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Andy Budd::Blogography Articles
The digital economy act to kill start-up culture in the UK
The recent passing of the UK Digital Economy Act has generated outrage amongst the web community. Large media business have effectively lobbied government under the spurious claim that without protection the future of the digital economy in the UK is at threat. However the future of digital isn’t locked inside...
5 Years ago somebody wrote something stupid on the Internet that annoyed a bunch of bloggers enough to write about it, including myself. Yesterday I received a contrite email from this person saying that the incident had ruined their life and asking if I’d remove the post. It turns out...
My response to the question of speculative pitches
A few nights ago I attended a UX-Bri session where one of the speakers floated the idea of doing free usability testing in order to win projects. I asked about the moral implications of this and was surprised by the response. While the audience largely disagreed with the idea of...
Clearleft offers free training to budding conference speakers
In order to get more people in the design scene speaking at events like SillSwap, BarCamp and even dConstruct or UX London, I’ve been toying with the idea of organising a free public speaking course. It would be held on a yet-to-be-determined Saturday at the Clearleft offices in Brighton and...
The best products sell them selves
The concept of ‘Pull Marketing’ is all the rage at the moment. In the age of the Mad Men, selling a new product was easy. You’d be handed a commodity product like toothpaste or washing powder and set about building a brand to set it apart from the competition....
One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the...
Design with Intent
Design with Intent toolkit 1.0 now online
It’s been a long time coming, but a year after v.0.9, the new Design with Intent toolkit, DwI v.1.0, is ready. Officially titled Design with Intent: 101 Patterns for Influencing Behaviour Through Design, it’s in the form of 101 simple cards, each illustrating a particular ‘gambit‘ for influencing people’s interactions...
Learning from game design: 11 gambits for influencing user behaviour
Games are great at engaging people for long periods of time, getting them involved, and, if we put it bluntly, influencing people’s behaviour through their very design. Something conspicuously missing from Design with Intent v.0.9 is a satisfactory treatment of the kinds of techniques for influencing user behaviour that can...
I haven’t blogged for a couple of months, which is not unusual, but I always feel I owe loyal readers an explanation! Primarily, I’ve been so wrapped up in PhD-related work (now in my final year, and desperately trying to get the thing finished by the summer), that most of...
What I didn’t get round to writing about in 2009
A lot of people send me ideas and suggestions for the blog, for which I’m very grateful indeed, but which I don’t always get round to investigating or posting or dealing with in a timely manner. Or sometimes I note them, use them as examples elsewhere, or in conversation with...
What’s happening with the toolkit (Part 2): Interaction design: how you can be part of it
Following on from part 1, here are a few of the ‘new’ design patterns that are going to be in v.0.95 of the Design with Intent toolkit, but for which I don’t yet have very good ‘design’ examples. Any suggestions, or photos / screenshots would be very much appreciated, whether...
What’s happening with the toolkit (Part 1)
It’s 8 months since the Design with Intent Toolkit v.0.9 went online and I’ve had incredibly useful feedback from a whole range of people who’ve tried it out on different kinds of briefs and problems. As mentioned a couple of months ago, the toolkit poster PDF (which has 12 ‘headline’...
Talkabout Design - Design Community
Wired Magazine’s iPad Edition is here
We have all seen a pretty demo from Wired for their digital magazine version a while back. It was impressive and showed us what the future of digital magazines will look like. Now that the iPad version is out and digital...
Bangalore traffic police: Talk them dead campaign
Don't talk while she drives is just one of the few ads created by Mudra Group, India to spread awareness about driving and talking on the phone. It's message is clear and chilling. Great campaign. Great art direction. Advertising Agency: Mudra Group,...
Turn your Wifi iPad into 3g with your iPhone
Did you buy a wifi iPad this weekend? How about browsing the web on the go? There is a solution for all of you that also have an iPhone. With the help of a little app called MyWi you can turn...
YouTube To Roll Out New Design Today
Did you know that today March 31st, 2010 Youtube is getting a brand new redesign? Below are some highlights of some of the things that have changed and why. Streamlined look and functionality -- the video is the star: This concept is...
Trololo Sounds App is headed for the iPhone: Update
No doubt the latest Youtube sensation is an old Russian song called "Trololo". It is now headed to the app store as a sound board featuring sound clips from the song. You should be expecting to see it in store this...
The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable. You’ll notice there are a few new UI elements as compared to the iPhone interface. The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the...
UsabilityPost
Linux… One of the problems with Linux is its lack of tasteful aesthetic. Linux seems to have always been designed by programmers—at least thats the impression I’m getting. It always tries, but it always falls short revealing its clumsy, unpolished edges. It’s getting better, but it’s not there yet. One of...
CSS Hover Controls On the iPhone
Here’s a simple technique to get hover controls working on the iPhone. Hover controls are links and buttons that appear when you hover your mouse over a a target area and so are useful for a lot of secondary actions like delete and edit links—a way to simplify your interface. The...
Jason Fried wrote a post a while back on the usefulness of site links shown on the Google results pages. These are the little site map links that Google sometimes shows under a page result for a domain, which essentially act as navigation links for that site. Jason’s observation is that...
I started UsabilityPost a couple of years ago with the purpose of creating an outlet which I can use to write about a subject I am passionate about. I focused on usability because the functional side of design is what interests me most and is something I feel is of...
If you browse a web design gallery or two you’ll notice a pattern—something that the design of my own site shares as well. The visuals of many sites recreate physical media. This is done by using paper textures for backgrounds, grungy or handwritten fonts, paper edges, wrapping labels, paint strokes,...
Drawar has published a couple of interesting posts about the importance of design and aesthetics for online businesses last week. The main premise is this: businesses succeed and fail on the web regardless of how well designed their sites are. An ugly website will succeed if their product or service...
Subtraction.com
The designer of a forthcoming Web app walks through his decisions on exactly how much to leave out in his quest for a minimalist design. “It’s easy to say ‘no’ too often, and forget that the features you do have should be implemented with all the care and perfection that is...
Last week, Google announced a new feature that lets users customize Google.com with their own pictures. When I read about this, I groaned; here was another perfect example of Google peddling unbridled visual pollution in its unconscious drive to become the new Microsoft, purveyor of aesthetic misfires. I just couldn’t...
NYT: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In
“Parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.” ...
What I Said About Apple and Typography
I watched with dismay yesterday when the comment thread for my post, “Better Display, Same Typography,” a rant about Apple’s lackluster efforts in typography on all of its platforms, went a bit astray. Lots of commenters understood what I was trying to say, but many others didn’t. Many thought I was...
Better Screen, Same Typography
Three years ago I waited in line to buy the original iPhone and I haven’t upgraded since, so I’m definitely warming up my credit card for Apple’s newly announced iPhone 4. I admit that it took some will power to sit out the subsequent releases of the iPhone 3G and...
This coming Monday, I’ll have the honor of speaking at The Museum of Modern Art here in New York City as part of their PopRally event series. This particular event highlights MoMA’s current exhibition “The New Typography,” which includes a selection of seminal works from the eponymous design movement of...
Max Design
Some links for light reading (9/06/10)
iPhone, iPad and VoiceOver The iPad as an Affordable Communicator: Initial Review Autism, iPhone, MacBook, and Life Can checklist accessibility be harmful? Showing and hiding content with pure CSS3 MagnifyMa: A CSS magnifying glass Official Google Webmaster Central Blog New windows with JavaScript and the target attribute CSS Sprites w/out Using Background Images Cloud Computing Podcast A Practical Guide to...
Have you ever wanted to learn CSS but put it off? Well, now is your chance to learn CSS from scratch via SitePoint’s online CSS cource – CSS LiVE. Why learn via CSS live? The course is broken into simple lessons over two weeks Four days per week (Monday to Thursday) you will...
Some links for light reading (2/06/10)
Perception and the design of forms – Part 1: Shape Smokescreen Accessible YouTube player controls CSS 101: Block Formatting Contexts How do Web browsers perform when copying and pasting alternate text? Touch Gesture Reference Guide Stop saying viral IE6 Finally Nearing Extinction Handling Active State for jQuery Animated Backgrounds Awe Dee Oh Accessibility does not prevent you from using JavaScript...
Some links for light reading (26/05/10)
Understanding node.js WCAG Rethink Why You Should Adopt An ‘Accessible Content Strategy’ Javascript shorthand for cleaner code Opera supports the WebM video format Our Solar System in CSS3 HTML5 Watch Worst examples of social media BS? Website Archives Design: Good Practices and Examples Quick and Dirty Remote User Testing Responsive Web Design A Feed Apart...
Some links for light reading (19/05/10)
CSS3 Media Queries – a presentation Box-Shadow back on the Menu (and other updates) Moving towards readable W3C specs Spacing Out on CSS Namespaces CSS Breadcrumbs In 5 Minutes HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives HTML5 Demos and Examples HTML5 Readiness Filling in the Gaps The CSS Corner: CSS3 Selectors CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 Help Cheat Sheets (PDF) The...
A quick snippet from our recent Brisbane CSS workshop Russ: “where do floats go?” Class: [silence] Russ: “Just ask Beyonce!” Class: [more silence] Russ: [rolls eyes in mock exasperation] “To the left, to the left” Someone from the class: “I thought you were going to say ‘if you like it then you shoulda put some padding...
Monday By Noon
WordPress Custom Post Types & Pods: What’s Next?
On more than on occasion I've been asked about my future with Pods specifically given the immanent release of WordPress 3.0 featuring Custom Post Types. On the spot, I didn't have to ponder too much, but I did want to let things seep in for a while before explaining my...
Content Entry: Whose Job is it Anyway?
Whose job is it to populate content on every project? Should the service provider handle it as part of their impeccable service? Should the client enter content to become more familiar with the content management system? Both sides have compelling arguments....
Typekit and Google Announce Open Source Collaboration
Typekit and Google Announce Open Source Collaboration « The Typekit Blog. I think this is great. Typekit is really making an impact with the service provided, and Google hopping on board is a really great thing for the both of them… and all of us. We’re happy to announce that...
BlackBerry OS 6.0 and… WebKit?!
BlackBerry OS 6.0 screenshots, details! « Boy Genius Report. I somehow missed the cruise liner that is BlackBerry buying a mobile WebKit company and things are finially coming together. Truth be told I’m not the least excited about BlackBerry OS 6.0 in general, but if it is true to fact...
Making your Pods Input Helpers a Bit More Helpful
Input Helpers in Pods really enhance the usability of Pods in WordPress. They work to modify data represented to the user in such a way to make it more useful or more valuable. I think that's an important factor to take into account when setting up a Pods powered WordPress...
A Book Apart – HTML5 for Web Designers
A Book Apart is here. The latest and greatest product from everyone’s favorite Web-centric publication A List Apart. A List Apart is one of the main reasons I really came into Standards-based Web design and development and they continue to publish some of the best articles on an extremely consistent...
Dustin Diaz
Asynchronous method queue chaining in JavaScript
Chaining. It's an extremely popular pattern these days in JavaScript. It's easily achieved by continually returning a reference to the same object between linked methods. However one technique you don't often see is queueing up a chain of methods, asynchronously, by which functions can be linked together independent of a...
And not just this website. Things are different now like, for example, my friends, my interests, and to sound nerdy, the web. All different for the better. I've been a bit under the blog radar this last year. @Erin and I have been busy with our separate jobs, also creating our...
Unofficial Twitter Widget Documentation
So, the Twitter Search Widget has officially launched. And the installation is fairly self-explanatory (as a matter of fact, I don't think we even explained it at all??). But nonetheless, if you haven't checked it out, it's worth doing that now. The new widgets are hot! Ok. On with this....
Twita@talinkahashify your tweets
Well hello everyone. I had previously tweeted about this a few weeks ago... but sometimes I forget more folks follow this blog than my Twitter. If any of you use our Twitter API to embed your latest statuses on your website, here is a simple little script that will do a...
Me on Photography and JavaScript
I figured the only way I can keep someone's attention on this blog while talking about Photography is to also talk about JavaScript. Since I have a vested interest in both, and with very good reason, they make a good pair. As some of you might have remembered, I wrote...
In July I published a post calling out puzzle enthusiasts to solve a programming brain teaser that involved grouping duplicates. Some solved it with a hefty amount of code, others used a savvy regular expression. Now I'd like to invite you to yet another brain teaser, except this time your answer...
Patrick Dubroy
Browser Bits: My mini-blog on browser UX
I mentioned it off-hand in a previous post, but thought I should mention it again: If you’re interested in web browser user experience, take a look at Browser Bits, my little tumblelog/mini-blog thingy all about browser UX....
My CHI2010 talk: A Study of Tabbed Browsing
Last week, I went to Atlanta for CHI 2010 to present my paper A Study of Tabbed Browsing Among Mozilla Firefox Users. For those who couldn’t be there, or just don’t feel like reading a 10-page academic paper, here’s a transcript-by-memory of the talk. If you want a Cole’s Notes version,...
If you’re going to CHI 2010 in Atlanta next week, you should come check out my talk on Tuesday morning at 9. I’ll be presenting a paper on the tabbed browsing study I did last year. Hope to see you there! If anyone wants to meet up, send me an...
An In-Depth Look at the User Experience of iPhone Safari
On stage Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad as “the best browsing experience you’ve ever had. Way better than a laptop, way better than a smart phone.” Quite a claim. Of course, the iPad browser is Safari. And from what I’ve seen and...
Thesis Update and Multi-Touch BumpTop
It’s been a while since I posted a real update here — it’s about time I filled you all in on what I’ve been up to. Academia In April, I finished my master’s in Compter Science (Human-Computer Interaction) at the University of Toronto. My thesis was a study of how people use...
If you visited this site in the last day or so, you probably saw a 404. Sorry about that. I had to bring the site down for a bit to upgrade my woefully out-of-date WordPress installation. A few weeks ago, someone actually took advantage of the ancient version of WordPress...
UsabilityBlog
Behaviorally-Anchored User Experience Issue Severity Ratings
This post originated from a response I wrote to a question on the list that dare not utter its name. Someone asked about whether ratings of usability issues should be ranked with an interval or ordinal scale. I thought the question was somewhat specious, because when you’re dealing with behavioral...
Ferrari Fail: Steering Wheel From Hell
It’s all about context, yes. Some immensely complex UI’s are necessary in certain domains, for certain workflows. But sometimes you can just look at a UI and know that, for whoever its intended users are, it’s a horrible failure. So it is with this Ferrari steering wheel. Via FastCompany and @JasonSpector,...
Another Classic After-The-Fact Design Mod
[Click to view full size] Yes, the world has another after-the-fact design modification to add to its motley collection of hacks, patches, fixes, taped-on signs, and Sharpie-improved user interfaces. Found at the Kent State University bookstore, where I ducked in to buy an umbrella during a downpour. I was there to do...
Click to view full-size I know, I know, this is how “The Design of Everyday Things” starts. The difference is that I found this instance at my local bank. The whole “Wells Fargo experience” is chock full of questionable design actually; I’ve struggled with elements of their web site, physical branch...
Malware Perception Risk Assessment Checklist: Before Its Time
Back about two years ago I was working on a product line that took a number of potentially objectionable actions with customers’ systems. I pushed back against the product teams, saying that these actions put our products at risk of being perceived as malware. They in turn pushed back on me,...
I used to be a semi-professional musician. For a variety of reasons I didn’t stick with the professional part. I still play, mostly for my daughters and to keep my fingers limber. But my repertoire has gone to crud. That happens when you don’t play for an audience anymore. You just...
Muffin Research Labs
Debugging Elusive Puppet Errors
On working on some puppet manifests I hit this error message: $ sudo puppetd -t err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: undefined method `closed?' for nil:NilClass warning: Not using cache on failed catalog err: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run Certainly not the most enlightening error message. After checking over the syntax of...
Ubuntu: java.net.SocketException in ec2-api-tools
Having installed ec2-api-tools under my lucid dev environment I was trying to shut ec2 instances down with ec2stop [instance_id] and I was getting the following exception: $ ec2stop i-XXXXXXXX Unexpected error: java.net.SocketException: Invalid argument or cannot assign requested address at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:310) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:176) at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:163) at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:384) -----...
Ubuntu: Installing the Beebem BBC Micro Emulator
Ah the BBC Micro. I have very fond memories of our first computer, idling away countless hours attempting to load games from tape for them only to crash shortly after you started playing them. I also remember one hot summer spending epic amounts of time playing Elite after I’d stumbled...
Adding more disk space to a Linux Virtual Machine
There comes a time where you set-up a VM and don’t set the hard-disk size to be big enough for what you are going to do. I hit that problem just the other day and I needed to increase the size of my home dir on a Ubuntu Lucid LTS...
Linux: Fix for apt-get update – Waiting for Headers
If you’re a Google chrome user on Ubuntu you may have noticed apt-get update seems to wait around for two minutes sitting at 99%. The culprit is the google apt repo having issues with http/1.1 pipelining. Fortunately there’s a bug for it on Launchpad with a workaround that does the...
Solved: VirtualBox Ubuntu Karmic Server VM crashes
Had a weird issue when setting up an Ubuntu Karmic JEOS VM under VirtualBox. When it was installed it rebooted and then the VM window dissappeared. I tried to boot it a second time and it got to grub and then as soon as I selected the kernel I wanted...
Church of the Customer Blog
Continuing to show the rest of us what to do when we screw up, David Letterman spent 3 minutes and 20 seconds apologizing on last night's show after revealing last week he'd been part of an extortion plot. The alleged plot was based on Letterman's relationships with women on his...
A survey of 1,400 companies has found that 54% of them completely prohibit social media at work. The companies that do allow their employees access to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or a host of other social networks do so in varying levels. Just 10% allow employees access to social media for...
AT&T and the 2 most important words
"We're sorry." That's what you say when a large number of your customers are upset with you. AT&T customers have been complaining for months about dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and slow download speeds for the iPhone. So, AT&T released this video on YouTube. In it,...
Did you know that world-renowned marketer and blogger Seth Godin has a Mini-Me? "Little Seth Godin" visits the Minnesota State Fair to promote his keynote speech at the October 5 Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association's Annual Summit. I will also be keynoting this event. I do not have an action figure....
Turning bad buzz around for Best Buy
Best Buy was in the news the other day for an oops. It offered a 52-inch HDTV that normally sells for $1,600 on its web site for $9.99. Eager web surfers gleefully pulled out their credit cards and placed orders. As word of the deal spread, Best Buy realized the...
SEC complaint against Cuban dismissed
Last year, we blogged about the SEC going after one of our favorite marketing-driven entrepreneurs, Mark Cuban, and the selling of his interest in Mamma.com. Today, a federal judge dismissed the complaint, giving the SEC 30 days to file an amended version, but overall striking a blow to the SEC's...
Good Experience
Wolfram Tones and auto-generated music
Wolfram Tones allows you to auto-generate music in a number of styles. For example, here's a piano piece that isn't too shabby. I also liked this minimalist piece from the "signalling" style. Both of these appeared at random through a few clicks. Probably the most effective style, though, is ambient....
Joan Sullivan founded the Bronx Academy of Letters - a public, not charter, school - in the poorest congressional district in America. A few years later it was ranked as one of the top high schools in New York City. Joan tells her story and invites two alumni on-stage as...
New Gel Video: Joan Sullivan (followup)
After Joan Sullivan and two alumni spoke at Gel 2009 about the success of Bronx Academy of Letters, many Gel attendees asked the same question: how did she do it? In a followup interview a few weeks after the conference, Gel founder Mark Hurst went to the principal's office to...
Patients who suffer medical errors get a range of responses from doctors and other parts of the medical establishment. Dr. Sigall Bell has researched this topic - finding out why a good response is often so difficult - and suggests ways to improve outcomes, system-wide. ...
There's always hope, says Dr. Mark Pochapin, even in dire situations. To underline his point, he finishes his presentation by bringing a special guest to the stage. ...
New Gel Video: Robert Martensen
Dr. Martensen explores the end-of-life experience, which he also covers in his excellent book A Life Worth Living: A Doctor's Reflections on Illness in a High-Tech Era. ...
UIE Brain Sparks
“Please, let me redesign your airline for you.”
The airline industry is well-known for the wrath and frustration it inspires in its customers. Usually this manifests itself in shouting at gate agents or long, angry blog posts about being trapped on the tarmac for hours without rescue. Recently, a new kind of manifestation has emerged: redesigning. Professional designers, frustrated...
Job: Amazing Digital Media Intern
We’re looking for an amazing Digital Media Intern for a paid, 3-month internship. Fast Forward Three Months… We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our Digital Media Intern. You’ve doubled the number of podcasts we’ve been publishing, making them sound better than ever. We were stunned at how...
UIEtips: Three Important Benefits of Personas
As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams produce better designs, we’re still constantly surprised by the number of teams successfully using personas. With personas, teams report that they are producing more usable designs that better match the needs of their audience, increasing the satisfaction of their...
“Holy Cow! Are you serious? I can’t believe I won it! My work colleague is extremely jealous!” Those are the exact words from Donna Krainert when we told her she is the newest member of the UI15 Apple iPad club. She and Jennifer Cooper, winner from week 1, can now...
We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us better understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. Basing stories on fact (data or knowledge embedded in your organization, or even new information) will help you...
UIEtips: Actually, You Might Be Your User
One of the common traps I see UX professionals fall into is believing there’s a right way and a wrong way to design things. We get too dogmatic, convincing ourselves there is a single ‘best practice’ that will yield the best results. Many of us are not open to the...
Veerle's blog
New York City edition of Pictory, designed by Nicholas Felton. Beautiful. (via)...
Graphic Design artifacts and inspiration from the 1960's - 1980's....
Meet my next phone. Such a beautiful design. For sale an iPhone 3G in pristine state....
Verona Walls - Summer Tour - Ladder Over The Wall. via Adam the Velcro Suit...
Very nice combination of a Polaroid device and fruit. Inspiring colors. via Level & Tap...
Interesting concept. via ffffound...
vanderwal.net Off the Top
vanderwal posted a photo: Uploaded with plasq's Skitch...
Somerhing more dangerous? [Flickr]
vanderwal posted a photo: ...
It was only four days into 2010 that the reality of life and its frailty surface to take the air out of my breath. It was the death of Brad Graham a very early blogger (BradLands) and host to the pre-SXSW warm-up Break Bread with Brad. As the article says,...
Ian said it best in the header for his post I miss blogging. There is so much good in Ian's brief post as well as the linked to Dan Cederholm post WoodPress. Before the thoughtless "15 ways to...", which rarely state anything worth reading. I am beginning to believe that...
it is in this precious life of ours that we see the living the dying the loving the caring the sharing the bearing the seeing the believing the comforting the guiding and all of the grace we can embrace it is from these lessons most wonderfully shared from a father to his son that we do really see the greatness in life and the blessings within us to live each...
Social Design for the Enterprise Workshop in Washington, DC Area
I am finally bringing workshop to my home base, the Washington, DC area. I am putting on a my �Social Design for the Enterprise� half-day workshop on the afternoon of July 17th at Viget Labs (register from this prior link). Yes, it is a Friday in the Summer in Washington, DC...
InfoDesign: Understanding by Design
A user's guide to service design
"If you don't, it might sound like something that's complicated, difficult and costly to get involved in. To help you get to grips with service design, we've talked to the experts, read the academic papers and compiled a set of case studies of some well designed services. This users' guide...
"Although usability practitioners love to show examples of big usability issues with websites and applications, the vast majority of usability issues are typically in the details. By forcing your application users or website visitors to be constantly bothered with more detailed usability issues, you eventually wear down their patience and...
Globalizing an information architecture
"So in the interest of resurrecting a six-year old conversation, here are some questions. I plan to use these to get my client to think strategically about the challenge of developing a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-regional information architecture. Being the information architect that I am, naturally I categorized them." (Louis...
"Even great ideas have a limited shelf life. Bill Buxton has some stern words of advice for those looking to rest on their laurels." (Business Week)...
Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences
"Good user experience isn't just about good design. Learn how to create a positive user experience by being fast, open, engaged, surprising, polite, and, well... being yourself. Chock full of examples from the web and beyond, this talk is a practical introduction for developers who are passionate about user experience...
Global User Research: Practical insights to ensure success
"(...) the first book to focus on global user research. The book collects insight from UX professionals from twenty countries and, following a typical project timeline, presents practical insights into the preparation, fieldwork, analysis and reporting, and overall project management for global user research projects." (About the authors)...
information aesthetics
The NYTimes Visualization of Live World Cup Football Statistics
Last week was one mainly dominated by the introduction of compelling data visualizations depicting real-time football statistics, with entries such as VisualSport, Adidas Match Tracker, a real-time World Cup Visualiser iPad app and a Total Football 2010 iPhone app. Today, infographic powerhouse The New York Times has entered this emerging...
VisualSport: Social Visualization of (Live) World Cup Football Statistics
In the new rage that is football statistics data visualization, VisualSport [visualsport.com] forms the newest member. The match tracking interface contains 2 separate parts: the "Match Timeline" and "Match Commentary", each focusing on displaying separate events (e.g. shoots, yellow/red cards, player exchanges) on an interactive timeline. The Player Comparison Tool...
What is the Best Way to Represent Directionality in Network Visualizations?
Networks are often visualized using points and interconnecting lines, with triangular arrowheads at one or both ends to show any directionality between the different points. Although such a standard arrow representation seems intuitive, it can lead to problems in dense graphs that contain many incoming or outgoing relationships. Furthermore, since...
World Cup Visualiser: Follow Real-Time Football Statistics on your iPad
As we already noticed from the Adidas Match Tracker post a little while ago, there is some serious sexiness radiating from any dataset that contains each single event during a football/soccer match. Now what about showing these statistics in real-time? Would that disturb your viewing experience? The World Cup Visualiser...
PlotWeaver: Automating xkcd's Movie Character Interaction Graphs
After noticing the beauty behind xkcd's beautiful graphs depicting the Interactions of Movie Characters, Stanford student Vadim Ogievetsky decided to develop an online software tool that would allow him to generate visually similar looking versions. Accordingly, PlotWeaver [stanford.edu] presents an efficient and effective layout algorithm that, with the users help,...
MTV Movie Awards Tweet Tracker Visualization
2010 MTV Movie Awards Tweet Tracker [mtv.com] by Stamen Design is a real-time graph of Twitter activity, highlighting the most popular famous people being talked about. In the 'Cloud View', the more popular a specific person is (counted in tweets per minute), the bigger their according headshot will grow. In...
Cone Trees
How to create active and inactives tabs in Axure
Summary This short tutorial tells you how to create non-interactive active and inactive tabs in the Axure prototyping application. If you are interested in a tutorial that teaches you how to create interactive tabs, then drop a comment and let me know. Drag a rectangle from the widgets pane to the stage/...
Rob Tanen on Tools for User Research
Rob Tanen begins to talk about how user researchers have historically lacked appropriate technology for studying how people use technology and the emergence of a variety of tools that can be applied to data gathering, analysis and sharing. He talks about the need for awareness and guidance in the selection...
David Kelley on Human Centered Design
David Kelley, chairman of IDEO, says product design has become more about the user experience than about hardware. He shows a video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York. About David Kelly David Kelly is the founder of IDEO. He helped design the first...
Rohan Shravan on the Adam tablet featuring tech specs better than the iPad
Rohan talks about Adam, a tablet PC in the making by his Hyderabad-based company, Notion Ink, which was founded by six IITans and an MBA graduate with an average age of just 24. Adam generated considerable buzz after they decided to demonstrate their prototype at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show),...
Jesse Schell on Games Design Outside the Box
Did you know that there are more Farmville players than there are twitter accounts? In addition to a few quick facts, Jesse Schell talks about the new thinking that is being brought to game development by studying the success of some extremely popular online games. He talks about why Club...
I presented a half-day tutorial on Tips for Usability Testing in India at India HCI/ IDID 2010 at IIT IDC, Powai, Mumbai....
The Work•Play•Experience Blog
WorkPlayExperience live on stage
Tools session at the Service Design Network conferenceIt's great to hear that our session proposal for the Service Design Network's 2010 conference has been accepted by the organisers.The conference, entitled "connecting the dots", take place in Berlin on the 13th and 14th of October, with a Member's day on the...
Why the hiatus?It's been a sleepy time on this blog recently, for a couple of reasons.The first is that Twitter has taken over as my main channel for sharing news and ideas. If you want to stay up to date, just follow me (@adamstjohn) and Markus (@markusedgar) and you...
Theatrical tools for service experience - an overview
Top practical tipsTheater can give you powerful - and long proven - tools for service design and experience work. Our customers at Work•Play•Experience love them, and I've written about them over the years on this blog. Here are links to some of the best...Rehearsal and service prototypingSetting up...
...how Work•Play•Experience gets down to businessWhen we are boldly going where no service design agency has gone before, Markus and I find it useful to have different spaces for different tasks.The BridgeAdam's loft office - light, airy, equipped with a big table, grand piano and much stuff. Great for big...
Silent nights...I'm having a quiet Christmas in Nuremberg (the Capital City of Christmas, or so they tell me) and taking it easy after a very busy few months.It's been an excellent year for WorkPlayExperience. Thanks to Markus for rowing his half of the boat so brilliantly, and thanks to...
Powerpoint, bras and twitter art
Just for funArtist Johanna Basford asked the twittering world for ideas, and proceeded to incorporate every one in a drawing that could easily become the new wallpaper at Arkham Asylum.Of course, I tweeted in "Powerpoint and a bra", and the result is in there somewhere. Thanks Johanna!See if you...