Category: Information Architecture
-
User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Interlude: Data Interpreted Badly
Here’s a great and succint case study of how user research data can be easily misinterpreted, and a great example about why we should always be suspicious of statistics. The marketing blog at FutureLab (which I do recommend) has a short post today entitled “Study Shows Fear of MySpace Predators is Overblown“. The research paper…
-
User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 2: Research as a Design Tool
(This is Part 2. Please read Part 1 first.) An eyetracking “heatmap” showing in red where users’ eyes were pointing for the longest time during a page-view. There is a limit, I think, to what a so-called “empirical” user interface test can tell you. At some point, the results must be interpreted in order to…
-
User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 1: Design vs. Science
Research-based design is a noble and widely-admired approach to building good products, especially in the web design field. Like a great many other user experience design firms, at Behavior we conduct research whenever possible, to whatever degree our clients’ budgets and timelines will allow. Our projects frequently involve usability testing (both lab-based and informal), card-sorting…
-
When Links Lie
It’s always been perfectly acceptable to me to have an underlined text link in the center of a large graphic, suggesting that the user should click the text link when, in reality, the user can click anywhere on the entire image to the exact same effect. In other words, the text link is something of…
-
The View From the Other Side of the Microscope
Photo by Liz Danzico The AIGA is currently in the throes of a major web site redesign. Liz Danzico, the AIGA’s Experience Strategy Director, invited me and about 7 other design industry types to attend a card-sorting exercise to help their design team understand how the AIGA’s users think about the types of content and…
-
Microsoft Word’s Useless Buttons
It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example,…
-
The Vicious Cycle of Web Redesign
Do we really need to keep all this stuff? Can we throw some stuff away before we move in? When we pack our belongings to move to a new apartment or house, we often take stock of our posessions and choose to throw a lot of useless stuff away. We lighten our load so that…
-
A Tale of Two Libraries 1: Mapping and Thinking at the NYPL
Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved…
-
The Scope Creep
“Scope Creep”, also known as “Feature Creep” and “Creeping Featuritis“, is the tendency of development teams to constantly find opportunities to add new features to a product. It is widely considered to be deadly: It’s obviously destructive to project schedules, but adding new features also has an enormous impact on much more than just the…