Noise Between Stations

  • The Spaghetti Under Wall St.

  • Home Page Evolution

    Quick, take a look at the unconventional Oracle home page before they roll out the new one.

  • Things On Walls

    Marc Rettig, fountain of wisdom, elaborates and links to a couple docs about using big analog tools with teams.

  • IT & Society on Web Nav

    Last Winter the online journal IT & Society quietly published an entire issue on web navigation. It’s somewhat ironic that the issue is one page of abstracts that link to PDFs :-) Still, there’s probably goodness there; I’ll be starting with David R. Danielson’s Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation.

  • I’m Starting to Feel That Way About Univers

    Owen found a Make It Bigger excerpt, and I love this part: ‘I had rebelled against the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow responsible for the Vietnam War. ‘

  • Product Cross-Dressing

    OK, is it me, or does this mobile phone look like a Zippo? Makes one think about how to combine various things we keep in our pockets.

    And how about this Porsche SUV and this Hyundai SUV?

  • Faceted Metadata and Choosing the Right User Interface

    Tanya’s revealing of her technique for setting facets for her blog was the catalyst that reminded me of a comment Peterme made regarding facets: ‘The system can never know which particular strategy a given user wants to employ — so why not avail them of them all?‘ I don’t think he really means all facets we could imagine, I assume he means all facets that correspond to the most important metadata fields for a type of information.

    I’m thinking about this because I’m working on a system that stores the information using a number of facets, but which is presented with a hierarchical browsing user interface: it displays information pre-filtered by a couple facets, and as you select items it displays more items further filtered by the facet you selected. I didn’t design it, but I must complement those who did as it probably (usability testing will confirm this) maps to the mental model of the user. And yet the faceted scheme on the back end keeps the data set flexible and available to display using alternate schemes.

    And I mention this for two reasons: One, I’ve noticed a tendency to want to use every facet we have in the user interface instead of relying on our knowledge of users to serve them only the facets that are useful without extra clutter. Second, even experienced IAs want to literally represent the back end structure in the user interface. I see this especially with semantic networks of information stored as nodes and connections, where people want to rely on Thinkmap like interfaces. The information model just might be a better way to store and manage information that, in user interface form, corresponds to user’s built-in understanding of categories.

    (Out of courtesy I should mention this is not a criticism of either person or site mentioned above, they were just catalysts.)

  • WWW Code

  • CSS for Emails

    Anitra, via Owen, provides some links for coding happy emails, an area new to me: you can read a CSS thread, search for email clients, or read the guidelines.

  • Jeffrey Heer

    Heer, part of Peter Pirolli’s research group, has a blog and some interesting projects.

  • Persona Images on The Cheap

    Need a quick image to place in a persona doc? Try going to images.google.com and typing in “[persona name] headshot.” For example, here’s Tony and Maria.

  • Usability Testing

  • The Goal of Usability Testing

    What is the goal of usability testing? Let’s say it’s to improve the user’s experience.

    The user’s experience will improve when designers have the skills and resources to design well.

    The designers will improve when they have a better understanding of the users.

    Usability testing offers us some understanding of users. The direct goal of usability testing is to yield this information, but the indirect goal of educating designers is ultimately more important (until someone devises a test that automatically tweaks the product without a designer, which won’t be anytime soon).

    This struck me recently when I thought more about the various usability testing methods available to us and realized some offer us information about users without making us better designers, mostly because the information isn’t as rich, visceral, or immediate as with other methods.

  • End User Slut

    Molly’s a wonderfully naughty girl.

  • IA Eats Itself

    If, years in the future, information architects are successful, machines will make it very easy to find things. All the rules will be established, most challenges will be conquered. All that will remain for us to address is serendipity, arranging things to encourage chance and new connections only the reader’s imagination can form.