PUBLIC MARKS from amyrussell with tag uxd

This past weekend I was up on Howell Mountain in Napa, tasting the ultra tasty wines there and taking in the gorgeous views. On the way back to SF, we stopped at a Shell gas station. It took me a good 20 minutes to gas up. Why? Lousy user experience. Let me explain.

My colleagues Matt Nolker and Shalom Sandalow have put together a nice little webinar entitled "This Won’t Hurt a Bit": Designing the Invisible Interface.. For those of us writing Web 2.0 applications, there are some key insights here, such as: "interacting with the software is not the primary goal or responsibility of the user." So when you use those nifty Ajax widgets, think about whether you are placing a usability burden on the user or are using the power of Ajax to make the interface disappear.

I've been a tad bit busy lately starting up one project and entering the UAT phase of another. More importantly, though, I'm still alive in my Pick a Loser football pool (for those of you keeping track, Arizona kept me in the game). In the meantime, here are some links you may or may not find interesting -- click away at will:

FYI, my company has just released a whitepaper on integrating Agile Development and UXD (User Experience Design), a subject of great interest to anyone developing Ajax/Web 2.0 apps. As the complexity and sophistication of our webapps increase, we have to rise to the challenge of making them easy to use. The whitepaper is an overview of some of the best practices and ideas from our own experiences of bringing our UXD and Agile Appdev practices together. Warning: the paper is free but requires registration (i.e. an email). So, if you are easily annoyed by this sort of thing, you probably don't want to click on the link above.