Category: User Experience Design
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Performative Diagramming
The cover of Bill Moggridge’s excellent Designing Interactions features a sketch/diagram that looks intriguing at first glance. But then when you actually try to figure out what it means, you’re stumped. I tried, but I couldn’t even scratch the surface. Inside the book itself, we learn that the diagram is based on sketches that Bill…
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The Holy Grail of Information Architecture
In a recent blog post, Garret Dimon claims to be hot on the trail of something fabulous: I don’t have the details worked out yet, but I’m slowly putting together a vision of how we can really document web applications in a pragmatic way. The primary driver is to create something that people can understand,…
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Usability Foxes Guarding the Henhouse
On the NYC-CHI mailing list today, someone from a big web shop wrote this: My company is dismantling its focus group and usability testing lab, due to a chronic lack of space and clients’ growing reluctance to allow our agency to do testing on our own work. Behavior‘s thinking has always been that it takes…
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Early Adopter vs. Efficient Person
As a UI developer, I want to be an “early adopter” of as many new technologies and gizmos as possible. Even if they’re clunky, non-helpful, efficiency drain tools, I feel like it’s my obligation to be well-informed about the latest gadgets and websites. So I’m often downloading trial versions, and occasionally checking out a friend’s…
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Other People’s ‘Puters
Christmas tree photo by Peggy During the holidays, as many Americans visit and spend time with their extended families, those of us in the web design industry get a chance to do a little user research — with our own loved ones as test subjects. Sure, most of us have watched other people use computers…
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TV News is Vaudeville
On election night last week, we were channel surfing and comparing the coverage by the various networks. We ended up for a spell at Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert exchanged snappy banter with each other in a kind of parody of network news coverage. Surprisingly, there was a part of me that…