Re: [IxDA Discuss] Zuckerberg doesn\'t care about users.
A cardinal rule in research is to give much more weight to what users *do*, as opposed to listening to what they *say*. While I wouldn't recommend completely ignoring user comments, if you're planning on designing something new, or reaching out to a broader or different audience than your current users, you will clearly not be basing your design on what current users say. bests, Alex -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] A long page with scroll v/s Tabbed Page?
Tabbed vs long is not the question - you can have short pages that are highly navigable without tab. So here's what I've seen: - Page length depends on the content. Many users prefer things close to above the fold, but nearly as many like to scroll, which is why major news sites and other informational sites (such as the NYT) offer multiple page and single page views in addition to print. In sites where there are multiple page and print options only, the proportion of printing views on single-vs-multi-page stories shows that print is frequently used to view one-page versions of pieces. - Short pages are excellent when you have a user actively interacting - games, forms, etc. - Long can be useful if your audience is band-width challenged as well. Short pages and tabs can result in long waits for page loads peppered throughout a story, which is frustrating and can lose users - Some audiences actively prefer one-page presentation of content. For example, working at a high-tech manufacturer, we learned that our 80%+ engineering audience vastly preferred a simple page with a scroll to multiple pages, however they were arranged. - Don't forget to think about width! Those users happily scrolling with mice can be frustrated by a page that insists on taking up all or exceeding their monitor's width. The important thing is to have good navigational scent above the fold if you're going to have significant content beneath it, so users know there is useful content below. bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Surface-like interface: without using flash
From my perspective: - This particular site's navigation is not useful for retail, education, or any of a number of things - and luckily its purpose is none of those. It's a display of skill and creativity by a recent graduate who's apparently highly versed in front-end coding. Her strengths are design and development, not IA or UX or interaction design. This may change in her future, but I don't think she should be blamed for having fun with her personal site. - Depending on the site and the company, I've seen Java, Javascript, flash, and various combinations thereof used to design navigation. CSS is a great alternative to all of the above for attractive, dynamic menus, and it's *searchable*. Showing me you can make CSS do more than is normally required is a good thing for a portfolio site. Personally I loved the feeling of being panned over a large, visually appealing interactive poster. I'd hire her for front-end coding and graphic design in a heartbeat if I could, and train her in information science. If she could be turned, she could be a powerful ally for interaction design ;-) bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Is social networking doomed to frivolity?
Great topic. It's unsettling to hear people like Valdis Krebs predict the ultimate failure of Facebook, as not sufficiently replicating the IRL social experience, when an online social network is your bread and butter (I work for a top-5 social network). Btw, if you don't know him, Krebs is an excellent source for understanding social networking, online and off. http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/ From what I can tell, the usefulness of an online social network is all about context and control. So, here are some examples (no, I don't work for any of them!). - LinkedIn is designed around the clear-cut context of professional networking, and allows you control of your content, whom you accept in your network, etc. Anything that can get someone a job *and* help them develop within it is clearly useful and will probably be around for a while. Sites using social media to address very specific topics are also useful. For example, some medical self-help awareness siteshave been well established since the '90s. - Facebook allows some control, but is a bit challenged re: context. They seem to want to do everything. I was pulled into Facebook by colleagues at my previous job who were communicating about work accomplishments via status updates; old friends have found me on it and I now follow their updates; and my new employer likewise has team members on it, who sometimes share about private things I should not know about in the workplace. This, combined with the strong meme and gaming element that further confuses the context, make it harder and harder to know what is appropriate to share in my feed, and to track who's going to see it. Yes, I know Facebook has Friend Lists, and they are using the Friends, Family, Coworkers, and Public Profiles distinctions in the new pages - but what about coworkers from different companies? Friends who can't stand each other? Acquaintances I met through Facebook political groups who are friends alongside people I've known 25 years? The level of effort to differentiate between these is one of the primary challenges Facebook must address. Perhaps the subscription model will help. MySpace seems to be crumbling (3 top execs left this week), and I think much of it's failure was due to the lack of focus (alongside a challenged corporate environment and overly difficult business approach). - LiveJournal has extremely easy privacy settings and customized friends groups. The ability to control who sees what is stable and easy, which means I'm able to read public blogs from professionals writing about their field of expertise, chatty personal posts, and occasionally the deeply private joys and woes of close friends whose friendship I developed online. A couple of these have turned into IRL friendships. There's also an extraordinary level of loyalty to the site among many members. The challenge is to be not only well-designed, but focused - and if you're not inherently focused, make it easy for the users to sharpen focus on their own. IRL we can easily slip into the different kinds of communication we use with everyone we know - online, this can be much more difficult. So that's my 2 cents. Enjoy! bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Visual Importance of Page Titles
I think you can, and should, have both. The page title can be obvious and clear to the user, while there can also be a clear call to action (your marketing splash). Your title is not only the description of the page's content, it's part of the navigational scent of the site, and as such is can't be left out. This in no way stops you from having a clear center to the page's content. In fact, having a primary focus to your content is better than scattering the focus. If marketing wants to leave the title off completely, that's a problem not only in usability but in SEO. There's a reason the H1 tags are important to search engines - they're important to users! And as search engines overcome the Heisenbergian issue of depth of analysis vs breadth of pages, things like semantically sound page construction will become even more important. bests, Alex P.S. As an aside, I would recommend trying to eliminate either-or questions in design. Frequently there are many choices, not just two, and in the few cases where their truly are only two options, the attempt to find more will be the exception that proves the rule. :-) The tyranny of dichotomy limits much more than it resolves. -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] A business case for switching Mac
Our creative team likewise live in a Mac world, in a company dominated by PCs. The IAs have VMware to switch back forth and use Visio. Comparing VMware to Parallels, one of our top IAs reports preferring Parallels because it feels more like you're running a Windows app in an OS X environment, so the switch is less jarring. Personally, I move back and forth between separate Windows Mac environments, and prefer Mac for most things, but I don't think an either-or world is necessary. And a few years ago when I did network administration in a Mac + Windows + Unix environment, I did find Macs much easier to network and support than Windows. bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Patrick wrote: I recently worked for a company that was totally committed to the PC world, and the ENTIRE UX team were Macheads. Personally, I live in both worlds, and I don't see as much of a difference between Visio and Omnigraffle, and actually have work for clients stored in both formats (I run Parallels). I prefer to do work on the Mac, but it's not as much as a dealbreaker for me to work in Visio. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] IxD Greats?
Two names that have greatly influenced my interaction work: Jakob Nielsen Edward Tufte. They focus on very specific aspects of it (usability and visual information presentation), and I don't always agree with everything they advocate -- but what I have learned from them has greatly shaped my work. Other possibilities: Jony Ive (the iPhone design may match Coke bottles, if not Falling Water ;-), Peter Morville, and Jesse James Garrett. I do agree that the field needs to mature before people make these calls. bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] IxD Greats?
Good question. I thought of influence before design, my mistake. I can't think of anything. Reading Dan's list, I'm infinitely embarrassed to have forgotten Miyamoto, whose work I've loved for lo these many years ;-) -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Robert Hoekman Jr rob...@rhjr.net wrote: Other possibilities: Jony Ive (the iPhone design may match Coke bottles, if not Falling Water ;-), Peter Morville, and Jesse James Garrett. Name something that JJG and Morville designed that makes them IxD greats. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Terms Every IxD Should Know
Good start :-) Here are a few additional possibilities, depending somewhat on the scope of your effort: Scrum narrative user story UX/user experience Attribute Value Facet Taxonomy Surface Skeleton Heat mapping (as opposed to eye-tracking) Fly-out menu Func spec bests, Alex -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Dan Saffer d...@odannyboy.com wrote: At I09, there were a lot of calls for a vocabulary we can all understand, no matter what medium we're working in. As part of my crowdsource the book effort, I'd like to include these terms in the second edition of Designing for Interaction I'm currently working on. Here's the list I have. What else should be on here? Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
[IxDA Discuss] Terms Every IxD Should Know
In response to: *I'm not exactly sure what you mean by:* * On Feb 15, 2009, at 5:55 PM, Alexandra O'Neal wrote:* * Scrum* * Attribute* * Value* * Facet* * Surface* * Skeleton* - Scrum is a flavor of Agile. - Attributes, values, and facets are forms of metadata in taxonomy discussions - Surface and skeleton are convenient ways of discussing an interface its underlying parts. These were applied by JJ Garrett in his Elements of UX, although he placed them in a larger context of five stages of UX development. I liked someone's idea of a permanent wiki for this effort. bests, Alex -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Tag clouds (and tagging)
Speaking as someone who's worked with online taxonomies since 1991, and been trained in systematics since the eighties, I'd like to point out that there cannot be a debate between taxonomy and folksonomy. One is a specific version of the other. The debate is between pre-determined taxonomies and community-determined taxonomies, which are called folksonomies. And both can be used to enhance each other powerfully. bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Usability Tools and Products
That said, eye-tracking gear is so way more expensive than it's worth, so even if you use the results properly, you're spending way more money than you should on usability tests and analysis. I'm so glad you said that. I made that argument to our usability research group recently, arguing there were a lot more ways we could improve method and analysis that didn't require the same financial outlay. I think they were disappointed, because mental rigor is so much less cool than an on-site eye tracking lab ;-) bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Would you test my designs?
what I found odd was that you were asking for advice and asking people to pre-qualify with the survey - not that you were asking for help, but that you wanted to check people out prior to accepting their help. When I am conducting design research, one of the things I want is a profile of the audience I'm researching. I don't know what was in Jeff's mind when he wrote the survey, but my initial interpretation was that he simply wanted to know what he was dealing with, and wanted to be able to evaluate responses according to level of expertise. On a forum like this, which is open to anyone, there are probable broad variations in training and experience, so I was not offended by the questions. I think Jeff probably already has access to a low-experience group for evaluation. What he's looking for is a high level of expertise. The only way to find out with our group, apart from deploying an army of private detectives, is to ask. bests to all, Alex Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] URL Guidelines
Some notes: - Eye-tracking research shows users spend nearly 25% of their time in search results looking at the URLs, so it's clearly part of their decision-making process, not just helpful for search engines. Jakob Nielsen posted this research in 2007; my guess is this number would not go down and might even go up, as users become more savvy. - Most SEO and usability people agree that hyphens are preferred to underscores. A few believe neither should be used. - Consistency is certainly helpful if you expect to have returning visitors - once they learn your site rules, they'll be better able to remember/guess pages, or recognize them in search results - If there are already underscores in URLs, the htaccess file can be edited to convert these to hyphens. bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] What to do in an environment run by engineers??
Ali, I sympathize. What Jay recommends is excellent advice for grappling with any overly strong and unreflective group, but there are more specific approaches that work best with engineers and similar personality types. Occasionally there are even advantages in having such a group. There are two issues with engineer-driven environments. - *Persuasion.* Building relationships and a business case is helpful. Focus on using data that appeals to the scientific part of their brains. Their logic and vanity will both appreciate that. I find any relevant neuroscience data very helpful, as well as analysis that incorporates different user types, including their type. So, have a smart engineer persona and what works for them (probably what they're recommending), and then explain the other types and needs, and how your approach meets them all. - *Development style. * More and more engineering-driven places are using Agile and Agile-esque approaches such as Scrum for development. This can make it challenging to meet big-picture needs such as UX IA. It is indeed possible, however. First, establish public best practices and what works tips, and where possible train all teams in the basics. Second, establish UX as part of an integration team, and let them track all the separate project streams in one place, to see overlap and conflict. Lastly - and this isn't necessary, it just helps me personally - remember that Agile Scrum are basically the creative process writ large, applied to technical development. The very act of working this way makes engineers and developers more accessible to alternative approaches - and makes the design people more immediately aware of dev needs, too. I said it could help at times, too. I worked at Texas Instruments for a while, and it's a very engineer-driven environment. However, the audience was just over 80% engineer as well. So we could turn to our own engineers as well as user engineers for research and testing, and happily design primarily *to* engineers, which is a rare joy in UX. The focus is clear and there's very little confusion as to what works and what doesn't, although there are a few differences with the rest of the world. (For example, for something like training informaiton, engineers prefer one long page that's well-anchored internally, rather than multiple pages to keep most content above the fold.) So, those are my comments on dealing with the engineering mind set. Hope they're useful to you! bests, Alex O'Neal ux manager/social network analyst -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Whats in a name, my fellow Usability Experience Specialists?
Jon wrote: in many practices the IA is now responsible for much more than taxonomies and functional wireframes. We see more cross discipline design work. Interestingly, when I was initially an IA it was more cross-functional, at least in the web world, and then became more specialized into front end work. Where I practiced it over a decade ago, IA encompassed the data architecture and database support from the back end, through the structure and information flow, into wire frames, etc. Taxonomy went throughout this, first through research, then through front end requirements and back end buckets to meet those. Personally, my experience has been that the UX title heralds a return to the generalist. There were webmasters who did it all, and then things began to become more specialized. But the integrating role of the big picture person was lost. Like a jack of all trades, master of some, the XA or UX specialist pulls together multiple fields of expertise (mine are cognitive psychology, information science, seo, usability, and graphic design). They design information from the inside out, so the data is most usable, findable, attractive, and valuable to the user. The goal is to see the forest for the trees. I don't blog often about my work, but I blogged about this, in case anyone's interested: http://alexfiles.com/blog/?p=100 bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] 3D Navigation
Here's one: http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=68 I am likewise leery of this kind of navigation unless it's extremely well done. The web is 3D enough in its very nature -- there's no need to pull that out visually (at least, not any more than usual) unless it's compellingly relevant to the content and audience. bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. You wrote: I'm looking for examples of 3D navigation where a user can move free form within visual objects or data Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Neat use of Tufte's sparklines: Airline pet incidents
Excellent! I'm always on the hunt for live examples of good information presentation. Thanks for sharing :-) I use sparklines for presentations on metrics-based recommendations, site SEO reporting, etc. The response has been very positive every time, and the biggest compliment of all -- others have begun to do the same :-) Alex -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:15 AM, Elise Edson elise.ed...@gmail.com wrote: Hi IxDAers... just thought I'd share this neat example of sparklines! I was looking for pet travel information across the various airlines, and I was surprised/delighted to see this: http://www.petflight.com/pet-incidents/airlines How have you integrated sparklines into your designs? Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] ThoughtPile.org
I'm with Michael. This may not fit the concept of universal design, but there are things to be learned from it. I found it readily intuitive. Perhaps it depends on the individual user's cognitive preference (spatial vs linguistic, etc.). Design innovation is like evolutional innovation. A broad variety of possible models and approaches appear. Some become broadly useful and disseminate across many geographies and contexts (cats, for example, exist as predators in a wide variety of ecologies); some end up filling very specific niches in limited ways (pandas and eucalyptus). Some fail altogether. Cultural and thought evolution occurs similarly. Memes (thought units, not viral games) that are useful spread through a society and become adapted to a broad variety of uses. When a designer chooses a format, that designer is buying into a particular thought mem re: design. The OLPC designers applied a systems psychology approach to their work, treating each child as a knowledge worker, and the resulting OS interface is very different from the pre-determined desktop metaphor to which we are used. See here: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/interface/index.shtml Thoughtpile is a promotional site, designed to provide fun, a sense of engagement and participation, and perhaps even social utility. Not the worst thought in the world, and a refreshing break from banner ad promos for office furniture. Take what you find useful to your purpose, and leave the rest :-) Alex O'Neal UX Manager/SN analysis -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Michael Dunn [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Really? Have you ever been here? http://www.thefwa.com/ Do you have any idea how high a demand there is for Actionscript programmers? Oh, and as to your point about the UX- If everybody did the same thing all the time instead of trying new methods to see if they might work, where does that leave innovation? I think some elements don't work, but there's enough interesting ideas here to warrant discussion. On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 2:23 PM, Kevin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bleh. I thought the days of completely Flash sites were a thing of the past. And the interaction with the site is poor -- the text fields don't look like text fields, the buttons don't look like buttons and the navigation just isn't intuitive. The site does have a nice visual design look to it, but aesthetic is only a fraction of good user experience design -- if people can't intuitively use a site, what good does how cool it looks do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36319 Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Michael Dunn FoolishStudios www.foolishstudios.com Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
[IxDA Discuss] UX requirements for IT consumption?
We're considering a major site redesign, going beyond interface to changing how things behave on the back end. Since good UX starts from the ground up, I'm spending a lot of time pulling taxonomy needs, describing scenarios, determining relationships between categories, etc. In the past when I did this I had a much more hands-on role in developing the database architecture, etc. Now I'm an independent contributor in a non-IT dept, and I'm being asked to develop the redesign requirements from which they will build. I'm not sure how much data to provide to (a) not do someone else's job for them - don't want to step on any toes! while (b) also assuring they have what they need to do the job. My thought is to provide use-case scenarios and the minimum taxonomic requirements, along with where those to map to existing categories, and let them figure out the specific tables, etc. Please note, this is *not* at the IA/UI stage yet. This is to assure that while the IA/UI work is done, any concurrent (or sooner!) development efforts from IT meet the eventual need. Has anyone else developed this kind of requirements documentation? What did you send? Thank, Alex O'Neal ux manager/knowledge engineer -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Creating a UI Spec Document Template
Re: unpleasant exchange. I'm dismayed at this turn on events in a professional forum. But perhaps it's a joke -- Will, are you being deliberately emotive for your own hedonic reasons? Are we just missing the punch line? bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Clients are funny
I have discovered that the fold has different levels of relevance according to the audience. For example, working for a tech company with an audience composed primarily of engineers, we discovered that so long as the information was easily navigable (anchored properly, etc.), users preferred a long page to multiple pages for tech specs, tutorials, case studies, etc. But a news site benefits from chunking pages and offering a print or single page option for the minority that desire a single page. Right now I work for a social network in which our user profiling shows several strong minorities of browser and resolution, so we can be flexible in design. So long as there is a clue that scrolling down leads to interesting information or apps for them, we're good :-) bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Brainstorming
I've provided creativity consultation and participated in or moderated quite a few brainstorm sessions since 1992. Here's what I've discovered: - Just as a good karaoke bar has a host, a moderator/facilitator helps tremendously in brainstorming by making it okay to speak up, offering questions that ideas might answer, and capturing ideas. - Set the rules out early, and make it clear that nothing is censored. Because you don't see how the idea will work with current infrastructure/whatever, does not mean someone else won't think of a workaround. Even if the idea is not used, it may provide a springboard for another idea. - Anyone can be present as long as they are not repressive of creativity. You should avoid having watchers who are obvious observers. If someone wants to come in and observe, fine, but they must also participate in some way, or they might have a repressive effect on the team members, which may feel as if they are being graded in some way. - Capture items live, but *not* as a bullet list on a white board. My favorite method is to work with a projector and have the moderator/facilitator capture everything on the fly in Visio's brainstorming template (or any application you find meets the need, Visio has simply been most convenient, most frequently in the workplace for me). This allows you to move items around, draw connections between disparate ideas, make notes regarding different concepts, etc. You immediately get away from the linear. Tracking in Visio worked in a phone/web meeting context once, too, gluing together departments in Toronto, Dallas, and Plano. Everyone could see and hear what was happening, and we were used to that kind of meeting. - Paper and whiteboard will work if they are large enough, and if you start off not writing a bulleted list. - If you already know what you're working with, a large table and a lot of index cards can be invaluable. For example, to brainstorm a flexible taxonomy that engineering, marketing, sales, and various product depts. could all agree on for a personalized site, I printed several sets of business cards that each had one of the possible values/attributes printed on it (plus a few blank ones). Then I got the business owners and SMEs into one room with a very big table. By the end of the afternoon we had the rough outline of an excellent faceted taxonomy. - I try to work with not more than a dozen, not less than five. Too few and people get shy; too many and people think they won't be heard. But with the right group of creative souls, these limits can be broken :-) - Someone within the dept. is fine if they know what they're doing -- otherwise turn to an outside facilitator. Sometimes both a facilitator and a scribe are useful - one person moderating, and another capturing data. All depends on what your options are. - I don't think brainstorming should be less than an hour or more than three. A couple of hours is usually enough to explain the situation, get things started. snowball ideas off of other ideas, and possibly prioritize/determine next steps. All day can result in burnout - unless you are working on a large project and chunk out the brainstorming sessions into targeted areas. Hope this is helpful! Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Why Google and SEO Sucks - Findability
Google argues that in the early days of search engines, there was a Heisenberg-like choice. (If you recall, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle observed that one the more precisely you observed a subatomic particle's momentum, the less precisely you knew its position -- and vice versa.) Similarly, search engines were limited by their servers to either analysing a large number of pages imprecisely, or a small number of pages accurately. You therefore see occasional glitches such as the one Will pointed out. Technology, though, is changing this. Last fall I sat in a two-day seminar with Google engineers and they claimed that this distinction was going to disappear -- that it will soon be possible to evaluate huge quantities of data to a very precise degree. So perhaps Will will get his wish :-) An aside - part of the improved analysis will very probably include stronger study of site semantics, taxonomy, XML sitemaps, etc., which will allow better understanding of content quality and perhaps even synonym-level analysis. While many of us watched the weight of semantics such as proper H tag use, metadata, etc. diminish in search engine ranking because of SEO abuses, I bet we see it increase again as they ramp up the precision factor. Well-designed content structure will be seen as more easily understood, and more easily presented. This also allows Google to present your site more clearly within their search engine. Google Texas Instruments or Nortel to see examples of sites whose structure and content are searchable from within Google's results page. bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager P.S. A good place to check a given page's semantics can be found here: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Testing persuasiveness
Hard to speak without knowing what the app is, but two things spring to mind. One requires some extra effort in setting up testing. First, look at the specific tools/techniques the app uses to engage users. Does it employ any specific elements, etc., to pull them into interacting? For example, many gaming techniques are useful in user engagement (chunking levels, abstracting complex things into simple interfaces or metaphors, awards, asthetic appeal). Itemize these to track during your testing (not telling the users, of course), and arrange them in different combinations to see what results in the most frequent activity - where is the mouse going, what gets the most attention? Second, the debriefing comments by Marijke R. are good. Additionally, try to take note of where a given user spends the most and least time. When you debrief the user, highlight those two things and ask what motiovated them about the highly active feature and what turned them off about the lowest active feature. bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Design of forms on web vs paper
Jared, I can see your point and agree with your approach, but I've worked with clients who seriously thought the web should copy the print experience. I've also worked with people who thought the information buckets behind the scenes needed to be identical to the interface; some people just get stuck in one taxonomy and have trouble breaking out of it. I suspect something of that nature is driving Jessica's question. In that case, she needs an answer that addresses the issue more directly, so the questioner feels respected. The proper response to such people is that the web is a three-dimensional space that only appears to be two-dimensional because it's on a flat screen; print is by definition two-dimensional. Years of usability testing have demonstrated that the same rules that apply to print do not apply across the board to the web. Attention spans online and in print vary considerably, and if you design for print (apart from the exceptions Paul mentioned earlier), you are seriously handicapping your site. Considering your audience and the best UX for their needs is definitely where you should start. bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
