activity Focused, and (5) User Focused.
Userfly: Usability Testing Made Easy
Imagine, a ‘Firefox 4′ without browser tabs
100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009
Wolfram Alpha Data Search Engine Launches Tonight [Launch]
Usability.Edu: 25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets & Checklists [Best Web Design Schools - May 12, 2009] - Is your Web site primed for any viewer? How do you know? The nicest thing about a usable Web site is that it’s just a good thing to do for others so they can easily read your online information. The other side to usability is that it can increase your search engine standings so more people can find your Web site.
Stuck On Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Or AOL? Gmail Just Made It Incredibly Easy To Switch
Jakob Nielsen Critiques Twitter [BusinessWeek - May 08, 2009] - Not everyone is hearts and flowers over Twitter. Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen discusses the hazards and limitations of tweeting

Links for 2009-05-01

Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?
960 Gridder - Lay out websites with ease - 960 Gridder is an excellent tool for any web developer/ designer that wants to easily align, match and/or lay out websites.
10 Best UX (User Experience) Design Blogs [Blogs.com] - Whitney Hess’ top 10 UX blogs to follow.
How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook - Dell mini 9 hackintosh guide [Gizmodo - Feb 21, 2009]
Usability test software tool: Excel data logger [User Focus - Aug 02, 2008] - Most people use Microsoft Excel to analyse the results of usability tests, but did you know you can use it to collect the data too? This spreadsheet allows you to measure task completion rates, analyse questionnaire data, and summarise participant comments. It even includes a timer so you can measure time-on-task. The spreadsheet is highly customisable.
Usability Study: Men Need Speed - web usability criteria show gender differences [WebSiteOptimization - Apr 28, 2009] - In a recent usability survey, researchers from Southern Illinois University found that after ease of use, men prefer fast download speed to easy navigation. Women prefer ease of use, easy navigation, and accessibility. The researchers hypothesize that these different usability criteria are due to differences in how men and women use the Web.
Design Fiction
User Research for Personas and Other Audience Models
OmniGraffle UX Template Update (v. 2.4)

Links for 2009-04-25

Links for 2009-04-21

“Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com [Jeffrey Zeldman - Apr 16, 2009] - Rated Five Stars at Amazon.com since the day it was published, “Taking Your Talent to the Web” is now a free downloadable book from zeldman.com.
In Defense of Eye Candy [A List Apart - Apr 21, 2009] - We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.
Emotional Cartography: Implications of Visualizing Intimate Biometric Data
Product Planner - Discover, create and share user flows - Discover, create and share user flows

Links for 2009-04-09

Mix 09: Bill Buxton on Design & Return on Experience [Presentation Zen - Apr 09, 2009] - You may not have heard of Bill Buxton yet, but the Canadian designer and computer scientist is well known in the field of human–computer interaction. Currently he is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Bill wrote a good book in 2007 called Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design.
50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory [Psdtuts+ - Apr 02, 2009] - While many of us can create something that looks good in Photoshop or attractive when spliced into CSS, but do we actually understand the design theory behind what we create? Theory is the missing link for many un-trained but otherwise talented designers. Here are 50 excellent graphic design theory lessons to help you understand the Why’s, not just the How’s.
The rule of 5: How to create a usability test highlights video you can be proud of [UserFocus - Apr 08, 2009] - There’s no shortage of software that will record videos from usability tests, but how do you put the clips together in a way that will convince management and the design team to take action on your results? Our solution is to use the rule of 5: Create 5 separate highlights videos each focusing on one usability issue, with each issue comprising 5 clips and with each video lasting 5 minutes or less
MacHeist’s League of Extraordinary Dropouts Reinvents Software Sales
Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: A survey approach - Despite the growing interest in user experience (UX), it has been hard to gain a common agreement on the nature and scope of UX. In this paper, we report a survey that gathered the views on UX of 275 researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Most respondents agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. With respect to the more controversial issues, the authors propose to delineate UX as something individual (instead of social) that emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. The draft ISO definition on UX seems to be in line with the survey findings, although the issues of experiencing anticipated use and the object of UX will require further explication. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding, scoping, and defining the concept
of user experience.
Redux DC: IA Summit 09 + IxD 09 - We have invited a number of fantastic people in the UX community from DC, Richmond, Philly and NYC to come down to the nations capital for a half day presenting condensed versions of their talks.
UIEtips: Harnessing the Power of Annotations - An Interview with Dan Brown

Links for 2009-04-03

Labels inside form fields [Attardi] - A new pattern is emerging for the placement of input field labels. One which, in my user tests, yields much better results. Labels are now often placed inside the field itself. This pattern is used consistently, for example, in Facebook and throughout Apple’s products.
March UX Roundup - Throughout the month of March we have gathered our favorite user experience related links for your viewing pleasure.
Free Stanford course on developing iPhone software [Stanford - Apr 01, 2009] - Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.
The Memphis Plenary [Jesse James Garrett - Mar 22, 2009] - Transcript of the closing plenary address delivered March 22, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 in Memphis, Tenn. This address was written to be read aloud. I encourage you to listen to audio or watch video of the address if possible.

Links for 2009-03-26

Why I am no longer calling myself an information architect.
Survey: When is an Accordion not an Accordion? Everywhere I go lately, it seems that interaction designers and web developers are talking about accordion widgets and debating about what makes an accordion an accordion. Not everyone working in this field has heard the term (some may simply refer to stacked panels or collapsible panels but most get the gist fairly easily. Ironically, none of the UI elements described as accordions share the actual behavior of a real-world accordion (the musical instrument): namely, that stretching an accordion opens all the folds evenly.
Infographic-Style Retelling of Little Red Riding Hood
Talk: Video Available - Interactive Prototyping with DHTML (Mix 09)

Links for 2009-03-20

Goodbye Google - Part 1 of 2
IA Summit 2009 Twitter List [Brian Hansen - Google Doc Spreadsheet] - A list of Twitter names of presenters and attendees at the 2009 Information Architecture Summit, held in Memphis, TN from March 19-22.
Slides On The Go! SlideShare Launches Mobile Site - Presentation buffs can now get their fix when they’re on the move, thanks to the mobile website SlideShare.
StickyScreen [Jack Cheng - Dec 16, 2008] - My new mini-project takes the note off the edge of your monitor and puts it smack dab in the middle. The idea is to set StickyScreen as your homepage so that your ‘note to self’ shows up whenever you open a new tab or browser window.
EightShapes Unify [Eightshapes] - The EightShapes Unify documentation system is a suite of templates and libraries for creating better, more consistent design deliverables, faster. This suite is freely available to anyone interested in making beautiful IX deliverables. System Requirements: Adobe InDesign.

Memphis, Here I Come

This Thursday marks the 10th annual IA Summit, held in Memphis, TN. Actually, it begins earlier, but the main conference begins on Thursday. My apologies to friends I will meet there. Being the avid college basketball fan that I am, I feel organizers made a royal blunder by scheduling the event on the 4 most sacred days in sports - rounds 1 and 2 of March Madness (college basketball tournament). So, I might be somewhat distracted.

With that said, I am really looking forward to my third trip to the Summit and anticipate learning new takeaways and meeting new friends. In a time where people question that value of the discipline, I feel the conference and its practitioners have much to say.

Tags: [Partial Recall, information architecture, IA Summit, ias09, ias2009]

Links for 2009-03-16

Dieter says “Thou shalt not produce crappy designs.” - Well, not in those exact words.
Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning [Emerging Technologies for Learning] - Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning
The UX Workshop - The UX Workshop is a global hub where User Experience professionals and enthusiasts can strengthen their skills and meet new peers through live digital media and in-real-life events.

Links for 2009-03-12

Fluid Design Handbook [Fluid Project] - The Fluid Design Handbook is a how-to guide filled with user-centered design techniques you can use to learn from your users and design better user experiences. The handbook includes information on a variety of user-centered design practices, from performing user research and creating models (such as personas and scenarios to inform the design process) to performing user-experience walkthroughs and user testing of your website or application.
Open Source Design Pattern Library [Fluid Project]
Wall of Deliverables - Welcome to the wallofdeliverables.com, a companion site for the IA Summit Wall of Deliverables annual event and an ongoing repository of deliverables submitted from the community to share. Take a look around, be inspired, and let us know what else you’d like to see!
History and context of User Experience Design - Peter Merholz on The History and Evolution of User Experience Design (podcast).
Case Study: Gestural Entertainment Center for Canesta - In Fall 2008, Canesta approached Kicker Studio to create a demonstration of their latest camera technology for the Consumer Electronics Show 2009. The prototype was to be of an entertainment center controlled by gestures alone, and powered, of course, by a Canesta camera.
Clever Uses: Simple User-Interface Trick Makes Your Remotes Idiot Proof [Lifehacker - Mar 09, 2009] - Ever written out detailed schematics so visiting friends or family members could operate your home theater setup? It’s annoying, right? Web site Designing Interactions highlights an incredibly simple but surprisingly workable solution.

Exploring Design Alternatives

Jared Spool (Twitter: @jmspool) of UIE and Robert Hoekman (Twitter: @rhjr) of Miskeeto started a podcast to talk about all things user experience. It’s called “Userability.” The premise of the podcast is that Jared and Robert will take a call from a listener and answer the caller’s question.

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the first show. Here was the question I posed,

“I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?”

Basically, I wanted to figure out how the team could explore a lot of ideas before widdling down these ideas to a select few. Listen to what Jared and Robert have to say: Userability Podcast #1: Exploring More Design Alternatives.

Tags: [userability, Robert Hoekman, Jared Spool, UIE, usability, user experience, web design, design, podcast, Partial Recall]

Links for 2009-03-09

Quince - A UX patterns explorer
Extracting Usability Information from User Interface Events [ACM Computing Surveys - Dec, 2000] (PDF) - This survey examines computer-aided techniques used by HCI practitioners and researchers to extract usability-related information from user interface events. A framework is presented to help HCI practitioners and researchers categorize and compare the approaches that have been, or might fruitfully be, applied to this problem.
The Bull’s-Eye: A Framework for Web Application User Interface Design Guidelines (2 of 2) [Ui Garden - Sep 22, 2006] - See earlier description.
The Bull’s-Eye: A Framework for Web Application User Interface Design Guidelines (1 of 2) [Ui Garden - Sep 22, 2006] - A multi-leveled framework for user interface design guidelines of Web applications is presented. User interface design guidelines tend to provide information that is either too general, so that it is difficult to apply to a specific case, or too specific, so that a wide range of products is not supported. The framework presented is unique in that it provides a bridge between the two extremes. It has been dubbed the ‘Bull’s-Eye’ due to its five layers, represented as concentric circles. The center of the Bull’s-Eye is the Component layer, followed by Page Templates, Page Flows, Interface Models and Patterns, and Overarching Features and Principles.
Data.gov Is Coming — Let’s help build it - Barack Obama rode into office with a high-tech, open source campaign that digitized the book on campaigning. Now, with his selection of a celebrated open data advocate as his Chief Information Officer, Obama appears serious about bringing those same principles to the executive branch’s treasure trove of data.

Links for 2009-03-05

A Pattern Language (HTML Summary) [Christopher Alexander via Downlode.org] - HTML summary of “A Pattern Language” book by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel.
Searching through NY Times Articles via Elastic Lists [Information Aesthetics - Mar 03, 2009] - The “Elastic List” faceted navigation concept proposed by Moritz Stefaner has been nicely demonstrated for exploring the information behind the past Noble price winners. The new NY Times Article Search [moritz.stefaner.eu] project transposes this concept to the recently released NY Times Article Search API, which covers over two million articles.
In Which a Concept Model Makes Me Giddy [User Interface Engineering - Mar 04, 2009] - Dan Brown, who wrote the now classic book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, recommends concept maps to help team members visualize the relationships between a design’s components and the people who use it.
Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams [Vitsoe] - Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design? As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important criteria for what he considered was good design. Subsequently they have become known as the ‘Ten commandments’.
AddressBookSync Adds Facebook Friend Photos to Your Address Book Contacts [Downloads] - Free application AddressBookSync pulls contact photos and birthdays from your Facebook account and syncs them with Address Book, so you’ll always nice photos assigned to your contacts (and hopefully never miss another birthday).
iPhone gets CBS shows for free with TV.com app - CBS’ TV.com and NBC Universal and News Corp.’s Hulu have been in the tech news foreground this week, revealing their struggle to meaningfully coexist on the PC screen. Meanwhile, the mobile device screen presents a different set of challenges, which TV.com today has officially addressed.

Links for 2009-02-26

OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter now freeware [The Omni Mouth - Feb 25, 2009] - OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter are now available as freeware. That’’s right: they’re free. You can go download them right now if you want. FOR FREE.
Put Safari 4 Beta’s Tabs Back [Safari] - Safari 4 has loads of eye candy and new features—but if moving the tabs above the address bar is too drastic a change for you, you can always change it back—if you’re a Mac user, at least.
Multi-Select, Upload Progress Added to Gmail Attachments [Gmail] - Nice example of an “attachment”pattern. No more triple-clicking for every file you want to send over Gmail. Clicking “Browse” now lets you select multiple files at once to attach to a message, and tiny progress bars are displayed while each file uploads sequentially. Nice improvement over all that clicking, and fewer guesses as to whether “Still working …” means progress or eminent browser crash.

Rob Fay is a user experience architect making sense of an information age. He is passionate about the “I” in IT and strives to evangelize that information is a resource on equal footing with an organization’s human, financial, and physical resources.

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