Via Interactive Development Blog |
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What we're reading in Via's Interactive Development Group. |
Friday, September 07, 2001
Thursday, September 06, 2001
Tuesday, September 04, 2001
Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data (Alertbox Sept. 2001) Search engine ads are one type of Web advertising that can actually work. To create the best ads, do quick experiments and redesign ads based on usability principles for online writing. Doing so helped us increase ad click-through by 55% to 310%. Monday, August 27, 2001
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
Thursday, August 16, 2001
Yale Style Manual-Site Covers Site covers can serve a number of different purposes. Some function as "splash" screens that offer little information, but are intended to entice users into a site by using snazzy graphics or effects. Others are used to establish an overall "look-and-feel" for a site. Such covers often provide links to the major sections of the site, allowing visitors quick access to topics of interest while providing a general site overview. Other covers have few graphics, but provide detailed information and access to the content of the site. Which type of cover is most effective is dependent on the nature and purpose of the site. We have found covers to be the most controversial of all site elements. For many readers, site covers are simply an additional and annoying mouse click between them and the content they are seeking. Such readers would like be presented with a site index at the start rather than pretty graphics or spiffy animations. The key is to assess your audience and then choose the entry that seems most appropriate.
Splash Screen Definition and Discussion: Client Help Desk A splash screen presents many problems:
Navigation 101 - The Web Developer's Journal ... It looks amateurish, and it will drive away a certain percentage of visitors. So will a "splash" or "entry" page, but some designers feel that it's worth it for the chance to make a flashy entrance. Many designers want that priceless first impression to be a big flashy graphic. It's impractical to put it on the home page, so they put the flash on a page by itself. This page is the first thing a visitor sees, and leads to the actual home page. A properly-designed splash page automatically loads the home page after a few seconds (using the META REFRESH tag), and also has a clickable element that will take a visitor to the home page if he or she chooses to click before the few seconds have elapsed. Think long and hard before you include a splash page in your site. If your business is graphic design, animation, or something else that requires you to show off your graphic chops, then a splash page is appropriate. For most business sites, it isn't. Some visitors will bail, and others will resent the delay. Remember that most people don't go to a business site to be entertained - they go for information. Monday, August 06, 2001
Spool Interview > The Usability of Usability ...Now, here's where the real breakthrough comes in: we found that, during the study, people made purchases that weren't on their shopping list. That fact alone isn't that interesting, what's interesting is the reason: it was because of the design of the site. It turns out that only 8% of the impulse purchases we saw were because of price or special promotions. The rest were because of the design of the site. And it wasn't small potatoes either. The impulse purchases averaged 42% of the revenue from those sites. (To put this in perspective, Staples.com generated $451 million last year. 42% of that revenue is $189 million. I wouldn't mind having that kind of revenue.) How did the design of the site affect impulse purchases? Well, as I mentioned before, the categories on the site played a huge role. On the home page of a retail site, you basically have 3 choices when shopping: 1) use the search engine, 2) choose a featured product, or 3) use the category links provided. In our study, if you chose option 3, you were three times more likely to make an impulse purchase than if you didn't. (Oh, by the way, not a single impulse purchase came from choosing option #2. This finding puts into question the practice of dedicating lots of home page real estate to featured products.)
First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (Alertbox Aug. 2001) To design an easy-to-use interface, pay attention to what users do, not what they say. Self-reported claims are unreliable, as are user speculations about future behavior. Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Thursday, July 26, 2001
Monday, July 23, 2001
Usability News - Summer/2001 | A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When? Fun Stuff! Friday, July 20, 2001
Friday, July 13, 2001
Web2 | Top-Tips - here you'll find great web designing tips from some the best designers ... When the final design seems too simple for the amount of work you've put in, then you know you're done
Eric Eaton : Why Type on the Web Is So Bad When designing type for the Web, I don't think much like a typographer. I think like a guy giving a drunken fratboy directions to the International House of Pancakes at 4 a.m. Typographic composition on-screen is not an exercise in specificity and exactness. It is a layered process that starts and ends with varying degrees of clarity and is intended to get someone with a limited attention span a little closer to enlightenment.
"The history of IT is a history of failure" ... Pelz-Sharpe hopes to see more successes like SMS (short message service), which sends small and unglamorous text messages to mobile phones. SMS "gave people what they wanted", he says. "That's the mentality we need - what does the user actually want?" According to Pelz-Sharpe, most IT professionals still don't want to try to calculate the return on investment (ROI) from individual projects. Web projects present special challenges because they can affect hard-to-measure assets such as a company's brand. But Pelz-Sharpe is encouraged by rising demand for advice on building an ROI case. "Two years ago they (IT professionals) didn't care," he smiles. "Now they care. They have to care. In the US, the chill wind has definitely arrived. Projects are being halted right, left and centre. Customers who in the past would have used every new technology are now changing. They're now brainstorming to identify the best technologies."
Accept responsibility to make your online project work What must managers do to avoid this trap? They must define in precise detail what users of the system can do - a tough, confronting task which takes place before a single line of code is written, and which requires managers with at least a small measure of technical savvy and a great deal of determination. This project definition becomes the starting point for a back-and-forth dialogue with the development team. Business management and technologists refine the project together. Only here, says Thomas, can the software team start writing code. Friday, June 22, 2001
Thursday, June 21, 2001
Tuesday, June 19, 2001
Thursday, June 14, 2001
What is Manila? What is Manila? Manila is an Internet server application that allows groups of writers, designers and graphics people to manage full-featured, high performance Web sites through an easy-to-use browser interface. Manila is included as part of the UserLand Frontier content management system, an $899 commercial product for Windows and Macintosh. Manila is easy!
The 3 Stages of a Product At The Usability Group, we define the three stages of a project to as follows ... Monday, June 11, 2001
PDF - Avoid for On-Screen Reading (Alertbox June 2001) When you make a PDF document available for download, follow these guidelines:
Ask Tog: How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched Thursday, June 07, 2001
Friday, May 18, 2001
Brightly Colored Food I'm a Usability Specialist. I help make software and websites easier to use. This is where I cite, ramble, and carry on. Wednesday, May 16, 2001
Sunday, May 06, 2001
A High-Tech Vision Lifts Fidelity "The Web has created a new set of rules or a new set of expectations related to usability," Mr. Tullis said earlier this year, during a speech at an I.B.M. conference on Web design. "Web pages have to be easier to use," he continued, "than some of the alternatives that people might have available to them. Many people would agree now that Web pages need to be works of art as well. They need to be beautiful."
Adweek magazine| Computer Intelligence The web ain't TV. So marketers need to stop treating it like an awareness-creating medium. Technology marketers' focus on the web as a type of broadcast media has become totally misplaced. You see, we may have been seduced by the visitor counts, but the web's real value as a type of medium is its infinite customizability and effortless depth. Treating what is essentially a one-to-one medium like a one-to-many medium is plain wrong-headed. And the proof of this notion is the currently disastrous state of real marketing return from banner ads and other tactics that treat the web like TV or radio. The fact is that treating the web like a broadcast medium is no longer a successful marketing tactic. The time has come to make some changes. First, marketers have to look at the place in the marketing process the web is most compelling. And it's not awareness, like most marketers thought. Instead, the web is really well positioned to be a driving force further into the marketing process. Friday, May 04, 2001
Thursday, May 03, 2001
Stats Toolbox: Statistics The CyberAtlas Statistics Toolbox was set up as a resource that allows CyberAtlas visitors to easily find statistics, numbers, and tables that have run on the site. Monday, April 30, 2001
ClickZ : What Do People Want Online? ... The answer, it seems, is very utilitarian: People want to accomplish something online. They're not aimless "surfers" looking for a fix or a novelty. Instead, the average Net user seems to be a goal-oriented person interested in finding information and communicating with others.
Human Factors International--ensuring usability through software ergonomics, human factors and design artistry Pull-Down Menus: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II : evolt.org, Site Development Real-World Browser Size Stats, Part II Thursday, April 26, 2001
IETF | Dublin Core expressed in meta tags The Dublin Core [DC1] is a small set of metadata elements for describing information resources. This document explains how these elements are expressed using the META and LINK tags of HTML [HTML4.0]. Tuesday, April 24, 2001
The Standard: Who Got Fired? With all the news about dot-com layoffs, you'd think there was no one left to run the Web. Internet Economy firms, from the tiniest startups to giants like Yahoo and Cisco, have announced layoffs of almost 90,000 workers since January 2000. That's a lot of pink slips. But how significant are the cuts compared to the overall economy? The University of Texas estimates that 3.1 million people worked in the Internet Economy as of last June, which means that layoffs to date account for only 2.5 percent of the Net workforce. Meanwhile, the overall economy has seen 2.2 million layoffs since January, representing approximately 1.6 percent of a total workforce of 135.8 million people. Friday, April 20, 2001
A List Apart: A Web Designer's Journey ... From the beginning, we've done whatever we had to do to make our sites work in every browser. In the world of non-standard HTML Design, we bolt every word, every image into place by manipulating table cells. And we solve problems by replacing them with new ones. Netscape 4 ignores the CSS {margin: 0;} declaration? Extend the BODY tag with the Four Horsemen of Non-Validation: LEFTMARGIN, TOPMARGIN, MARGINWIDTH, MARGINHEIGHT. IE4 doesn't fully support the CSS border property? Fake it by wrapping a black HTML table around your white one. Sure, it shouldn't work, but it does, and this site was due yesterday. Build, test, rebuild. WHERE WE'VE BEEN That's how sites have been constructed since 1995, and it's how they're built today.
Our company: Understanding is our business | XPLANE Note the site map at the bottom of each page.... Adds 8.26 K to each page. Thursday, April 19, 2001
Flazoom.com - A Cancer on the Web called Flash (editorial) Recently I have been seeing a lot of Flash sites that are very nicely designed but so far away from a good web experience that I began to wonder just what was up with the designers of those sites. Do these hot shots even care about the people who are visiting the Flash sites that they create?
Salon Technology | DEN, Boo: R.I.P. ...For instance: In the year 2000, there is no excuse for any professional Web site that expects to reach a wide audience of users to put on its home page an animation that requires a browser plug-in ...
dack.com > web > flash is evil Some response to the title's premise: ... I am currently working on a Flash website for the company I work for and the Boss was exited to hear that the company logo ws now going to be able to jump to life and talk to the users in our company. The users never previously went to our website mainly because it was boring and just filled with information. But, when you had information with media you get a website that people WILL use over and over again.
User Interface Engineering | Eye Tracking ... Scan Patterns Were Similar All the users spent the same proportion of time looking at each area. This similarity of behavior surprised us. We think it means that they all applied similar criteria in deciding on the relative importance of the tested areas—the likelihood each area would contain the link or information they wanted. New and experienced web users scanned essentially the same way. At first, the new user scanned pages from left to right, as if reading a book. But he quickly changed to the center–left–right sequence. He needed only two or three page visits to learn where to find the “good stuff”—and how to avoid less-interesting (to him) material. He looked at the browser controls more than the experienced users did, but was otherwise unremarkable. We had only a single new-to-the-web user, but this is an interesting pattern to watch for. Because these users so quickly adopted the center-left-right strategy, we believe the experienced users—who used it immediately—had learned the behavior through their earlier visits to other web sites. This suggests that designers may not need to design pages differently for new web users, but we’d need more tests to confirm this.
WebWord.com > Flash Usability Challenge Let me set the tone. I'm generally agnostic about technology. I have no vested interest in Macintosh and I don't have the Open Source or Linux religion. I don't stand up for, or promote, Windows or Adobe Photoshop either. Or any other operating systems, programming languages, or design tools. These things simply don't matter to me. I could care less that someone has used Java or C++ to develop a product or service. I just want fast and easy services, great news, and solid web applications. I do care about developing and providing solutions that augment the customer experience. The key for me is identifying and providing effective, high quality web sites. For me, usability is a huge part of the customer experience. I basically filter every article and email and news posting as either helping or harming the customer experience. In a nutshell, the general usability of web sites is important to me. That is why I am sick and tired of people telling that Flash is great. People tell me it is cool but I think that it ruins the customer experience. I think that it should be thrown out as an e-commerce tool, except in rare cases of promotion and marketing. Maybe it is useful for entertainment, personal web sites, art and game sites, but it isn't any good for e-commerce. Wednesday, April 18, 2001
A Framework for Organizing Web Usability Guidelines If web usability guidelines can play an important role for ensuring usability when designing and evaluating web sites, the moment and the way to use them still remain unclear. To address this problem, one goal of the EvalWeb research project was to come up with a general framework of web usability guidelines helping people to structure the way they are working with such guidelines.
Web site may intrigue the designer, but what about audience? ... Web-site designers make all kinds of mistakes, said Nielsen, a Ph.D. who has done the research to back up his views. The biggest mistake is simple egotism. "Web designers believe they and their sites are important," he said. "They're not." Just because those involved in a Web project care about it doesn't mean surfers will. There are 20 million Web sites to choose from, and more than two billion pages of content. In this age of the consumer, Nielsen advocates turning the tables. "It's not what you think about your site that counts. It's what users think about it," he said. "And even more important than what users say they think is how they act."
3Cs of Critical Web Use: Collect, Compare, Choose (Alertbox April 2001) ... The most obvious conclusion is that, when it comes to critical Web use, users are almost always goal-driven: 96% of the time in the PARC study. Although this has been common knowledge for some time, the magnitude of the percentage surprised even me. It's also interesting that it is almost three times as important for users to find multiple pieces of information as it is to locate a single specific piece. The entire browsing paradigm is optimized for accessing individual locations. Users are typically on their own when they want to collect more than one answer. Tuesday, April 17, 2001
Cascading Style Sheets: Getting Serious about Compatibility Style sheets that don't just "work", but really work.
A List Apart | Dao of Web Design Really good reading! Introduction What Zen was to the 70's (most famously with motorcycle maintenance), the Tao Te Ching was to the 90's. From Piglet and Pooh to Physics and back, many have sought sense in applying the Tao Te Ching to something (the Tao of Physics), or something to the Tao Te Ching (the Tao of Pooh). It can be a cheap trick, but lately it has struck me that there is more than a little to be understood about web design by looking through the prism of the Tao.
A List Apart: Fear of Style Sheets 4 ... Nothing is sadder than the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of ugly facts. Monday, April 16, 2001
Is the Magic Number 7 Relevant to Web Page Design? Web Page Design: Implications of Memory, Structure and Scent for Information Retrieval ...This study was an investigation of the effects of memory, response mapping, structure, and scent on designing web sites for efficient information retrieval. We have tried to couch the last twenty years of research on depth and breadth in menu design in a current theoretical and design framework in a systematic fashion. The danger of generalizing from earlier research to web design is that there may be a tendency to assume that broader, shallower web site designs are always preferable. The current study has demonstrated that, for one well-organized, large information space, our moderate level of breadth (the 16x32 structure) may actually afford optimal user performance. The results of this study map nicely into the information foraging and effective view navigation lines of research. As has been demonstrated in previous work on that topic, it is extremely difficult to distribute residue, or scent, throughout an information structure effectively [4]. For this study and its expertly organized content, the 16x32 and 32x16 information structures most likely afforded optimal performance because their category labels were more distinct at the top levels (better scent) than those of the 8x8x8 hierarchy. For the 8x8x8 hierarchy, the top-level category labels were more general, and hence subjects took longer to make a decision as to which category to choose. The 8x8x8 structure also likely suffered from the fact that subjects had to make yet another categorical decision at the second level of the hierarchy. Researchers in cognitive science have long modeled decision making behavior as a more time-intensive cognitive process than simple visual search [*]. In summary, one explanation for the current set of results is that subjects spend less time making categorical decisions and more time performing visual search in the broad, shallow structures, and categorical decisions are more cognitively taxing. Our findings do converge with previous studies that suggest broad, organized menus be recommended over deep ones on the web. However, the authors wish to emphasize the need for designers to consider the layout as well as the semantics and labeling of their content. More research on matching category soundness and labeling to the user’s understanding of the information space should augment our understanding of how to best design for large-scale information spaces, such as the World Wide Web.
CHI 97: Helping and Hindering User Involvement - A Tale of Everyday Design Usability problems continue to offer a challenge to interactive system designers. Saturday, April 14, 2001
The Standard: Get Back In That Box But even as technology advances by leaps and bounds, people remain stubbornly linear in their behavior. Day after day, they go from point A to point B and on to point C. If they change their habits at all, they do so at a glacial pace. And guess what? It's those very same people who spend the cash that is the ultimate source of all business revenue and profit. Here are a couple of simple but telling facts. According to a Media Metrix study of Internet use last year, 92 percent of U.S. households still access the Web via dialup connections, and nearly 40 percent of that group have modems that operate at 33.6Kbps or less. Never mind the painfully slow rollout of dependable broadband access; there are a heck of a lot of people out there who haven't even bothered to upgrade to a 56Kbps modem. And the average Internet user doesn't exactly live online, either. NetRatings statistics for February reveal that the typical Net surfer logged on 18 times and visited a grand total of 10 unique sites. It's nearly 10 years since the start of the great Internet revolution, and loads of people are still quite happy getting onto AOL a few times a week to check their e-mail. Wednesday, April 11, 2001
Elegant Hack Weblog: thoughts on information architecture and user experience ... I've always said that the usability specialist (or usability engineer or whatever.. would you people please decide on a title) studies and tests, while the IA designs structures. IA is a calculatedly creative act, while usability is research-- during the beginning, middle and end of a project. IA's should not test their own work any more than a writer should edit their own.. it's just too hard to stay objective. Monday, April 09, 2001
Search Engine Traffic to Useit Portals and search engines accounted for about 20% of the "unique visitors" to useit.com. In comparison, the HypertextNow site gets 30-40% of its visitors from portals and search engines.
Seattle Times: Usability guru philosophizes on Web subjects On the Internet: "The classic mistakes are No. 1, a site that is glamorous, beautiful and impossible to use. The first site is always done by an ad agency and it always looks like a glossy brochure (that's) not interactive at all. The second mistake: The structure is wrong. The internal structure of a company is not how to structure a Web site. If you can say, 'This button belongs to this VP,' it's designed wrong. And No. 3, the writing is marketese, fluffy, overblown." Thursday, April 05, 2001
Wednesday, April 04, 2001
Monday, April 02, 2001
Color Matters - Vision - Color & Vision Matters The human eye can see 7,000,000 colors. Some of these are eyesores. Certain colors and color relationships can be eye irritants, cause headaches, and wreak havoc with human vision. Other colors and color combinations are soothing. Consequently, the appropriate use of color can maximize productivity, minimize visual fatigue, and relax the whole body. Which color is the worst offender? Yellow, pure bright lemon yellow is the most fatiguing color. Why? The answer comes from the physics of light and optics. More light is reflected by bright colors, resulting in excessive stimulation of the eyes. Therefore, yellow is an eye irritant. Babies cry more in yellow rooms, husbands and wives fight more in yellow kitchens, and opera singers throw more tantrums in yellow dressing rooms. Be careful how you use it. In practical application, do not paint the walls of a critical task environment yellow. Also, do not use yellow legal pads (but it will give you a jolt and temporarily wake your brain up), and do not use yellow as a background on your computer monitor.
Death of the Websafe Color Palette? One of the givens of Web design, the holiest of holy truths, is the sanctity of the 216 websafe color palette. It's a rite of initiation for every Web designer or developer: Use only these colors, we are told, and don't question why. Friday, March 30, 2001
Jupiter - at work connection speeds ... "Although the projected increase in at-work broadband access means a much larger audience and greater appeal to advertisers, employees with access to broadband are not a panacea. Jupiter foresees some enduring technology-related constraints because the average connectivity speed of individual users on shared networks will remain roughly equivalent to today," said Joe Laszlo, senior analyst at Jupiter Research. "Companies deploying broadband content and applications must tailor their offerings to fit the time of day and usage constraints that affect at-work audience behavior patterns. This means short-form content, unobtrusive applications and programs that will appeal to the at-work multi-tasker." Thursday, March 29, 2001
Westport Co. > Company The Westport Company helps businesses make interactive and online products and services simple, comfortable and easy to use -- for all audiences. Our strength is our ability to translate interactive technologies into products and services that are simple enough for everyone to use successfully on the first trial -- intuitively and error-free.
Nua Internet Surveys: Online shoppers avoid fancy features PricewaterhouseCoopers: Online shoppers avoid fancy features Mar 07 2001: A new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) has found that most online shoppers do not use the extra features, or "bells and whistles," on ecommerce sites. Only 19 percent of shoppers had ever filled out an online wish list, for example, and only 13 percent of those had ever forwarded such a list to friends or family members. Features such as live customer service, personalization, and product comparison guides were also unlikely to be used or to tempt shoppers into buying. The most popular and important features for online shoppers are search capabilities and product information. About 77 percent of those surveyed had used search facilities at retail sites and 43 percent said it was the most important. PWC said that online retailers must be careful not to add features to their sites if they do not add any value or speed up the buying process. Wednesday, March 28, 2001
ZDNet: Business & Tech: E-Commerce: Best Practices How to craft smooth navigation Visitors may like your products and services, but if they can't understand how your site operates, or if they find getting around consistently annoying, you lose them. Tuesday, March 27, 2001
Welcome to the Information Architecture Standards Initiative Welcome to iastandards.org! This is a new web site intended to serve as a hub for the Information Architecture (IA) community's nascent standardization movement. To learn more, please see the Intro and Mission pages. Friday, March 23, 2001
Natural Language as an Interface Style Natural language is one of many 'interface styles' (or 'interaction modalities') that can be used in the dialog between a human user and a computer. There is a significant appeal in being able to address a machine and direct it's operations by using the same language we use in everyday human to human interaction. Conventional wisdom in the field of human-computer interaction, however, is that natural language is nowhere near as an attractive an interface alternative as it initially appears. The literature tends to focus on failures of such interfaces to achieve what was expected of them. As an example, an introductory human-computer interaction text dismisses natural language interfaces on the grounds that language is ambiguous. Successful implementations are thus characterized as being sufficiently restricted in syntax or lexicon as to call into doubt their status as natural language (Dix et. al. 1993). Thursday, March 22, 2001
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Elegant Hack Scroll to: don't make me think So I sat, staring at this screen, trying to figure out where to click to get information on Health Care plans for small companies. Tuesday, March 20, 2001
RightNow Technologies Inc. | Customer Service for Every Web Site Interesting Customer Service/FAQ creator Wednesday, March 14, 2001
Joel on Software Three Wrong Ideas from Computer Science Joel on Software painless software management
How Dot-Coms Joined the Old Economy ... Today, there are thousands of Net- savvy twentysomethings looking for work. Many, perhaps most, of them will take their knowledge of the Internet into the very same traditional companies whose demise at their hands was being predicted only a year ago. What the Internet brought to the economy — the ability to move information worldwide instantly, at low cost and on demand — is still revolutionary, but it is now a revolution within, rather than against, the old economy. Thursday, March 08, 2001
Reading Reader Reaction - Terry Sullivan Obtaining genuinely useful site feedback is a complex and difficult task for any Webmaster. This paper proposes a systematic, inferential approach to analyzing and improving a Web site based on reader behavior, as recorded by the Web server log files. Systematic analysis of site traffic based on log files can provide invaluable information for improving the navigability and usability of a Web site, optimizing its structure, and improving both visibility and accessibility of content. Tuesday, March 06, 2001
Retaining Key Staff (Alertbox March 2001) Retaining Key Staff: What High-Tech Employees Say versus What They Do
Adaptive Path: User Experience Consulting Lane Becker, Janice Crotty Fraser, Jesse James Garrett, Mike Kuniavsky, Peter Merholz, Jeffrey Veen and Indi Young have formed a consultancy... Thursday, March 01, 2001
Internetworking (3.3): Article-Designing for Information Foragers Designing for Information Foragers: A Behavioral Model for Information Seeking on the World Wide Web James Kalbach Wednesday, February 28, 2001
Wednesday, February 21, 2001
Strange Connections | Software for Information Architects Search Engines Definition: Software that provides full text indexing and searching capabilities. Examples: Inktomi Search, Verity, Google SiteSearch, Oingo DirectSearch Comments: Abundant sillyness. As content volume grows, search will become the heart of most web sites and intranets, yet few vendors admit they're selling a search engine; they all have "portal solutions." Meanwhile, the true challenge involves getting the IT people, who currently own the search engines within most corporations, to share their toys with people who understand how and why to connect users and content. The current difficulties in this category are not due to technology. It's a people problem! To learn more, visit Search Tools.
People | Christina Wodtke We made at least a half-hearted attempt to persuade Christina to move to Portland ... no luck<g>
ACIA White Paper | Information Architecture and Personalization Information Architecture and Personalization Thursday, February 15, 2001
WebmasterBase - Boxes and Arrows: Defining IA Deliverables Boxes and Arrows: Defining IA Deliverables Wednesday, February 14, 2001
TheStandard.com: Just the Text, Ma'am Frustrated by the eternally slow Internet, tech-savvy news junkies are peeling away Web sites to get to the juice: Words.
CHI 97: Aesthetics and Apparent Usability: Empirically Assessing Cultural and Methodological Issues "... it requires a somewhat mystical theory of aesthetics to find any necessary connection between beauty and function." Herbert Read, Art and Industry, p.61 Tuesday, February 13, 2001
AOL Browser table Beginning with Windows AOL 3.0 (32-bit), the AOL client does not have a browser embedded, but instead uses the Internet Explorer browser the user already has installed within their system. On the Mac and 16-bit Windows clients, the AOL client contains various versions of Internet Explorer embedded directly within the client, and independent of the version of Internet Explorer installed outside AOL in the system.
CHI-WEB archives -- March 2000, week 4 (#12) Interesting thread: ... but remember that most users *prefer* to use the Back button Monday, February 12, 2001
User Modeling & Cognitive Analysis Why do user/operator modeling or cognitive task analysis? Provide common framework for understanding (communication mechanism between designers and users); basis for systems design; prediction (in terms of performance, workload, error). Terminology: Cognitive task analysis refers both to the process of analyzing human performance from a cognitive point of view and the resulting product of the analysis (e.g., a GOMS model). I use the terms operator modeling (process) and operator model (product) as a special case of cognitive task analysis applied to supervisory control situations (where we tend to talk about (human) operators as opposed to (human) users). Wednesday, February 07, 2001
HBS Publishing: Product Detail Display Almost all companies today compete to some degree on the basis of continuous innovation. And many turn to customers for information to guide that innovation. The problem is that customers' ability to guide new product and service development is limited by their experience and by their ability to imagine and describe possible innovations. How can companies identify needs that customers themselves may not recognize? A set of techniques Harvard Business School Professors Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport call empathic design can help resolve those dilemmas. Its basic principle is observation--watching customers use products or services. But the critical twist is that such observation is conducted in the customer's own environment--in the context of normal, everyday routines.
Consumers combat pop-ups with software, tricks - Tech News - CNET.com ... "People loathe pop-ups because it clutters their desktop and forces them to do work to clean them up," said Jason Catlett, president of anti-spam group Junkbusters. "It's a major reason that people start using products for filtering banner ads."
optimal web design Designing a website that takes into account the human element requires both an understanding of our nature as well as our physiological limitations. Usable websites incorporate human tendencies and limitation into its overall design. The questions below are meant to address some of the more important human factors concerns in the design and building of usable websites Tuesday, February 06, 2001
Usability News - Winter/2001 An essential ingredient in constructing the content of a website is knowing the typical users' mental model or 'schema' for the characteristic location of web objects on a website. Knowledge of this schema and constructing a site that reflects this should aid in the site's accessibility.
TheStandard.com: Razorfish Scales Back, Lays Off 400 ...A total of 15,448 Internet workers at 120 companies were shown the door in January – mostly to achieve profitability – according to TheStandard.com's Layoff Tracker. Monday, February 05, 2001
Friday, February 02, 2001
Adobe Web Center - Columnists - Jeffrey Zeldman When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don't start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name — at least, in some circles. Thursday, February 01, 2001
jjg.net: a visual vocabulary A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design Tuesday, January 30, 2001
Monday, January 29, 2001
A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites Slave to the Spec The Page Spec was a bland PDF file. It looked like a web page, sure. It looked like a boring web page, the kind of thing you'd see in Lynx, maybe, but a web page nonetheless. It laid out the whole damn page, the entire site, from links to pop-up windows to what should appear in the status bar. It didn't affect me all that much—it was common sense, and it helped me in small ways. But I wondered about the graphic designers. The information architects, the busy fussy people using strange terms like "user flow," seemed to have done all the work for the designers. The designers—the ones who went to school for years, studying layout, color, and the effective way to deliver a message in any medium—were now glorified painters. Pick a font, slap a color on, and send it on its way. And God forbid if there had to be a change in anything! Instead of just working the change into the design or the production, the Page Spec would have to be revised, then approved both internally and externally. What could have taken five minutes became a bureaucratic nightmare. This is the situation that many designers and front-end developers find themselves in: hemmed in and held hostage by the Page Spec.
Software for building and editing thesauri Software for building and editing thesauri What is a thesaurus? This is a list of software for the development and editing of information retrieval thesauri.
American Society of Indexers Thesaurus Management Software Packages This list of software geared toward the needs of professional indexers and vocabulary developers is for informational purposes only. Thursday, January 18, 2001
vizbang: what is it? An open XML syntax, Information Architecture Markup Language (IAML) Spark, an IAML browser, authoring environment and presentation tool A startup located in Berkeley
jjg.net: a visual vocabulary The guy who did the Elements of User Experience document developed "a visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design" Wednesday, January 17, 2001
Tuesday, January 16, 2001
The Usability Methods ToolboxThe Usability Methods Toolbox Links to tools and methods for usability testing... Tuesday, January 09, 2001
Andrew Dillon column on IA Dillon is a professor at Indiana and has presented at several IA conferences. First, while I accept IA as a concept and even a meaningful description of a design process, I need more convincing that any one person could be described accurately as an Information Architect. Just as I value the process of user-centered design, I would view with some cynicism a person who told me their profession was 'user-centered designer'. So there are architectural properties in information, of that I am sure, but are there any information architects? Most people want to think so, and who could blame them? Information Architect is a very sexy title, bound to impress one's friends and family, and certainly a more lucrative professional title than web designer or librarian. But I find it hard to shake my sense that information architecture currently represents a collective process more accurately than it describes what any individual does. Maybe that doesn't matter. After all, what is it exactly that 'information scientists' do? Second, I am wary of drawing boundaries between disciplines and skill sets that so clearly overlap despite the job titles or formal qualifications of the participants. In our attempts to define IA, both at the summit and the subsequent online discussions, I heard and read many definitions based on what IA was not, or what is was different from, rather than what it truly was. What inclusionary definitions have been provided seem so narrow to me as to become exclusionary. Can we really create a field whose sole purpose is, as some
Tune Up - Web Site Diagnostic Tools, Automated Maintenance, Web Site Tune-up Good toolset for checking pages...
Evaluating Information Architecture Information architecture (IA) is the art and science of structuring and organizing information environments to help people effectively fulfill their information needs. This white paper explores the why’s, what’s, and how’s of evaluating a web site’s information architecture.
At the Crossroads: Information Architecture and the “Purpose Crisis” Presentation at an ASIS conference.
Wachovia Online Banking Demos Excellent Flash demo, as well as an HTML version for those who prefer it.
Yale University | Welcome to Yale University Interesting use of rollover menus - but is it usable? It is still difficult to move diagonally from the top menu to one of the bottom menu items in a sub-menu.
Jakob: Mobile Phones: Europe's Next Minitel? (Alertbox Jan. 2001) Europe's cellular phone system is far superior to that in the United States. However, telephones will not be the platform for the mobile Internet. Given this, Europe's advantage may in fact be an obstacle to real innovations, as France's experience with Minitel shows.
Demo idea - FoodMagic.com Click the "New? Take a Tour" button to see how an HTML tour can be created. Not sure about the "Wizard" guy, but this approach may be faster than Flash and serve as an alternative. We took a similar approach on eSprocket...
Browser News: Overview - the browsers and their futures This site provides news and gossip about Browsers from the major players -AOL, MS, etc. |
