User Experience

18 Nov 2008 1350H

Stop reading, start doing

People ask what a good reading list is for our interdiscipline. But I like to be the contrarian. I say stop reading. Take an interaction. It can be any interaction but preferably human-machine interface. Take it apart. Figure out what is the desired path. Figure out where things can or do go wrong. Put it [...]

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12 Nov 2008 0918H

Lumping & splitting among information architects, user experience people, and interactionists

Of all the lousy times to be looking for a new gig, there’s a recession and a marriage banquet and an election and all these things with starting a new life. But I really can’t complain because at least the interviews keep coming, so that signals to me that the market is still fairly strong. [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1507H

Progressive disclosure redux

The other day I came across the improper and proper use of progressive disclosure. For those not in the know, progressive disclosure (PD) is a technique we use in interface design, partly to mitigate information overload, to signal that a secondary action is possible, and if selected, information will be solicited from the user. So [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1447H

Are carousels abused?

Probably. We talk about carousels but no one properly seems to know what are the appropriate contexts around when to use them. For those not in the know, carousels are a kind of web user interface widget that essentially displays a subset of a larger set of information in a loop, and typically not only [...]

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21 Oct 2008 1419H

Isn’t that . . . marketing’s function?!

Was reading a white paper from HFI the other day. Said they wanted to move beyond usability, which as I’ve noted in previous posts, as we typically experience it, is more normative than it is positive. In essence they described what Grokdotcom might call Persuasion Architecture, but which they are calling, Persuasion, Emotion and Trust. [...]

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18 Sep 2008 1058H

Random recent thoughts

Should we call the kinds of usability testing most of us have been exposed to as preference elicitation instead? Should we not recruit passionate users, who tend disproportionately also to be expert users, and therefore, are unrepresentative of typical users of a site? Should we start to disaggregate the different kinds of work we now [...]

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18 Sep 2008 1005H

Vast oversimplification probably, but

If you invest in solid user experience, interaction design, and usability as central to your corporate values, then you don’t have to spend millions on an expensive media campaign, nor do you have to hire all these “gurus” to help people out: Besides the TV ads, Microsoft is adding content to windows.com, creating a related [...]

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08 Sep 2008 0706H

Just because it works in a u-test. . .

doesn’t necessarily mean that the user will be incented (incentivized?) to take an action. In other words, beyond the role that user experience plays in making things findable and easy to use — for those of us who work in e-commerce, anyway — there is this other role we play in promotion of features. For [...]

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01 Sep 2008 1330H

New Google browser?

The latest ploy by Google to own a piece of your desktop is your browser? That’s what this comic shows. Google Chrome, coming soon. But if you were to create your own browser experience, what would it be like?

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26 Aug 2008 0917H

Design for Democracy

Thanks to Ryan for pointing out this opinion piece on the Design for Democracy project. You can also see the interactive piece that shows how it would work. As user experience professionals, and as UPA members, we feel of course that the information design and interaction design are inseparable parts of the entire voting user [...]

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