Archive for March 2007

09 Mar 2007 0928H

Weekly roundup of UX postings

From UXMatters, Mike Hughes writes about Instructional Text in the User Interface. UXMatters can be a little uneven, I’ve found, but this is a pretty good article, especially since we’re building increasingly complex web apps. It’s time to bring back the instructional help in context!
At UIGarden.net, Kathy Sierra takes a stab at trying to [...]

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07 Mar 2007 2257H

How not to design a form

Some people look askance when I say user experience people don’t just design the way people interact with websites, but all kinds of information, services, pretty much anything where people have to try and accomplish something. Don’t believe me? Fine. FINE. I’ll show you.
Close readers of my blog know I am going on my fourth [...]

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07 Mar 2007 0708H

The biggest challenge in user experience work

in my humble opinion, is overcoming the resistance of corporate stakeholders who don’t read or otherwise ignore our recommendations and unilaterally proclaim their own, often at the final approval moment when all is laid before them.
I do find that they tend to respond to evidence, to data, and to benchmarking, but because they tend [...]

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06 Mar 2007 0718H

Starbucks: the more managed the experience becomes. . .

. . . the less authentic it feels. In its mad dash to the top, Starbucks has lost its way, according to its chairman. He feels it has become commoditized. Undifferentiated. Soulless. (I know. He finally noticed?) He blames bagged coffee, automated espresso machines, profit expectations that come from being publicly traded. But at one [...]

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04 Mar 2007 1116H

Exploring Wilshire Blvd

By way of my friend Kevin, I’ve been reminded of this site, Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd., designed for the LA Conservancy by Hello Design, which, if memory serves me correctly, rose out of the ashes of one of the first superstar web shops called cow., in Santa Monica.

Going even further back, back in [...]

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04 Mar 2007 0003H

Usability testing by other means: ethnography and kaizen in lean manufacturing

This article from the Total Experience blog goes into how a researcher videotaped manufacturing workers on the factory floor to look for process improvements, which is kind of like watching a usability test but without giving the participants directions (since they have their own already). What is really useful about this is that the workers [...]

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03 Mar 2007 0859H

Gender and ethnic diversity in UX, Death of Information Architecture, and . . .Toronto

Pretty good discussion being brought up on Victor Lombardi’s Noise Between Stations, Zeldman, Anil Dash, Josh Porter’s Bokardo, Kottke, Disambiguity, about the relative dearth of diversity in our workplace but given the country’s climate towards race, ethnicity, immigration, gender, sexuality, class, faith — all the social stratification mechanisms — and most people’s tendency to dismiss [...]

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02 Mar 2007 1741H

The face of the $100 laptop

Got this off Experientia, another one of the few blogs I read that has anything worth reading about UX. So you all remember Negroponte’s famous $100 laptop they’re designing and building over at MIT? Gotta have a user interface somewhere right? It’s called Sugar and it scraps the Desktop metaphor. Instead, the user is the [...]

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02 Mar 2007 1656H

Everyone repeat after Aza Raskin

“As long as THE works, it doesn’t matter for the user. For the user, the interface is the product.”
Hear, hear. It’s always the french horn player that winds up saying the most profound things. Helps to have had Jef Raskin as your dad, a little, but the guy stands on his own two feet.

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01 Mar 2007 0440H

Usability madness

There’s apparently 7 more weeks of election madness, so this thing isn’t done yet, but there’s lots to talk about lately, so I’m just going to go for it.
This week is usability madness. When I was going through usability tests this week, it occurred to me that you could apply Bayes’ theorem to the [...]

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