This is an ancient insight that I feel summarizes the nature of
design...
http://www.taoteching.org/chapters/11.htm
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=38230
Patterns can help with consistency, and design heuristics, tenets,
guidelines, walk throughs and critiques can all help in improving a
design; but I don't see anyway to truly evaluate quality of
interactions without actual testing.
I suggest setting measurable design goals at the start of a
Regarding your question about remote testing - I've done a great deal
of remote testing and have had excellent results. I've even run
pseudo-paper prototypes remotely using PhotoShop layers to handle the
paper switching. PowerPoint can be useful for that as well
As for software to use, I've had
For long lists without an obvious logical arrangement alphabetical
order allows one to take advantage of Hick's law
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hick's_law), but if the list is
relatively short and there is a logical order to the items then
alphabetizing is probably not the way to go.
In most
Nehal,
Experience is the totality of ones perception, but I think what you
are getting at is how to differentiate a positive experience from a
negative one.
I believe the key is expectation. If an experience meets or exceeds
ones expectations of that experience it's perceived as positive, if
Yes Andy, play is a particularly interesting form of interaction since
discovering the rules and possibilities of the game is often a major
component of the experience.
Unlike game designers who selectively and deliberately obfuscate some
interactions, application website designers usually want
I've worked on several browser based enterprise applications, and I
have seen reluctance from users in trying interaction they see as not
being something done in a browser (i.e. on a website). This includes
right-click as well as interactions like drag drop and window
selection. Even when
Can anyone tell me the difference between these three titles:
Interaction Designer, User Experience Designer, User Interface
Designer?
Yes, a Designer can... but not anyone else. :-)
Seriously though, designers tend to like to ruminate over what to
call things, and nothing more than the name for
Ambrose,
The specific questions...
What are your thoughts on right-click actions in web applications?
What about specifically for enterprise applications? Should there
even be a difference?
Hence the focus on right-click in web apps in this discussion. But
alternate approaches to exposing
There are countless icon providers to choose from.
Just have your friend search on icon in Google and plenty will
come up.
Examples
http://www.iconarchive.com/
http://www.freeiconsweb.com/
http://www.iconexperience.com/
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Posted
It sounds like a serious development process problem. There are many
good books on the subject of integrating design into the development
process by folks like Cooper, Mayhew, Constantine Lockwood, Garrett
and others; but they all make a similar recommendation that is key:
start with a small
There is a quote attributed to Yogi Berra that I find relevant to
discussion of the role of process in design,
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In
practice there is.
To me process is like an Airline Pilot's preflight checklist and
training.
Does the preflight check
Many of the great architects industrial designers are known to the
general public. To name a few (in no particular order): Walter
Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Antoni GaudÃ, Frank Gehry, Raymond
Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss, Charles and Ray Eames...
Who do we feel are the greats of IxD?
And to
Lot's of wonderful discussion!
To the IxDA's mission points of Evangelism and Education, should we
work to create a Hall of Fame site touting the accomplishments of
innovators in computer interaction design?
We can learn from our history, and demonstrating the progressive
advancement of the
Liz,
The timeline concept sounds like a great one.
It strikes me that people (teams individuals), projects, products
and publications all work in concert to show the evolution of
interaction design. A timeline could be an effective way to tie all
those items together and enhance understanding
Andrei,
I agree that the artifacts are as important to acknowledge as the
individuals who created them. I like the timeline approach for that
reason. It's a way to aggregate the artifacts; such as applications,
components, and publications - and the people that created them in a
format that
I suggest asking some target users what name they would use.
You should also look at similar naming conventions in leading
development tools - Dev. Studio, Eclipse, etc.
I don't know the exact nature of the tool you are designing, but
terminology in the development community is fairly well
Have you read Bill Buxton's views on the role of design in executive
leadership? (found in his book Sketching User Experiences) If not
I'd recommend it. It makes points very closely related to those in
your article.
Both designers and executive teams need to take action that will
bring about
A spreadsheet analogy usually works well. A single dimension array is
like 1 row in a spreadsheet. The array name is the row label (ex.
A) and the column numbers let you cycle through values - A1, A2,
A3...
Most people will get that since spreadsheets are so common. And you
can build from there
I think the move is to more 'just in time' UI.
Look at tabs, more popular than ever. All the cool browsers are using
them now. :) They only show what pages you have active at any given
time.
The entire Office 2007 UI is built around task based, just in time
UI; contextual Ribbon tabs, for
IMO, the vast majority of social networking communication is
background noise. But to go from that to, ...since online
interaction lacks the human elements of empathetic facial responses,
body language, and touch, will social networking media be relegated
to only the more frivolous types of
I've been working on using desired user responses as a way to
communicate design intent. These responses are potentially measurable
goals, but more importantly they are effective at getting
non-designers to understand the core objectives of a project.
It's important to be able to measure design
If you're so averse to icons then just use text. The use of single
characters like !, Q, $, and C seems risky. ! generally denotes a
warning or error - Q to me reads as question or query - $ is
money (USD that is) - C... speed of light. :)
My point is, single characters tend to already be imbued
I've found personas to be a very effective tool. That said, I've
seen them done incorrectly and fail more often than not: They are too
verbose, they are not realistic (no grounding in user research), there
are too many of them for a project, they change radically from release
to release, they are
Joshua Porter's post most clearly captures the value of using both,
The reason why icons text works best is because that combination
provides the most information...which by sheer probability makes it
more likely that a user will recognize them when they need to.
I would add that icon text
To Jared's point,
Keep in mind that there's a lot more work to make a high-quality
icon than to make high-quality labels.
I certainly agree that is most often the case, but there cases where
it's easier to convey a concept symbolically. One specific personal
experience...
I worked on an
Overall I find the discussions on IxDA to be quite thoughtful;
covering a great width and depth of design issues.
That said, I 100% agree that the what do we call ourselves?
conversation rears its ugly head far too often on every discussion
board and at every conference related to design. It's
I'm a avid musician - I've been making music longer than I've been
designing. For me there are many parallels between music and design.
Most of my musical 'career' has been dedicated to writing and
performing original material. I find the act of composition, or of
arranging someone else's material
I've personally found personas to be very effective design tools, and
have frankly been surprised to hear so many negative opinions about
personas from designers on forums like these, at conferences, and in
my work over the last couple of years.
It's fantastic to see some research that not only
Jamie's point is important, each branch has a different rank
structure (I'm presuming we're talking US military).
You can find this sort of info online - Wikipedia for example... for
the US Marines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps#Rank_structure
You could either have
The City Bikes of Copenhagen have been around for quite a few years,
and are very heavily used by locals and tourists. They use airless
tires, so there is no chance of a flat. Here is an example of a
company that makes those - www.airfreetires.com
That would solve one of your problems.
. . . .
This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but I have a very
brief overview I put together on a presentation about Information
Foraging Theory (IFT) given by Peter Pirolli at CHI 2007. It's
available on my website at -
http://www.mylesdesignstudios.com/IFT_CHI2007.ppt
It's not specifically
I'm surprised someone with a MS in HCI is not considered qualified
for an IxD role. What do they see as your skill deficiencies? Is it
primarily an experience issue (too senior a post), or do they feel
you are lacking some specific training?
As far as I'm concerned, some reasonable level of
I'd be strongly inclined to use their over his/her. It's become a
fairly accepted approach (though some certainly object to it).
Here is a related Wikipedia entry on the singular they -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
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One may say that the use of the singular they is not universally
accepted, but to state that it's blatantly incorrect ignores the
flexibility and ever changing nature of the English language. It's
more commonly accepted by speakers of British English - who
incidentally adopted the title prefix Ms
This reminds me of a talk I saw by Bill Buxton recently. He asked
attendees to sketch a PDA in 15 seconds, then do the same for its UI,
and lastly for it's interaction design. In the last case he said
something to the effect, If there isn't some part of a person in
the sketch of the interaction,
How about the ethics of temporarily blinding users that don't use a
products as intended?
Read this story:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/pepperspray/
Now that's what I call influencing behavior through design.
What's next, the tazer equipped vending machine? You better have
exact
What is aesthetics, and what is it's role in design?... A simple
question?... Really?
OK, a simple answer then.
Aesthetics: The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and
expression of beauty. (American Heritage Dictionary)
As for it's importance in interaction design, one could safely
http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=44186
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44234
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association
Excellent analogy.
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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=44227
Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)!
To post to this list
Being a corporate video site I'd presume the requirements are
considerably different than a public one.
What sort of quantity of videos are you considering? Certainly not
YouTude scale, I would think.
Will they fall into clear categories? Training, Corporate Messaging,
Company Meetings, User
As others have said, it's difficult to make a specific recommendation
without more details.
That said, X3D may be worth looking at. I'm not very familiar with
it, but I did use VRML a bit many years back, which preceded X3D, and
I found it useful for some things. Depending on the graphics you are
What you're trying to chart is a switch statement.
It can be done with multiple decision nodes. Here is an example...
http://www.gailer-net.de/tutorials/java/Notes/chap43/ch43_8.html
And there is more info here on charting different decision
statements...
Jennifer,
I think you're 100% correct in suggesting an alternative to the
proposed design.
Speaking just as a user of the web, rather than a IxD practitioner, I
can tell you that would tick me off!
When I've had that sort of thing happen to me I will almost always
just say, forget it, and not
I can't distinguish link text from static text unless I painstakingly
mouse over the whole page. What were they thinking!?
- Make out website look like a news paper, because we're a news
paper company.
- News papers don't have hyperlinks.
- Don't show hyperlinks on our website.
I think someone
The table interaction in MS Word is,
- Tab to the next cell in a row
- In the last (right most) cell of a row, tab wraps down.
- If no row on wrap, create a new one.
- Enter puts a line break in the current cell contents.
MS Excel goes down a row on Enter.
Applications like Work have the need to
That is a good point Oleh. I've used that approach before in a query
editor UI, and have seen it often before - there is always a blank
row to go to at the bottom of the list. As soon as any focus is given
to that last row, a new one comes in below it. If one were to close
out of the interface at
I just came across this example the other day tracking an order (so it
sticks in my mind)...
https://www.zzounds.com/ordertrack/
It has some obvious issues: the inputs aren't horizontally aligned,
and the OR text is barely readable in yellow. So I wouldn't call
it a good example. I probably
Rather than making up personas that you may validate later, I think
you'd do better to use User Roles - from the Usage Centered Design
approach by Constantine Lockwood.
There is an in depth pdf on the subject here:
http://www.foruse.com/articles/rolespersonas.pdf
Good luck!
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