Blogging on User Interface and experience

A nice slide show

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Did it for work….

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Tags: usability, slide,

“The Telegraph newspaper reports that over-50s are invading sites like Facebook and MySpace in massive numbers. A recent study showed that nearly one third of Facebook users are aged between 35 and 54, and that this group also made up 41 percent of MySpace users. “Because the mind of an over-50 is likely superior to that of a drink-addled undergrad, at first there was uncertainty about whether older users would find the Facebook-led social-networking phenomena attractive.” Looks like dad just turned up to the party.”

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In my opinion, the greatness of facebook is its distribution system.
This system use several psychological tools:
An app acceptance’s is based on the credibility of my friends - by distribution.
An app acceptance’s is based on the credibility of facebook - by design.
Making the application part of a profile is a 3 click process.

Enjoy the movie

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A talk by Adaptivepaths Peter Merholtz.
It is something to show your boss to get him on the experience team side (A little bit long but have some take aways).

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A Video by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue.
Great talk about simplicity in design - funny and inspiring

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/7

Enjoy!!!  

Tags: Talk, David Pogue, simplicity

Flock - a social browser has a great tool - screen shoot. This tool give a possibility to “photocopy” an entire web page, above and below the fold.
These Images can be of use when I want to study the structure of a page,
see the relationship between above the fold items and below the fold,
and study methods used (like tutorials) or study the competition.

Another great use for page photocopy is paper prototyping, and once in a while, it even comes up in a board presentation.

During my work on Websites, I found my self looking for a way to “photocopy” a complete web page (including fold), some tools I found, but many times I found my self cutting and pasting….
The flock tool is a great tool for UI professionals.

There is a browser out there named flock, it has very interesting features, including social tools, blogging tools, social bookmarks tools and over fun feel.
The most interesting thing about it is the overwhelming amount of data on each page and how my eyes got used to it so quick.
You would think this is a very crowded view, but once you make good of some tools on the left and figure out those are just tools (like the blog editor I am using right now) you focus all your attention on the main part of it, and just have a very quick access to what ever you need.

I have been playing with it for several hours now, after I got a recommendation from a friend and I pass on this recommendation - Flock, give it a try http://www.flock.com/RC3/

But are we blind to tools? once we learn tools, we place them, one of the first things users do (according to eye tracking systems) is map all the action Items in a page.
We look for those action buttons again only if we need them and then we look in the places we mapped them before.

Flock sure makes a good use of this trait.

D.

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Tags: flock, new, Interface

After hearing this sentence too many times from developers I start to wonder do they need us? I guess they don’t. User interaction experts just make their life more complicated. So who need us? The users of course, and this certainty is caused by the programmers ideas and solutions to interaction issues. By no means I take the programmers’ work lightly, nor encouraging not to listen to them.

Many times programmers vision is limited by their knowledge, experience and the desire to experience with new technology. The latest example is three state check box in a web application (MSDN, example). For those of you who say three states is normal considering check, not checked and disabled, I address here an additional state (that makes four states total) which can be described as slightly checked. My opinion is that option should be deprecated until some one will explain me why it is needed.

Any way listening to the programmers is good, especially when working on a detailed design of the interaction. The analytic nature of their work and the ambition to identify stages, actions, event and responses can discover missed interaction scenarios. The more detailed the design is it is simpler for the programmer to understand and implement the interaction correctly. But this raises a problem, the user interaction expert becomes the writer of a major part of the system specification document. This sounds good from the point of view of user centered design (UCD), but such a tight integration requires the UI expert to be a system analyst as well. This is not good…

Many UI experts basic education is computer science, but as this is a multidisciplinary profession some are graphic designers or from the field of cognitive science. That makes a mess, especially when talking to a programmer, in some cases they even don’t share the same vocabulary. Then the programmer say “I think the best thing for the user is…”

For all of you there, doing god’s good work:

The IPhone human interface Guide!!!

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/iPhone/
Conceptual/iPhoneHIG/

Enjoy.

A must see. I got this movie from techcrunch.com

Do your selves a favor and watch this to the end.

Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch, who has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer (see his blog for details), gave his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University last week. He gives excellent advice on how to live your life and achieve your most outrageous dreams. It’s a must see for entrepreneurs, and really anyone looking for a refresher course on living life to achieve your maximum creative potential.