PUBLIC MARKS from greut with tag design

Activity-Centered Design (ACD) focuses on the activity context in which individuals interact with your product. Instead of analyzing specific goals and tasks, ACD focuses on the analysis of meaningful, goal-directed actions supported by tools and artifacts in a social world

For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP! The job’s a game!

My grand-father was saying: life is a game

Our software is as brittle as 15-20 years ago. Reusable objects and framework superstructures have failed. UML has failed. Even design pattern have failed as they turned out to be more idiomatic than universal. What’s left are lightweight programming languages which let us glue things together. Some are user friendly and don’t suck badly. That’s still the best we have.

Lua, are you there?

I’ve recently been working on an implementation of cookie-based authentication for CouchDB. This is important for pure CouchDB applications (couchapps), where browsers communicate directly with CouchDB. Currently browsers can be authenticated using HTTP basic auth but the popup login box can be disruptive and confusing for users.

don't miss the picture.

In general, most people think they’re building an everyday app, but they’re not. When the actual use patterns are discovered, most apps will be used every few days or less. Designers have to ask themselves a very hard question: “How often are people really going to use our web application?”.

Decisions vs. Choices

The difference between choices and decisions is subtle , some of it has to do with the quality of your ingredients and some of it has to do with compromise at the wrong stage of development. Is the process all that matters? A process that is used to constantly create new possible options and choose from those instead of making Frankenstein out of the options given? The design process will constantly emphasize the goal in the iteration of options leading to a choice. I don’t think that definition clear, but it’s the best we came up with.

hackers and painters

2nd International Workshop on Mobile Internet User eXperience

The presentations given that year

If you can’t remove yourself from architecture or design so that you can concentrate on managing the project, it’s time to choose. Either manage this project or become one of the technical staff. But don’t try to do both.

I'm not the only one to think that Architect and PM aren't playing well together.

In our research, we found that the most effective teams were skilled in all five styles, choosing the style that best fit the needs and goals of a project. For example, they might concurrently be involved in deep research on a User-Focused project, while relying on their experience for a Genius designed project, and spend a little time whipping out some one-shot functionality whose results would be Unintended Design.

Since the teams are working with different styles all the time, does it matter? Our research says it does. The teams that produced the best experiences knew these styles well and how to quickly switch between them. They knew when they needed to go whole hog and pull out all the stops for a User-Focused style project, while also knowing when it was important to bang out a quick design, knowing the results would essentially be unintended. Those teams had a rich toolbox of techniques and a solid understanding on how and when to use them.

There is no silver bullet.

Generally, in that group, there will be one or two loud voices. Maybe an Alpha Male or two. The important thing to note is that this is a small group. It will be difficult to reach common ground with a small amount of people.

ouch... that is my daily job.

IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU LIKE IT

Yes it doesn’t matter. Some of my most effective and successful designs from an analytics/statistics standpoint are not ones that I particularly like. That is because I am not the user, and I think and interpret visuals differently than psychology scholars (or any other given user base)

follow the link to the experiment made by Drupal, nice idea very nice.

We recently published "How people really use the iPhone", an interesting readout of design issues and recommendations for people designing for the iPhone and beyond. Our presentation on this topic at the iPhone Developer's Summit was called the "best presentation of the conference" by several attendees.

Some of the problem exposed applies to other system imho.

A good UI should fade away, putting content in the front seat — it should be transparent. Sometimes there can be too much ‘UI’ — controls and buttons that are too strong and distracting win over content in their battle for attention.

A recent lengthy discussion in the Interaction Design Association focused on the placement of actions in Web forms that span several Web pages. The quintessential question underlying this debate is: can an action which leads people to the previous step of a process be placed to the right of an action that leads users to the next step of a process?

yet another great article.

Forms that are laid out vertically with the prompts to the left of the form control have the advantage that the user can quickly scan down the left-hand side to determine what type of information they are required to provide. This is generally the best approach, although not always practical. For example, in languages such as German (emphasis added) where some words are a lot longer than others, it can create a situation where some prompts may be a long way from their associated form control, which obviously has an impact on usability. In these circumstances, positioning the prompt above the form control may be more appropriate.

bloddy German

“Excessive distances between some labels and their input fields forced users unnecessarily to take more time to interact visually with the form.”

how form layout performs.

I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood why people buy beautiful products, if you think it’s all about projection. While there’s certainly something to that (and I see absolutely no shame in that either!), it’s at the core about people feeling good about that which is pretty. That doesn’t make us shallow, that just makes us human.

hell…

Standard news readers organize feeds into groups, and then under each feed are items. If there's an unread item in a feed, the feed's name is bold. If you leave the cursor on an item long enough the feed name goes un-bold. These programs work much like mail readers, so much so that they are sometimes even integrated into mail readers.

the concept of "river of news" origin

Not a line I draw ends up on an end‑user screen. Not a word I write is compiled into code. Not a sentence I say instructs users. I draw, write and talk to enable the specialists I work with to excel at what they do and realise inspiring software for my clients.

I’m not a graphic designer, I am an interaction architect.

An interface should be effective, habituating, reliable, efficient, and tested. To the extent that doing so does not conflict with these essentials, an interface should also be attractive.