Re: [IxDA Discuss] Designing a long list of items that people mustchoose from.
Actually we did an a/b test with an auto-complete feature, with disastrous results. Personally I think the lack of an agreed upon vocabulary killed it. While you know what your high school is called, there might be 25 ways to name your job. Thanks for the ideas. Let me know if you have any others. Paul On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 4:31 AM, Bryan Minihan bjmini...@nc.rr.com wrote: Go to berecruited.com and register as a high school athlete. While doing so, you'll be asked to select your high school from a list of 25,000 of them. You'll notice, though, that you have to type its name, and once done, your dropdown list narrows to show schools in your state, then just those in your area. -- 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] List ordering: alphabetical vs. logical?
To add to what Elizabeth said. Alphabetical order only makes sense where there is a well understood common vocabulary in your list (as with states.) If the items lack a well-understood and expected set of labels, alphabetical order is just as random as ordering them by length. Paul Trumble On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 12:27 PM, Elizabeth Buie eb...@luminanze.com wrote: Dmitry asks: Does anyone know of any studies, tests, or standards of practice that discuss when to organize a list of items in alphabetical order vs. another designed order (such as one based on expected frequency of use)? Alphabetical ordering is, under most circumstances, appropriate when there is no logical order based on similarity or relatedness. It is a logical order for something like countries or states in e-commerce, although even there I can imagine situations in which you'd want to group states or countries by region first and then order them alphabetically within the group. Frequency of use is not a logical order, either. A logical order would be one where the information structure is based on how people think about the task and related items are grouped together. For example, Save and Save As are nowhere near each other in frequency of use, but they are grouped together in most File menus (and rightly so!) because they are very closely related. Elizabeth -- Elizabeth Buie Luminanze Consulting, LLC tel +1.301.943.4168 (US) tel +39.347.394.7022 (Italia) fax +1.301.949.9694 (US only) www.luminanze.com 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 -- dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit - Cicero http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ http://www.twitter.com/trumbling 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] Good digital voice recorders?
I've got a Sony ICD-P520. I use it to record interviews and it works great. It was easy to figure out how to record with and the batteries seem to last a long time. I've also used some freeware to record on my laptop. Paul Trumble On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 7:46 PM, Jenn Anderson [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Hi all: I'm planning some in-person interviews and am looking for a reliable digital voice recorder. Any advice on models and why you like it is greatly appreciated! Thanks. 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 -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] feng-gui
Has anyone taken a serious look at this tool? http://www.feng-gui.com/ It uses artificial intelligence to create heat maps that are supposed to replicate what one would see with eye tracking. Some of the developers in my shop have gotten a hold of it. I have yet to see a heat map that makes sense. The first ones they did attributed the greatest area of interest to white space. For my own amusement I created a heat map for a dilbert cartoon and most of the attention was attributed to the masthead and one characters head (out of 6 panels.) Clearly the AI doesn't understand context. I was wondering exactly in what instances you thought it might be useful, if at all. Paul Trumble UX Lead -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] Masters Programs in the DC Area
No personal experience with it, but if cognitive science is what you are after, George Mason has a very good masters program. I've had people on my team who went there. I think the focus tends to be more on transportation and military applications than the web, but the principles apply just as well. Good usability labs, good eye tracking equipment. Not design of course, just principles. Paul Trumble -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] Confirm password field - Superfluous?
Steven, We had a form like that for several years where we only asked for the password once. For a username we required an email address. I had it changed to include a second box for confirmation, but the reason had nothing to do with typing it incorrectly. I observed multiple instances in usability tests where the participant interpreted it as asking for the password to their email account, which caused tremendous abandonment of the process. We had always associated abandonment at this point to be due to the email requirement, but a substantial portion was because of the password. So we added a second password field which we think clarifies that we would like them to create a password in relation to our site, and the data backs that up. I don't know if you will find the same issue with a user-created username, but since most people have usernames on multiple sites that might be the case. I'm not a big fan of being a trailblazer, particularly when it's something like a registration where the user will have very little experience with your site. The more you can use their experiences on other sites to give context to yours, the better off you are. Paul Trumble -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] Validity of Hit Counts
They probably do include spiders. I have a domain they host as well, but I've never looked at their analytics tools. You should look into google analytics, www.google.com/analytics. It's a free page tag based analytics tool that will give you much richer data than the log analyzers from godaddy. Paul Trumble On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 8:53 AM, Piotrowski, Charles [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One of the organizations I volunteer for get hit counts from Go Daddy for its website (www.rutlandhistory.com http://www.rutlandhistory.com/ ). We are getting about 20,000 hits a month. How many of these hits can I believe to be searchers, rather than spiders, etc? Is there any way to tell? -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.trumbling.com/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] iPhones on Campus
Not a manual typewriter, but an electric portable Smith Corona. Then again, I seem to recall I usually wrote them out longhand. Paul On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Kim Bieler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Oooh, geezer thread! I remember what a pain it was to type my term papers on a manual typewriter with two fingers and no correction ribbon. Footnotes, anyone? -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ 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] Aerial vs Verdana?
On Jan 15, 2008 11:10 AM, Christian Crumlish [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the subject of this thread is driving me crazy! It's Verdana, not Vernada! At the risk of sounding both ethnocentric and old... Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Whatz dis thing called Font Vernada? It was driving me nuts as well. Paul Trumble -- The truth is more important than the facts - Frank Lloyd Wright http://www.flickr.com/photos/paultrumble/ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ 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] The death of web usability testing as we know it?
Multivariate and A/B test tools have been around and available for almost as long as the web has been around. I've had metrics vendors tell me that Amazon runs as many as 8 different versions of their checkout system for the purpose of testing. And yet we still do usability tests. I do plenty of both in my team. They each have their place and I find them quite complementary. Split tests can be more expensive then they seem at first, and more often than not don't produce a clear winner. Analytics tools of all types are very good at telling you what happens but not so good at telling you why it happens. And they can't tell you what will happen at all. Paul Trumble *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ 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
