Monday, January 22

experience
Look at LEO (a perfect translation tool btw): he provides you with about 67 meanings and context of the term "experience". Well, they have "combat experience", but they do¥t have user experience. I think it makes sense to think about a words meaning, history, ethymology and contextual usage when you want to build sth great like "user experience". Enlightening.
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Neil W. Van Dyke: MindShare
MindShare is a new way of sharing knowledge within an organization or community of interest. MindShare uses each person's personal information-organizing scheme as a basis for navigating and presenting new information, and it leverages each person's everyday Web information-finding and -organizing activities for the benefit of the whole.
It¥s a MIT thesis...has anybody mor Info about it?
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Saturday, January 20

MSDN Online User Interface Center
The Definition: "User experience and interface design in the context of creating software represents an approach that puts the user, rather than the system, at the center of the process.This philosophy, called user-centered design, incorporates user concerns and advocacy from the beginning of the design process and dictates the needs of the user should be foremost in any design decisions." Aren¥t we all designing with the users in mind? But here starts the game!
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AskTog: A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts So you think you are an interaction designer? Not if you cannot answer all the questions on Togg¥s Site quickly and with authority...
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Don't Make Me Think
The companion site shows Chapter 2 of this book: How we really use the Web . It starts with a children¥s riddle: Why are things always in the last place you look for them? Because you stop looking when you find them.
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the v-2 usability rants
Starting from the position that nothing helps clarify good UI design better than examining bad UI design, v2 is launching suspect device as a place to do just that - with the caveat that nobody involved has any professional background in industrial design, interface design, or anything of the sort. What we all are, quite simply, is people who use stuff.
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Friday, January 19

Knowledge?
Let¥s talk about a big challenge for lots of disciplines: ho do we face the big tsunami of information, as Richard S. Wurman would have said (he actually published Information anxiety 2)? How do we face the growing amount of both information and explicit and implicit knowledge? (btw: Sheila Corrall published an article asking if Knowledge Managment is a new phrase in place of 'information management', or a new concept all together) What are the roles of a designer in this game? I say roles because there are a couple of both emerging disciplines and discourses in that context: from the well known information architecture topic to the community experience designer.
Sitch to the actual link: thinking about knowledge that has to do with networking. David Skyrme Associates is a networked management consultancy specializing in advising senior executives and policy makers on how to create and implement successful knowledge-based strategies. Their mission is, as they state, " To create prosperity and sustainable futures through collaborative knowledge networking." Browse through their widespread content at their website (you will be triggered to buy stuff, but abstracts are for free;-). I liked the part he is talking about knowledge communities, describing an Knowledge Connections Workshop.
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Thursday, January 18

Music Bottles

Another Project of the MIT¥s Tangible Media Group: The musicBottles project presents a tangible interface for interaction with a musical composition. The core concept is that of using bottles as graspable containers and controls for digital information.
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WDVL: Conceptual Foundations
Many elements go into successful web site design; we can cluster those elements into sensory, conceptual, and reactive aspects. That is, design isn't only what you see, it's also what you think and feel as you navigate a web site. This article explores some of the basic principles of web site design, and provides many links to other resources for further detailed study.
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SmartDesk
SmartDesk is a project of the Perceptual Computing group at the MIT Media Lab and encompasses experimentation on a range of computer-based perceptual input and output systems in a personal work environment.
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The MIT¥s Tangible Media Group
Usability doesn¥t stop at the screen¥s surface: we should open our focus from time to time. From mediatecture to media environments: the "mise en scËne" of the "2d-GUI" is providing value on different levels of the communication process.
Tangible Bits is their vision of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) which guides their research in the Tangible Media Group. People have developed sophisticated skills for sensing and manipulating their physical environments. However, most of these skills are not employed by traditional GUI (Graphical User Interface). Tangible Bits seeks to build upon these skills by giving physical form to digital information, seamlessly coupling the dual worlds of bits and atoms.
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Wednesday, January 17

The Microsoft Agent User Interface

The Avatar attack is on its way. Here you find a complete archive and documentation of Microsoft¥s ideas of the avatar concept. From my perspective it is oversimplifying the whole avatar, virtual character and ai/dialogue topic - but they are the guys who make it work. So we should think about concepts, not about implementations.(link by kris).
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Monday, January 15

010101 : Art in Technological Times
This astonishing Website of an exhibition at the SF MOMA provides you not only with interesting and valuable content...before getting there, you will be confronted with some new and well-thought navigation paradigms, It¥s all flash-based, sometimes too flashy, and not usable in the common sense of usability. You have to learn and understand the way of navigating through the site. But you have the "user¥s guide" available on every single page. The text (try to scroll...) is not very readable sometimes, but the usage is an experience...Or you have the selection of 8 topics, and after selecting one of them the new content is hiding the other topics (like in the artists biographies). What I really dont understand is why external links are "dead", and as it¥s flash text I can¥t copy / paste them.
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Wednesday, January 10

2WW
The Two-Way-Web is a vision for the Web as an easy writing and publishing environment. It's not a new idea, in fact it's the original vision of the Web as defined by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. Don¥t miss to see the open letter from John S. Rhodes at WebWord.com. Link by webDev.
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Monday, January 8

What Is Usability?
ISO Definition: Usability is the "effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which a specified set of users can achieve a specified set of tasks in a particular environment."
The people from the usability group claim to manage the "customer experience". Or its just a prevention from soemthing well done beeing bad? Or better? They define usability (testing) as a "service" that comes after setting up a site (or application), I think designers should be much more interested in developping methods of creating usable services (that might be any kind of media or application) by their knowledge of the design process. What this is about? Yes, that¥s the question we want to talk about... And its not the simple way of solutions they offer for designers.
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