August 2006 Archives

Steve Mulder recently announced to the IA Institute and IxDA mailing list that his book on user research and personas, The User Is Always Right, is now available:

If you attended the IA Summit in Vancouver, you might have heard me give a preview of some of the book’s content on adding more science to persona creation. The book is a hands-on guide to creating personas (with advice on getting the most out of a variety of user research methodologies, generating persona segmentation, and making personas real) and using personas for everything from overall business strategy to IA, content, and design.

Mulder also blogs at PracticalPersonas.com, where recent posts question whether quantitative methods are required for creating personas (he says “not always”), and whether it’s wise to include a grump among your personas.

The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.

practicalist: authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account:

…what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior.

There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.

Now here’s something useful: arrow sound effect with no trouble at all. I also like the way the search results show the wave forms.

(via shacker)

CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents.

Our sense is that we are still in a transitional time so, at least on one major project, we are taking a hybrid approach. In fact, we are still working out the details: We may redirect mobile users to a version of the primary site optimized for their converged devices, or we may simply encourage them to use the mobile-optimized version of the site while still enabling them to satisfy their curiosity by visiting the web-basic version of the site.

In the latter case, we’ll use a smart enough stylesheet and user-agent sniffing regime so that they can have a satisfactory experience even if not visiting the mobile-specific site. Either way, we want to build both “flavors” of the site from the same content and image database, flagging some content as web-only and optimizing versions of the images for the mobile interface.

A key thing to remember is that even though a single site can be carefully crafted to be adequate in both interfaces, the use cases are not necessarily the same. We don’t expect people to read reams of paragraphs on their phones. More likely they will seek answers, help with problems, contact information, shortcuts. They will save their research and studying time for the full computer / laptop experience.

Of course in time this may change and things continue to converge, but it’s important to build for today with an eye on tomorrow and not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information - infinitely preferable to an endless stack of email messages.

On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely change the way that Extractable builds wireframes, prototypes and functional specs.

Download a free trial of Axure RP Pro.

Dan, I’m still waiting for the review copy of your book, Brown, published an excerpt from his just released Communicating Design in Digital Web Magazine, called Competitive Analysis, discussing different ways to compare competing sites and present your findings. Some interesting visual thinking there.

Can’t wait for the book, hint, hint.

I did like Lost in Translation, but I agree with I think about six of the Eight Things IÕm Supposed to Love But DonÕt from The Bivings Report (especially the bit about preferring Ze Frank’s The Show to Rocketboom).

David Smith is the director of marketing for HTC America, whose site we are redesigning. (We recently relaunched the site with an interim design but we’ve got great things in the works for later this year.) HTC makes incredible smartphone and pocketpc “converged devices” and generated a lot of buzz on enthusiast blogs and websites. This morning we heard about this Mobility Today podcast interview with David Smith. We’re excited about the ongoing interest in HTC and its products and we’re pleased to be part of David’s marketing team.

This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice.

I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the nerdiest of ubergeeks are willing to sling so many pocket devices from their belt clips.

The downside of convergence is that you can end up with a device that is optimized for no use case and is only adequate for all of them, but these problems are being solved. For example, there’s no way I would carry a PDA and a phone now. My HTC smartphone is great for both and even my dad uses a Palm Treo now.

It’s an interesting market to keep an eye on.

Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).

Since we began working with HTC and since I got my Cingular 2125, I’ve been sort of obsessed with the topic of developing sites for the mobile web, and with developments in the mobile space in general.

Recently Dan pointed me to the relatively new MobileCrunch blog, and I’ve become, well, addicted. Recommended.

Austin Govella writes about rich interfaces on the web (think AJAX, Flex, etc.), and Samantha Starmer explains how to sell IA to executives.

Gene Smith writes in his Atomiq blog

The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click - about as simple as it gets - and yet it’s the central component of the community.

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Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting post about quick and intense usability iterations:

I definitely see the strong advantages of the intense sessions mixed with the usual longer term development. Finally it seems a broad section of the development world is finally learning that the best way to build out stuff is to sit with the people that use it, see their pain and frustration. But, even better is fixing that pain overnight. These intense iterations build positive feedback for the developers and designers on the projects, the business owners seeing quick improvements, and the people who want and need to use the products. The people using the tools will most likely go away and become evangelists for the products as the developers and designers not only listened to their needs, but fixed it so it worked better for them right before their eyes.

Luke Wroblewski has some interesting thoughts about two orthogonal roles in the user-experience design process: Product Leads & Strategic Designers.

I’m not sure whether I’d classify myself as one or the other, though. As director of strategy here at Extractable I’m clearly a strategic designer in this scheme, but I think I’d be equally interested in seeing a specific (software application) product through its entire lifecycle.

I wonder if there is actually a temperament or skill-based distinction here?

David Rubini at online banking company Digital Insight has some words of wisdom for Web site operators of the Credit Union industry. The short of it is:

12 Steps to a User-Friendly Web site

In order for an online banking to be successful, it must be effective, efficient and satisfying to the user. Developers and designers must take the fundamental principles of human behavior and performance into consideration to achieve this outcome.

The following 12 steps will take your Web site down the path of usability wellness (we’ll address the critical design elements that help drive usability in part two of this series) 3 :

Be Compatible: Users form a mental model of expectations culled from prior experiences. Don’t try to break new ground: follow what has proven to work elsewhere and repeat.

Make the Interface Transparent: A good user interface requires little conscious thought from the user. Each page’s function should be immediately apparent.

Be Concise: Any information displayed at a given step should have direct relevance to the task at hand. If they are transferring funds, for example, don’t try to sell them on online bill pay. Stay the course.

Provide Constraints: Make it impossible for the user to make a wrong choice by constraining alternatives. In addition, offer only valid options.

Speak the User’s Language: Do not present unnecessary information. Ensure what you do present is in a natural and logical order.

Be Obvious: If missing data is detected, prompt the user for the data, like highlighting the missing information in red for example. Better yet, offer them a default value.

Keep the User in Control : “Are you sure you want to transfer these funds?” Users need to feel that they are the ones always in control, not the computer. Ask them to authorize each step they take.

Provide Feedback: “Thank you. The transfer has been made.” Let users know where they are, what they have done, and the success rate of each task.

Accommodate Different Skill Levels: Meet the needs of primary users, both novice and expert:

For Novices: provide “more info” and other visual cues to help make it easy or to learn more For Experts: provide hidden shortcuts that are redundant with visible cues. Provide tours and orientation models for users that want to go beyond the basics.

Minimize the User’s Memory Load: Don’t assume the user knows what you feel should be obvious, like clicking on the company name to get to the home page, for example. Make visual cues clear, but keep them balanced on the page. Don’t visually overload.

Be Consistent: Use principles of good design and industry style guidelines. Users expect familiar conventions that have been tested and are typically proven to work.

Assume Murphy’s Law: Most errors are design errors, not user errors. Provide help at key decision points and allow for easy error recovery by making actions reversible.

(full article)

I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.

I think Sinha summarized some of these thoughts on one of the tagging panels at the IA Summit this year. It looks like she has now developed this strand of thought into a focused presentation: (My slides for WebVisions: Designing for Social Sharing). I wonder if she has considered turning these thoughts into a book?

It’s interesting to see the slightly stylized map of continental US emerge from this data-driven map of Flight Patterns.

I don’t know if I can make it to the IDEA conference, but if not, I look forward to reading about it on the IDEA Conference Blog.

(Self-plug: I hacked the site’s design into WordPress templates to get the blog working for Peterme.)

Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.

The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.

Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:

I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event. … Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.

I’ve got two panel proposals in the running:

Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

(filed under blogging and education / sociological)

and

You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

(filed under social networks and user generated / open source)

Vote for my panels and eight others!

Liz Danzico of Boxes and Arrows interviews Dan Saffer about his Interaction Design book in Newsweek. Pretty mainstream, huh?

Digital Web Magazine has a brief article with tips on designing for the mobile interface.

Austin Govella explains why Rapid prototyping tools should NOT generate code:

Why would you need the prototyping tool to generate production code? Is there something about the code they would generate that would make it better than the custom code most applications require? Does the rapid prototyper’s code generator let me tell it how to generate the code, so it codes the way I need it to?

Why do engineers blanch at creating UIs? Why do so many designers create UIs without understanding the underlying technology? Nate Kohari has some suggestions: A Crash Course in User Interfaces.

Eric Scheid tells me,

We’ve now announced the conference program, and it’s quite exciting - lots of practical sessions, by practitioners, for practitioners. Over the next few weeks we’ll be expanding the detail on each session. Over the next few weeks we’ll be expanding the detail on each session. Stay tuned for more news, sign up for announcement emails, or subscribe to the RSS or Atom news feeds.

I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.

I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:

What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.

and

One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.

and, also

Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:

• David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
• Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
• Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
• Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

If you know a developer - pass the word along.

Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

(Reposted from The Power of Many.)

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:

• David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
• Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
• Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
• Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

If you know a developer - pass the word along.

Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan for Peachpit/New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as and she’s known as . A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan È interview with christian crumlish.

In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, and the long tail. Hope you enjoy it (in lieu of Friday UX blogging, which I’m too lazy busy to do today.

Microformats are standards-compliant structures based primarily on ordinary XHTML tag attributes (such as “rel=” in a link tag). The Knowledge@Wharton website features an excellent interview with Tantek ‚elik and Rohit Khare explaining the concept further.

Interestingly, Yahoo is running their new Yodel Anecdotal corporate blog on WordPress (the same software we run this blog on) and not their own homegrown Yahoo 360 platform.

Speaking of blogs, one of our clients recently asked us whether the old rule of thumb that a blog needs a new post every day is really true. According to Erik Kintz at Marketing Profs: Daily Fix (Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore), it’s not. (So why am I busting my hump to make sure this blog has at least one new entry each week day?)