Interaction Design

04 May 2008 2014H

Calendaring apps

It occurs to me that we spend far too little time actually tackling industry-standard problems in school and that is, of course, what we look for when we interview people: has the candidate actually done work that looks like a professional problem, with the inputs and limitations placed upon us by resources available?
If I were [...]

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24 Mar 2008 1211H

Google Map actions

Interestingly Google Maps supports double-clicking as default center and zoom. You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but, after all this is the web, where people single click everything. . . I wonder what other contexts there are for using double-clicks. . . .There is some support for multi-touch gestures on my Macbook: one can [...]

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20 Mar 2008 0541H

Monkey see, monkey do

A few weeks back I did an internal presentation on benchmarking. Isn’t benchmarking just shorthand for plagiarism? No. It shouldn’t be a kneejerk apeing of what someone else is doing just because they seem successful for it. In this article from Harvard Business School, the authors warn against the dangers of casual benchmarking. In the [...]

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18 Mar 2008 2024H

Users strongly prefer ‘View All’

They want to see everything. They don’t mind scrolling; they prefer to scroll than to see pagination. They want it all.

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18 Mar 2008 1945H

A season of usability!

Every season is usability season, we might protest. True, though frankly I can’t find a better way for a budding interactionist to get into the discipline than by providing usability services for open source software. Ellen Reitmayr is running the show: 9 students will get to participate on some very sexy high visibility projects. Check it out. 

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10 Mar 2008 2135H

Revisiting Tog’s First Principles of Interaction Design

The first principles are required reading, but should be fleshed out to make them living examples.
Just thought I’d throw this out here because a lot of folks are coming into IA/IxD work and they don’t really teach this stuff in library and info science or instructional design or whatever passes for undergrad or even graduate [...]

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06 Mar 2008 0906H

Reworking wireframes

Probably one of the most frustrating things about this type of work is the amount of rework that is required due to changing or poorly gathered business requirements, and in fact, sometimes the business side is actually using hard code and layouts as a kind of sandbox for their own ideas before rejecting or accepting [...]

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06 Mar 2008 0711H

The importance of convention

A coworker said yesterday, someday I’d like to write a book on Defying Convention. Well, the problem is that the book was written and it was the irrational exuberance of the dotcom era, Web 1.0, which for all of its innovation, was, I feel, ultimately a search for convention, a search for standards. People defy [...]

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25 Feb 2008 2257H

Just a reminder: buttons do things, links take you to pages

For instance, “add to cart,” probably one of the oldest and simplest examples, other than, “submit,” perhaps. Nielsen of course provides the rules: don’t use buttons for navigation; use links when users move between pages. It’s not a matter of popularity. It’s a matter of consistency of the design vernacular with convention. 

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18 Feb 2008 2122H

It’s ridiculous to think that

there’s a one size fits all e-commerce interaction model. It’d be like saying that user experience is the same discipline as marketing.
Of course, there are many pretenders out there.

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