Flash is Ajax, or Flash versus Ajax, at the Ajax Summit

One of the more interesting debates at the Ajax Summit this week concerned Flash and its relationship to or inclusion in Ajax. The discussion was more interesting because of the Flash demo that Kevin Lynch (CTO of Macromedia, the makers of Flash) gave on the first day -- and maybe also simply because he was there at the table.

Kevin's demo showed a Flash graphing application interacting with JavaScript on a web page -- both while initially loading and later, after receiving input from the user on the page (outside of the Flash movie). (Kevin later wrote up some of the details of this.) Cool example. (Via O'Reilly Radar)

Webooti: the uber-simple computer

Okay, so while we fancy ourselves big nerds over here at Engadget, we realize there are actually people out there who aren’t on constant lookout for ever more droolworthy computer hardware (though we don’t understand them). We’ve got room in our hearts for the non-tech-savvy, and we love them to bits, but we’re still gonna give them computers as gifts. Luckily, we can bestow something that won’t scare them by giving the gift of webooti, an ultra-simple PC designed for the technically frightened. And they’re right: with a Pentium II 300Mhz, 128MB RAM, and 8GB hard disk, that thing cannot possibly frighten anyone. Plus, it’s called “webooti,” and if that’s not completely harmless, we don’t know what is. (Via engadget)

I wonder what the interface looks like. What software does it run? Check here for the manufacturer ...

Longhorn To Focus on Visual Improvements, Usability

Longhorn will include several visual improvements, such as icons that show content from the documents they represent. The software also is expected to introduce more intuitive ways of organizing files as well as faster searching.

Longhorn also will include a number of visual improvements such as icons that show content from the documents they represent. The software also is expected to introduce more intuitive ways of organizing files as well as faster searching.

Charney said the features will work even without a new file system that was originally scheduled to ship with Longhorn. The updated file system, called WinFS, is now slated to be available in a preview release when the final version of Longhorn is shipped in late 2006. (Via Enterprise Linux I.T.)

Transforming Data into Meaning for Rapid Decision-Making

This is a very innovative interface. The following information is on the website. But you have to see the Dynamic Demo.

Enterprises invest vast amounts of resources aggregating and processing data. Unfortunately, this data is not in a form that can be used to drive decision-making. There is no ability to see the forest and the trees; to step back and see the data that impacts the business or drill down to get at the important details, all within a meaningful context.

Visual i|o solves this problem. Over the past decade, we have developed a library of core technologies deployed at the presentation tier that provide executives, project managers and decision-makers with an entirely new class of simple, clear, powerful applications. With Visual i|o, the enterprise can finally turn the mountains of data into clear pictures of the business, enabling rapid, effective decision-making. (Via Visual i|o)

Nifty Sun.com Search Enhancement

Amid all the commotion of the redesign last week, we also sneaked out a neat little search enhancement: term highlighting in the destination pages.

Though we've had term highlighting since around 1996 on docs.sun.com (Google since about 1998), this is the first time we've made it available across sites.

Just do a search on sun.com. Next to the result link listing of your choice, click the "new window" icon (the little double boxes -- see screenshot) for a new window complete with term highlighting. There are little arrows on either side of the term to take you to the next, or previous instance (handy for long pages like technical documentation, etc). (Via Sun.com)

The Optimal Design Roadmap

As interaction designers, we often have to deal with what interaction pieces to include in a product. At some point, we come to a discussion with project management and it goes something like this:

Designer: “These interaction pieces need to be in this product for it to be usable” PM: “Well we don’t have the time/money/people to do all of that.”

At which point you have to choose what to cut, or more accurately, what gets to stay. While it’s great to come up with what we believe to be an optimal user experience, it’s easy to forget that when realities of project schedules hit, something in the experience needs to be sacrificed.

Which begs the question, should a unified interface, designed to fit perfectly together, be done at all? Perhaps we should design something more piece meal, where we can prioritise how much each piece impacts the experience and thus elect to not implement certain aspects and mostly keep the experience at the best it can be. (Via OK/Cancel)

Ajax, Ajax Everywhere

You know how the web works, right? You click a link in a browser and your computer says, "hey server, send me this page." And the server says, "sure, here ya go." And you see the page. Click, rinse, repeat.

Ajax, and the pile of techniques and technologies that get lumped in with it, are all about breaking that page-by-page web experience into smaller chunks. If the traditional web was letter writing, Ajax is instant messaging.

The more compelling examples are the smaller ones. If you're a Flickr user, and you've ever clicked on a photo title to edit it, that's Ajax. Or explore Dunstan Orchard's fabulous LiveSearch, which presents search results as you type. Or explore any of the new web apps from 37 Signals. Ajax, Ajax everywhere.

Put simply, Ajax lets web pages to go back to the server for updates in between page refreshes. Before, once you got the page, you were done. But now, with Ajax, the page can respond with server smarts as you interact with it. (Via Powazek)

Lot's on Ajax, but this is a good explanation ...

O'Reilly and Adaptive Path Team Up for Ajax Summit

No part of Ajax is truly new; its youngest piece is more than five years old, which for all practical purposes is about half the age of the Web itself. So why are Adaptive Path and O'Reilly Media excited enough to have a summit? Certainly, its use in new cutting-edge web apps like Google Maps has something to do with it.

Ajax advocate James Jesse Garrett, founder of Adaptive Path, says it's because Ajax offers a "philosophy of technology" that describes a new way of creating applications on the Web. Ajax applications feel more like desktop applications, except with the real-time internet data part that you get from being on a web page. "The wall between the desktop and the Web is coming down." He sees a relationship between Ajax and desktop applications similar to Apple's new Dashboard, which uses tools more familiar to web developers than to the heavy lifters like Cocoa programmers. (Via O'Reilly Network)

The Vision of Good User Experience

THERE HAS BEEN MUCH DISCUSSION among organizations and practitioners lately about the ownership of the user experience. So, who owns it? Or to put it another way, who is responsible for the user experience and makes it work? What I have found is that the most important contributor to the design of a successful user experience is a leader with a vision.

It’s the leader who takes the vision of the total user experience and makes it work. The leader sees the big picture and combines and synthesizes, adding individuals with skill and knowledge in the right places to contribute to the vision. The leader’s critically important role is to set the vision and hold tight to it. The vision is the easiest thing to lose, and when a product team loses its vision, the project becomes ordinary and the user experience disjointed.

So, who can take this leadership role and own the user experience? I believe that it could be anybody who cares about the user experience, anybody who can see the bigger picture and who believes that user experiences can be designed. It could be a visual designer, a usability consultant, a creative director, a project manager, an information architect, or a user experience architect—anyone within the user experience field. (Via Interactions Magazine)

This article is in PDF format ...

Reverse-Engineering Passion

Like all good geeks, I can't let something important remain unanalyzed. If we're talking about passion, we better know a little something about what that means. The best way to create passionate users is to figure out:

1) What it looks like when people are passionate about something
2) What kind of things people are passionate about
and finally...
3) The characteristics of the things people are passionate about

We're not going to leave it to chance or fads.

This post is about #1, What it looks like when people are passionate. This defines why we want it. It defines our goal! We hear people talking about wanting (or already having) "passionate users", but when they describe what it looks like, it's closer to "satisfied and happy" users. And since we're going for the full passion monty here, we can't stop with that. (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Ken Norton: Humans at both ends of the rope

Ken Norton nailed something critical in The web is full of tags

There are humans at both ends of the rope. It seems so simple, but technologies that can rely on this fact have a huge advantage, since the human brain is terrific at signal extraction in environments that consistenly defeat machine strategies. This is one of the reasons that semweb-flavored approaches to metadata attempt to express data in an unambiguous format — if there is a machine at the other end of the rope, even slight ambiguities defeat the recipient’s interpretive capabilities. As the man said, time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.

Once you have humans at both ends of the rope, though, even purely contextual tags that are unextractable from the tagged content itself, tags like cool and toread, become valuable. This is why attempts to improve tagging by making it less ambiguous are missing the point — the ambiguity allows for a huge reduction of both markup cost and conceptual brittleness, by involving human brains as the final endpoints. (Via You're It!)

The web is full of tags

There's been a bit of discussion lately about search and tagging (or "folksonomy"). Recently my friends Danny Sullivan (here and here) and Gary Price (here) have commented. I had dinner with Gary a few months ago in New York, so in addition to his published comments I know where he's coming from. Now, I'm the first to agree that tagging has a long way to go before it's accessible to millions of web users, but it holds a ton of promise. They both make a lot of great points about how usable this stuff is for the general web population.

But, sadly, I think they both miss the mark. Danny has picked a poor analogy for tagging - meta keywords. The meta keyword tag allows content publishers to insert keywords into their pages that describe the content. Since the keyword tag is invisible in a browser, it promised to be a mechanism for delivering metadata to search engines. It was a dismal failure. (Via Hey Norton!)

Industry Leaders Join Effort to Improve Mobile Web User Experience

Today, at the WWW2005 Conference, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the launch of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) - an endeavor to make Web access from a mobile device as simple, easy, and convenient as Web access from a desktop device.

"Mobile access to the Web has been a second class experience for far too long," explained Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile Web experience worthwhile."

W3C has launched the Mobile Web Initiative to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality. (Via PhysOrg)

Zeldman on tag clouds

Jeffrey Zeldman’s recent post on tag clouds has gotten some play elsewhere, but not here so I thought I’d mention it. It’s not quite as spot-on as his usual commentary, but it raises an interesting question about tag clouds: are they making good use of Fitts’ Law or just reinforcing herd behaviour?

The idea behind tag clouds is that users know best. Their actions determine how other users navigate. Their choices leave a trail. Typically, though not always, the “important” topics get big while those considered less important (which in this case only means less popular) get small. Once they get small enough, they disappear.

In Flickr and Technorati, users create their own tags (“design,” “cats,” “California”). When enough people have used the same tag, it begins to show up in the cloud. Once a lot of people have used it, it becomes a visually dominant element, encouraging others to click it — and subtly discouraging them from creating their own tags.

Beyond the cloud there are many interesting ways we could visualize the, um, tag-geist if you will. What about tag abandonment, or clustering by social group, or unique users, or changes in frequency? Obviously there’s lots of room for innovation here.

Aside: the del.icio.us shades-of-red technique gets my vote as the best popularity interface. It’s subtle, effective and actually useful. (Via You're It! )

Best Blog Post of 2005 from Seth Godin

This could be the best blog post I’ve read in 2005. Seth Godin, in his post titled On Critics, Criticism and Remarkability, writes:

“We don’t choose to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We hesitate to create innovative movies, launch new human resource initiatives, design a menu that makes diners take notice or give an audacious sermon because we’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it and call us on it.”

Read the whole thing. I think he’s right. We all have a choice to be remarkable or not. From here on out, I’m choosing Yes. (Via Bokardo)

This is the full article...

The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design

The role of metaphor in interaction design has oft been maligned and usually misunderstood. Metaphor has been called “not only unhelpful, but harmful” (Cooper, 1995) in design, and is typically thought of as being limiting, scaling poorly, and leading to faulty thinking about how products work.

However, properly used, metaphor can be a powerful tool for designers, in both the process of designing and within the products themselves. Metaphor can help redefine design problems and help solve them. It can be used as a research tool, to understand new subject areas, or as means to generate new ideas about familiar subjects. It can help sell a product, both to internal stakeholders and teammates as well as to consumers. Metaphors can provide cues to users how to understand products: to orient and personify. In short, interaction designers can use metaphor to change behavior.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that without metaphor, interaction design today would be severely limited, especially in the digital realm. After all, no one addresses his computer without some metaphoric mediation; we do not speak machine language. Metaphor provides us with the means to understand our complex digital devices. (Via )

This is a Masters Thesis in PDF format ...

They Want To Believe...

In the beginning, it was about features. Products were new, barriers to entry were high, and there just wasn't that much competition. By the eighties, it had become all about benefits, and any salesperson (or advertiser/marketer/brand manager) worth his Mont Blanc pen knew he had to answer the customer's "what's in it for me?" question.

The brain scientists (and marketing research) convinced us that despite what users and customers claimed, they made decisions based NOT on logical feature-for-feature comparisons, but on an emotional response. So we focused our "unique selling propositions" on benefits that we knew (or hoped) would touch the right button, implying that what we offered made you richer, slimmer, sexier... someone others would respect, love, or envy. We called those "meaningful benefits", things that the prospective customer valued.

The idea of "meaningful benefits" still applies, but something has started to shift.

Something big. (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Ajax: 99% Bad

Ajax was coined by Mr Garrett of Adaptive Path in his essay Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications. This was on February 18, 2005, and even though it's only been under three months, the term has spread quickly.

Before defining Ajax in detail, Mr Garret described two examples: "Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web."

So as not to be left without specifics, Mr Garrett goes on to describe the components of Ajax in detail: "standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS; dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model; data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT; asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest; and JavaScript binding everything together." It's certainly a mouthful, which is why having a nice, friendly name like Ajax is so helpful. So what's the problem?

99% Bad? (Via Johnnie Manzari)

AJAX summit continued 3

Day two of the O'reilly/Adaptive Path AJAX confab in SF started as a continuation of day 1, with a series of presenters showing off their latest AJAX tricks.

Dunstan Orchard from Odeo / Apple spoke immediately before I did. He advocated writing a non-AJAX, basic html application first, and then adding in AJAX as “sugar”. This obviously facilitates backwards-compatibility, but it just as clearly limits the scope for AJAX-based interaction: AJAX is reduced to a tactical optimization rather than being central to the design. This is actually an eminently practical approach, particularly for large consumer sites (like apple) that demand backwards compatibility, and cannot afford to eliminate even corner-case browsers (like IE 5 on the Mac). (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

Mind: Resources

A series of slide presentations about User Experience:

May 10, 2005 My slides from Blurred Boundaries/Focused Solutions.

April 1, 2005 My slides from DevGroup NW.

March 14, 2005 My slides from SXSW Interactive 2005.

March 3, 2005 My slides from User Experience and Usability 2005. " (Via knemeyer.com)

Some thoughts on elegance

We posted earlier regarding the inspiration that can result when designing with restrictions. Be it an innovative house shoe-horned into a bustling city or terraced fields laboriously persuaded from the hillsides, these designs share a common logic, a common trait: Elegance.

Akin to quality, elegance is a matter of opinion. Though often unverbalized, it is frequently utilized as a main criterion for both designing & judging our designs.

The dictionary defines elegance as grace and ingenious simplicity. We propose that in design elegance is a solution so succinct that it calls for no further adjustments; requires nary a second glance...it just feels right. Some folks specialize in that kind of perfection.

One such designer, Edward Tufte, devotes his career to studying and creating visual elegance. Tufte specializes in information design, specifically on the best methods for picturing nouns, verbs, and numbers. He has written a trilogy on the subject (not to mention The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint) in which he castigates obfuscatory (read: confusing) designs. But he doesn't stop there, rather proactively he suggests improvements as well as methods for simplifying and intensifying content. Additionally, Tufte lauds several examples of elegant informative design. (Via IDFuel)

Yahoo plucks Amazon.com design guru

Internet giant Yahoo has named Larry Tesler, a veteran design engineer at Amazon.com, to lead efforts in shaping its consumer experience.

Tesler, 60, will be vice president of Yahoo's user experience and design group, reporting to Geoff Ralston, the company's chief product officer. He will also be a research fellow in Yahoo's Research Lab, focusing on "human-computer interaction."

Tesler helped craft Amazon's shopping experience over the last three-plus years as a vice president for the Web retail behemoth. He has also held positions at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, and at Apple Computer, where he worked for 17 years as chief scientist and vice president of engineering, among other roles. (Via CNET)

Ten Questions for Joe Clark

Joe Clark is a Toronto journalist, author, and accessibility consultant and has been dubbed the king of closed captions by the Atlantic Monthly. Joe is the author of one of the most informative and detailed books on accessibility - Building Accessible Websites. An occasionally-sought-after speaker and accessibility consultant for major organizations in Canada and the US, Joe has written over 400 articles for online and print journals and spoken around the world. (Via Web Standards Group)

Five simple steps to better typography

Typography, I find, is still a bit of mystery to a lot of designers. The kind of typography I’m talking about is not your typical “What font should I use” typography but rather your “knowing your hanging punctuation from your em-dash” typography. Call me a little bit purist but this bothers me.

So, in an attempt to spread the word here’s the first of five simple steps to better typography. To kick it off, part one is about the Measure.

It's our responsibility, as designers, to embrace the rules which are born of a craft which goes back hundreds of years. (Via Mark Boulton)

Infographics, design and visual journalism

This 50-pages document was created for the Multimedia Bootcamp 2005 in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It contains a brief introduction to infographics, its history and rules, and a discussion of several real cases of elmundo.es online special and breaking-news presentations. (Via Alberto Cairo)

This is a 50 page download ...

Mobile Web Initiative

World Wide Web technologies have become the key enablers for access to the Internet through desktop and notebook computing platforms. Web technologies have the potential to play the same role for Internet access from mobile devices. However, today, mobile Web access suffers from interoperability and usability problems that make the Web difficult to use for most mobile phone subscribers. W3C’s "Mobile Web Initiative” (W3C MWI) proposes to address these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.

Currently, the W3C MWI is focussing on developing "best practices" for "mobileOK" Web sites, work on device information needed for content adaptation, and marketing and outreach activities. (Via W3C)

WWW 2005 Notes

I’m currently at the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan. Some notes from the W4A2005 workshop:

* The aDesigner visual disability simulator (screenshots) looks like an interesting tool to get an idea of a website’s accessibility - Windows only, though.

* Wendy Chisholm: WCAG 2.0 (currently in Working Draft stage) will be more precisely testable (by humans, with the help of tools) and easier to use than WCAG 1.0. Transition from WCAG 1.0 to 2.0 also shouldn’t be that hard. Those interested might want to check the WCAG 2.0 introduction page.

* It seems there’s a lot of work going on in the field of (intermediary) content extraction tools that attempt to de-clutter web pages and just keep the relevant content (which can then be passed on to a text-to-speech engine, etc): Crunch is one of these tools. (Via wg)

More ...

User Interface Design (Broadcast)

Bill Weir, a specialist in Web site design, takes us through the essential elements of creating user-friendly Web sites. We'll see how the entire history of page design in books, magazines, and newspapers has influenced user expectations and can help Web designers accomplish their task. At the end of the show, Chris Kilbourn, president and chief technology officer of Digitalforest.com, explores the mystique of Macintosh users on the web. (Via UWTV Program)

This is a broadcast from University of Washington available at specific times ...

An Interview with Edward R. Tufte

The intellectual tradition with which Tufte’s ideas are most clearly aligned is not rhetoric or even human factors theory. Rather, it is cognitive science. His principles of visual display are predicated on the idea that excellence in visual design is largely realized through the creation of graphics that correspond with the mental tasks they are meant to support. So, as he argues, “If the thinking task is to understand causality, the task calls for a design principle: ‘Show causality.’ If a thinking task is to answer a question and compare it with alternatives, the design principle is ‘Show comparisons.’”

His emphasis on identifying design principles that support cognitive tasks has led him to distance his work from other arenas that also deal in design, such as marketing, propaganda, and commercial production for mass markets. Rather than spending time thinking about howdesignworks in arenas such as these,Tufte opts to study designs that are primarily meant to help people reason about data and how the data may be used. As he said, “At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning.” (Via Technical Communication Quarterly)

This is an in-depth interview in PDF format ...

AJAX summit continued

Many of the morning presenters were presenting little web tweaks: tactical improvements to a site that make it just a little bit faster, easier, or have a clearer workflow. Technorati and Flickr both showed the minor improvements that they have made to their sites. These tweaks sound like they were a LOT of work to do. This is a big problem with AJAX: doing it “right” (for all browsers) means taking on a lot of technical complexity.


One of the best demos so far have been, ironically enough, from Kevin Lynch at Macromedia (an AJAX/Flash hybrid application that uses both flash and dynamic html). Here’s a link.

Sabre demoed an incredible AJAX-enabled table that can page through / sort tables holding hundreds of thousands of records). They will be releasing the source for their framework (called RICO) in a week or so. No links so far, I will post once they go live with it. (Via Jonathan Boutelle)

AJAX Summit

I’m at the O'Reilly Adaptive Path AJAX Summit today and tomorrow with a lot of smart folks. Notes of each talk are showing up online including some overviews of my talk (Jonathan Boutelle, Ajaxian) which referenced last month's Web Application Solutions: A Designer’s Guide. (Via Functioning Form)

Several papers are shown online ...

The case for easter eggs (and other clever user treats)

My previous post on user treats drew some arguments both for--and passionately against easter eggs in software. But in each of the arguments against easter eggs, the reason is virtually the same: "Why the hell are you spending your time creating these "surprises" when you haven't even bothered to fix the glaring bugs?"

So let's get this out of the way right now...

* Until you've nailed the fundamentals--the things users want, need, and expect--don't bother trying to "surprise and delight" users. That just pisses 'em off.

* A good easter egg is a playful, hidden or disguised feature that, when discovered, can offer surprise, delight, entertainment, humor, novelty, or an "I Rule" experience. (Via Creating Passionate Users)

LG Electronics LCD monitors sweep top design awards

The slimmest monitor ‘LX80 series’ grabbed the Reddot Design Award 2005, one of Europe’s two most prestigious design awards with the IF Design Awards. Launched in 1955, the Reddot Design Award goes to products with outstanding designs. The award-winning products are able to feature the Red Dot accreditation mark, and are recognized worldwide for their design excellence. The LX80 series also received great appraisals at the CES 2005 held in Las Vegas which led to appearances on CNN HEADLINE News and CBS News as an innovative product.

At the same time, the beautifully crafted ‘LX40 series’ received the 51st ‘iF Material Design Award’ from the International Forum Design (iF), a Germany-based world’s authoritative industrial design association, for commitment to design and technical excellence. LX40 series show its excellence with design, and its environment-friendly and customer-friendly factors which include no lead and anion generation.

In addition, the innovative arched back design of the LX40 series, which can be compared to a human bodyline, has won the highest praise from the world design industry such as the world famous Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who is well-known for his car art design including Volkswagen Golf, BMW Nazca, appraised LG Electronics’ LX40 series as follows: “This is not a design. It’s a poem.” (Via PhysOrg)

Solutionless puzzle: The dreaded "S" labels

Tim Bray points out recently what a wishy washy label "Solutions" is, and how we have this 'vile word' in multiple places on the new Sun home page. Tim's rant is also my rant... and the rant of every information architect and designer at every high tech company. We all hate "Solutions!" Or at least, we hate this wretched label because it is so meaningless. But the truth is, without a "Solutions & Services" section, where would things like Sun Grid live? Or information about datacenter consolidation services? Or information about Identity and Security in Government? Or managed services? Though it doesn't excuse the label, there are more things in the world than will fit into a product catalog.

The "Solutions" label problem illustrates the problem all companies have in creating a good information architecture, which must simultaneously:

Provide clear names for anything that a customer might want to navigate to, paying particular attention to the main missions and tasks on the web site (we have a list of common customer tasks, including their need to understand what kinds of services and 'solutions' are offered by Sun beyond point products)
Provide a home for all the things a company does and wants to talk about this (we have this also, in the form of content inventories and site maps)

The trick is to come up with a organized navigational framework (an "information architecture") that groups things into logical categories so that your site visitors can find things. There are some pretty classic methods you can use to ferret out good labels and structures... (Via Sun.com)

GUI Design Studio

GUI Design Studio is a graphical user interface design tool for Microsoft Windows that you can use to rapidly create demonstration prototypes without any coding or scripting.

However, it is important to understand the limitations of these prototypes. This is a user interface design tool not an application development tool. The only behaviour that is currently supported is the ability to navigate between windows; to click on a screen element and make another modal or modeless window, panel or other item appear or disappear. This includes the creation of cascading menus, popup modal dialogs, combo box drop-downs, tabbed interfaces and many other idioms.

Beyond such behaviour, the controls themselves are non-interactive. So, for example, you can't type into edit boxes or change the check state of check boxes. To do so would be somewhat pointless without coded functionality to act on the data or state changes. Such functionality is beyond the scope of the tool. (Via ru_ucdesign)

Why Consistency is Critical [Usability and Information Architecture]

There is little doubt that consistency is important for users. Consistency makes sites easier to use, because visitors don't have to learn new tricks as they move around.

Sites should be internally consistent: standards and conventions should be established and applied throughout all the content. For example, a user who encounters the "Search" at the top right on one page will have problems if it's arbitrarily moved to different locations on other pages of the site.

Sites also need to be externally consistent, that is, consistent with general practice. Users will tend to apply rules they've learned elsewhere, even if those rules don't actually apply to the current site. They bring to your site their own experience and expectations. If you ignore that, you risk causing confusion and alienation. (Via Sitepoint)

Straw-like User Interface (SUI)

Straw-like User Interface (SUI) is an evolutionary interface system that allows us to virtually experience the sensations of drinking. These sensations are created based on referencing sample data of actual pressure, vibration and sound produced by drinking from an ordinary straw attached to the system.

The virtual drinking sensations accomplished by SUI are obtained by exerting pressure and vibration change to our mouth thru the control of valve and speaker.

'Pressure control'
The valves control the opening and closing of the solenoid motor and thus controlling pressure change in the SUI system. Moreover, the transmission part of a small servomotor was installed with an oval-shape sheet to push the valve to make a slight space that makes pressure change more smoothly.

'Vibration'
A straw is adhered to the speaker that gives out sound vibration based on sampled sound data and thus produced appropriate vibration at the straw.

'Food data'
In order to reproduce accurate virtual drinking sensations, we first drank various food tastes by straw and recorded necessary data. We then used it for the operation of SUI so it becomes possible for acquiring high accuracy in the reality of virtual drinking sensations.

Prototyping for user testing

There are several important factors to consider when you are planning to do prototyping for user testing. In this article from July 2002, Chris Farnum explains how to make the right choice about fidelity, level of interactivity and the medium for your test.

"In theory, low-fidelity sketches are also a time-saver, but this really depends on your point of view. Personally, I like to draw diagrams and wireframes in Visio where I can revise and move things around without erasing and redrawing."

"In the grand tradition of Goldilocks, I find myself drawn to the middle approach. A medium-fidelity approach tends to include some visual design and a level of detail somewhere between high and low fidelity."

"You can mix these three variables (fidelity, interactivity and medium) in many different combinations. The exact combination you choose should match the goals you determine for your testing." (Via GUUUI)

Accessibility Special: On the Usability & Accessibility Campaign Trail

In the run up to the British general election last week, User Vision reviewed six political party websites (going three better in their review than Cimex, reported last week in: UK Political Parties fail Accessibility Test, claims Agency. User Vision asked how do they measure up in terms of usability and accessibility? Do these parties seize the opportunity of exploiting this flexible channel to reach out to their voters? They answered: 'Well.. yes and no.'

This review looked at the website of six British political parties (Conservative, Green, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, and SNP) and assessed them against recognised usability and accessibility standards. The internet is increasingly a resource used to research detailed issues such as political and social policies. Clearly as government in general tries to build bridges to the citizens, an effective web channel is critical.

The way a site is organised, written, and presented can make or break the overall 'user experience'. The clarity with which a party can convey its views to a large degree will determine if site visitors feel frustrated and alienated by a party's site or whether they engage with the site, potentially actively campaigning, recommending others and voting for the party. (Via Usability News)

Context matters

The Sun project that took us to Japan was the development of a new Java certification exam. It's meant to be a beginning level exam for entry-level employees or new graduates who haven't yet worked as Java programmers to at least demonstrate a basic level of knowledge. For more than a month we (the American team) argued with our Japanese counterparts over the objectives of the exam.

We (the Americans) figured it would be a scaled-down, easier version of the current programmer exam, with an emphasis on the fundamentals of the Java language. Simple.

They (the Japanese), on the other hand, felt that some of our objectives were too technically detailed, but then they included all this other stuff they wanted to test people on. Things like understanding the difference between the three Java "editions" (micro, standard, and enterprise), how each of these editions make sense given a design goal, problems/tradeoffs with deployment of these various editions, basic UML, and on and on...

In other words, they wanted to test not just on the Java language, but also on the context in which Java is used. (Via Creating Passionate Users)

Why Social Software Makes for Poor Recommendations

Another interesting question that came up at the Nokia workshop was whether social software networks, such as Friendster, would prove to be a good source of recommendations to filter the Tail. At first blush it makes sense that they would. After all, whose recommendations would you trust more than those of your friends? But the truth, parodoxically enough, is that strangers typically do an even better job.

In other words, the assumption that there's a correlation between the people I like and the products I like is a flawed one. To use an analogy, Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously uttered this truism (now known as Joy's Law): "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." The same might be said of recommendations. No matter who you are, someone you don't know has found the coolest stuff. (Via The Long Tail)

Userdriven Distributed Spidering

"What if you could get information as to what pages are new and what pages are changes by just observing where people are surfing? This is the space that the [Google] accelerator occupies. Sitting neatly between your web browser and the Google architecture is a mini proxy that keeps checking if it can find a way to give you pages at a faster rate from the Google index than it does from the actual existing site. Along the way, Google finds out what pages are missing from its index (and gets a chance to add them) and what pages in its index are not up to date. Imagine a million people downloading the Google Web Accelerator and all of a sudden, you have an infrastructure that finds out about a lot of pages very quickly." (Via UserDriven)

Good article but still not ready for prime time ...

Windows 95, a study in good design?

We don’t often think of Windows 95 as a shining example of user interface design and usability. It was slow on the hardware of the day, it crashed often, and many of its claimed “innovations” were copied from Apple and others.

All of that said, Windows 95 was a big leap for visual user-interfaces at the time. Even if it didn’t break new ground in design, it was significant if only because it brought many of the visual user-interface design innovations of the previous decade to a massive audience.

I was a huge geek/dork, still in high-school, at the time of Microsoft’s development Windows 95. I was one of thousands who paid $49.95 to order a special preview of Windows 95, which was still code-named “Chicago” at the time. Yes, that’s right, I paid for a beta. I can still remember, it came on 37 floppy disks (seriously). (Via Acts of Volition)

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content

Many of the design teams we talk to face the same major issue: how to organize the information on their sites. From creating navigation schemes to developing site hierarchies to refining checkout sequences, it’s highly important for design teams to organize information effectively for their users.

Information architects frequently must deal with the problem of managing more and more information. Rarely can they remove information from a site; in most cases, it’s add, add, add. Design teams must make room for this new content in some way, either by incorporating it into the current organizational scheme or by altering the information architecture to allow for it. (Via UIE)

The Significance of "Social Software"

In 2002, Clay Shirky (re)claimed the term "social software" to encompass "all uses of software that supported interacting groups, even if the interaction was offline, e.g. Meetup, nTag, etc." (Allen). His choice was intentional, because he felt older terms such as "groupware" were either polluted or a bad fit to address certain new technologies. Shirky crafted the term while organizing an event - the "Social Software Summit" - intended to gather like minds to talk about this kind of technology.

Although Shirky's definition can encompass a wide array of technologies, those invited to the Summit were invested in the development of new genres of social technologies. In many ways, the term took on the scope of that community, referring only to the kinds of technologies emerging from the Summit attendees, their friends and their identified community.

The term proliferated within this community and spread on all fronts where this community regularly exercises its voice, most notably the blogosphere and various events, including the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference (Etcon). These gatherings, most notably the social software track at Etcon serve to reinforce the notion that social software primarily refers to a particular set of new technologies, often through the exclusion of research on older technologies. (Via apophenia)

Life With Alacrity: Tracing the Evolution of Social Software

The term 'social software', which is now used to define software that supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within the last two or more years. However, the core ideas of social software itself enjoy a much longer history, running back to Vannevar Bush's ideas about 'memex' in 1945, and traveling through terms such as Augmentation, Groupware, and CSCW in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

By examining the many terms used to describe today's 'social software' we