October 18, 2006
BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype
See http://www.BumpTop.ca for more information. BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.
Posted by richard ting at October 18, 2006, 05:55 PM
May 22, 2006
Yahoo's Steady Home Page Transformation
Yahoo's newest design, released Tuesday, is much more graphical and less cluttered. The top search button resembles that of Google, with search tabs for images, video, news and more. A left column has buttons with icons for general "services" ranging from Autos to Maps to Horoscopes to Real Estate.
Next to that, users can click through tabs as they would sections of a newspaper to browse everything from News to Video. On the right side of the page, local and personal services such as Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Movies get their own icon-laden buttons.
Posted by richard ting at May 22, 2006, 12:02 PM
March 14, 2006
Tag Clouds
A tag cloud (more traditionally known as a weighted list in the field of visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Often, more frequently used tags are depicted in a larger font or otherwise emphasized, while the displayed order is generally alphabetical. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.
Check out the great Tag cloud page on Wikipedia. It's an excellent resource for those interested in designing Tag clouds.
Posted by richard ting at March 14, 2006, 06:57 PM
February 20, 2006
Yahoo Design Pattern Library
The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is now on-line as a resource for the design and development community. Currently on the site is Yahoo's first release of design patterns. Expect to see a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns. In many cases, Yahoo has bundled the patterns with pointers to related code from the Yahoo! User Interface Code Library. Excellent all-around resource.
Posted by richard ting at February 20, 2006, 10:23 PM
January 31, 2006
Display Errors in IE 7
A growing tag set of images on flickr showing display errors in IE 7
Posted by richard ting at January 31, 2006, 06:36 PM
April 07, 2005
Amazon's new product page
[from 37signals]
It looks like Amazon is trying a new book detail page. The new page sports a huge 400px tall book cover, a cleaned up and stacked page layout (each section takes the full width of the page and is bordered by dashed lines, revised typography with bigger type for headlines, more consistent treatment of section headers, a revised buy box, and more. They even lost the sidebar. This new design definitely puts the focus on the book first and the rest of the site second. Interesting direction. Here’s a screenshot if they change it or if you can’t see it.
Posted by richard ting at April 07, 2005, 10:16 AM
February 17, 2005
Common Interface Concepts and Conventions
Here's an excellent interaction design resource from Amsterdam. It's a massive archive of common interface concepts and conventions.
Posted by richard ting at February 17, 2005, 05:12 PM
January 29, 2005
Interface Hall of Shame
Three weeks ago I posted the Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook. Here's a complement to that site, the Interface Hall of Shame which is also an excellent resource for what NOT to do when designing usable interfaces and systems.
Posted by richard ting at January 29, 2005, 06:34 PM
January 09, 2005
Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook
This is an absolutely fantastic resource site for interface designers. It's basically a guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces.
Posted by richard ting at January 09, 2005, 07:53 PM
January 07, 2005
The Secret Behind the iPod's Scrollwheel
Here's an interesting article about the design reasoning behind iPod's scroll wheel.
Posted by richard ting at January 07, 2005, 01:42 PM
September 23, 2004
From Boxes and Arrows: Personas
Making Personas More Powerful: Details to Drive Strategic and Tactical Design
by George Olsen
Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here?
Read more.
Extending a Technique: Group Personas
by Mike Kuniavsky
Entertainment, education, and collaboration software is often used by two or more people simultaneously. Each of these groups has a different set of needs and expectations, and each can be modeled as a group persona, rather than as individual users.
Read more.
Posted by richard ting at September 23, 2004, 12:48 PM
April 14, 2004
Group Usability Testing
Developers looking for the best way to test application usability can choose between a focus group or usability testing. But there is a third way that combines the best of both those approaches: group testing.
Focus groups and usability tests each have their strengths and weaknesses. Focus groups, which bring together six to nine users, along with a moderator, are easy to organize. But their success depends largely on the quality of the moderator, and they uncover only users' opinions of an application, not how users actually use it. Usability testing, by contrast, observes actual users testing an application, often on a one-on-one basis. Yet even though usability testing is a powerful way to evaluate design usability and interaction styles, it is a poor way to assess user needs.
Group testing combines the strengths of both approaches, especially when used during an application's prototype phase. Group testing involves a group of users, just like a focus group, but it also gives developers an opportunity to actually test the application. Group testing is cost-efficient; it produces large amounts of data in a short time. One caveat: For group testing to deliver the best results, it should be moderated by an experienced researcher who understands both usability testing in general and the underlying technology.
Posted by richard ting at April 14, 2004, 10:47 AM
January 07, 2004
InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on R.S. Wurman
Each month, InfoDesign interviews a thought leader in the design industry, focusing on people who are identified with or show strong sensibilities to the design of information and experiences. This month, Dirk Knemeyer interviews Richard Saul Wurman.
Wurman coined the term 'information architecture' almost 30 years ago. While 'information architecture' has a different connotation today, for the purposes of this interview, it is treated as synonymous with 'information design'.
Posted by richard ting at January 07, 2004, 10:39 PM
September 05, 2003
Web Design Practices
[courtesy of Daniel Harvey]
Heidi Adkisson is launching webdesignpractices.com this month. She has a sneak peek up for navigation practices (linked above).
Basically, the site takes her Masters thesis study of 75 ecommerce sites and makes it more accessible online. (For the impatient, you can download the 8mb pdf of Heidi's thesis). - http://www.hpadkisson.com/papers/hpa_thesis_final.pdf
I met Heidi at the IA Summit in Portland, and think that this will be a great resource for the community. I'm hesitant about considering common practice to be best practice (as gets implied in surveys like this), but it's good to consider if something really is a de facto standard, and what reasons your own project has for doing things differently.
found on http://www.iaslash.org
Posted by richard ting at September 05, 2003, 01:03 AM
August 27, 2003
Information Architecture Resources
Don't Make Me Think by Steven Krug
Web Site Usability Handbook by Mark Pearrow
Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielson
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman
All three Tufte books
Books I don't own but have heard are interesting:
The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
Information Architecture by Christina Wodtke
www.argus-acia.com
www.uiweb.com/other/chiweb.htm (two big IA list-serves.)
good online IA journal:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com
Posted by richard ting at August 27, 2003, 10:28 AM
August 25, 2003
Usability Testing?
What is usability? How, when, and where can you improve it?
Why should you care? This overview answers these basic questions.
