Monday, April 30

User Advocate Or Enemy Of Creativity?
It won¥t stop: Jakob Nielsen defines the boundaries of art and functionality in designing site?!
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Sunday, April 29

When Interfaces Kill ?
What Really Happened to John Denver: On October 12, 1997, John Denver, popular folk singer and amateur pilot, at the controls of a newly-purchased experimental aircraft, died after crashing into Monterey Bay, in California. He died in an aircraft that had already done its best to kill two previous pilots, an aircraft with a human interface flaw so fundamental, so profound, that it finally managed to kill.
Bruce Tognazzine (tog) now leads this back to the cockpit¥s interface. An extreme point of view for usability...
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Friday, April 27

Institute for Human and Machine Cognition

The Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) was founded at The University of West Florida by the Florida legislature in 1990 as an interdisciplinary research unit.
Current research areas include: computational and philosophical foundations of AI, haptic displays to mitigate spatial disorientation, non-alphanumeric pilot displays, computer-mediated communication and collaboration, cognitive science, computer mediated learning systems, performance support systems, pedagogically-motivated browsers, knowledge discovery and data mining, neural networks, software agent mobility and security, spatial and temporal reasoning, diagnostic systems, the nature and modeling of expertise, situated cognition, pattern recognition, and other related areas.
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Wednesday, April 25

Featuritis - SuperSites.com
Polls, hot lists, and email alerts; how useful are they and what makes the good ones good? ... Any feature should be motivated by a user-centered design process, rather than as a way to 'add something' to the site that the competitor doesn't have.
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Monday, April 23

Effective use of forms on websites (theory, March 1, 2001) People don't like filling out forms in the real world, and especially not while using the web. Forms are complicated, distracting, and take control away from the user. That is, unless they're designed effectively.
Most people hate filling out tax forms, registration forms, ballots, and so on. In fact, all kinds of new technologies are being developed to speed up delivery of common information (like telephone numbers, addresses, names, birthdates, and social service numbers), and prevent excessive use of forms. Yet users are still forced to fill out forms, to accomplish all kinds of simple tasks, because forms are perceived as an effective means of gathering information. They aren't always effective for users, and certainly aren't always effective for the recipients of the information, either.
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webmutant: web design paper
Web version of a apaper describing the approach to (re) design a website: goals, steps, visions...
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Sunday, April 22

peterme.com
Peter brings it to the point, when he talks about TLB¥s vision of the semantic web: This is one of those Extremely Noble and massively complex endeavors wherein academics, removed from the real world, attempt to solve a problem nobody has.
This is an interesting question, indeed!
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sitemaps on every page
first seen on this site (poorbuthappy.com), xplane now uses the same approach: having a sitemap of the full site one every single page of the site. it seems to make sense, but it takes a lot of space and distracts. are there better visual models? is the direction of the brain the right way?
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From GUI to ZUI: Zooming User Interfaces HCIL is exploring Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs) where zooming is a fundamental part of the user's interaction with the computer (also known as multiscale interfaces).
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Workshop on Social Navigation: A Design Approach?
Social navigation has been proposed as a means to help users cope with large information spaces. Through making other users actions visible we can take advantage of their work to find our way around and to solve problems. By information space, we mean anything from the interface to a normal application to large hypermedia spaces such as the World Wide Web or virtual reality environments. Users actions can be made visible in various ways: through direct social navigation (talking to or seeing individual users act), indirect social navigation (seeing the aggregated user behavior as in recommender system advice), or readwear (seeing how an object has been used by other users through its texture).
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Friday, April 20

SCG Swiki: Steps to the two way web?

A Swiki is a collaborative website; anyone can edit and create pages. While that may seem dangerous, it's also amazingly powerful. It turns out that we all know quite a bit about writing and talking together. See this example site of the Computer Science Institute of the University of Berne, Switzerland! If you look for interesting content, I recommend the pages about topic maps.
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Media Tertia Home
Web-Based Resources for Web Development: see the section about "Envisioning the WorldWideWeb"
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terraswarm
Through massive convergence of communications, data, and media, new technologies are interwoven into urban fabrics at all levels, changing how they work and grow. Computerized highways, intelligent buildings, automated databases and online transactions are augmenting conventional patterns of living, working, and playing. To gain a contemporary understanding of the urban environment it is necessary to understand and operate within this expanded field. As local and global networks create new organizational opportunities, commonly used software is adapted to operate and maintain them.
Never before has their been a greater coincidence between the tools which are changing the city and the tools with which we study it.
Terraswarm develops a fluid method for exploiting this convergence of technologies, navigating new resources for conceiving and understanding the changing exurban landscape. Available tools come in the form of software, databases, and equipment.
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Information Architecture-Home
This site was created as part of a research paper on information architecture. This site serves as a resource for students and others involved with information architecture study or practice.
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Argus Associates--Information Architecture
Good bye. Why? Good luck.
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Thursday, April 19

Debunking the myths of UI design
In teh IBM developerWorks¥section Paul Smith talks about different myths for software developers on the role of design - trying to debunk them.
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Friday, April 13

Sydney Opera House
QTVR is back, bundled with flash. An astonishing, high-bandwith site presenting this architectural pearl. Go for a virtual visit and come back to tell and discuss wheter this enourmos effort makles sense, creates desire to go there, recalls the feelings if you have been there. And, another question, are the yellow "balls" and its sounds the cognitive link to tennis?
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Thursday, April 5

WILLKOMMEN BEI SATURN
Is this user experience? Online shopping at saturn is anyway better than the real shopping at saturn. The behaviour of the screen elements is very engaging for the hesitating user...
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Monday, April 2

Web Design Experts
Creating Usable Websites knows about twoe Experts: "People whose work you should be familiar with to successfully design for the World Wide Web. More to come later!" Well, they have Tufte and Nielsen. Who should follow?
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