On May 20, 2008, Todd posted this entry in User Experience, Information Architecture, Usability, Interaction, Interface.
I just came across this on www.dusteddesign.com. In their tag navigation, the length of the link tag is proportional to the number of articles it contains. I can’t say this works, or that I’d employ it, but it’s interesting and I applaud their thinking.
On December 15, 2007, Todd posted this entry in Information Architecture, Linkroll.
Below are the links for today, lovingly scoured from the walls of the Tubes. See all links posted to this blog at Del.icio.us
On September 7, 2007, Todd posted this entry in User Experience, Information Architecture, Usability, Interaction, Interface.
Just wanted to post an update on some of the recent events that have occurred in the Phoenix usability community.
Christopher Brya has been hard at work assembling interested members and putting together the paperwork to create a UPA chapter in Arizona. In case you’re not aware, UPA
…supports usability specialists, people from all aspects of human-centered design, and the broad family of disciplines that create the user experience in promoting the design and development of usable products.
He’s even started a blog at arizonaupa.blogspot.com. Head over there and sign up for the mailing list. If you’re interested, leave a comment on the blog about what you’d like to see the group tackle.
Theo Mandel has started putting together the framework for our local World Usability Day Event. In his words,
I would like to announce the Phoenix event for World Usability Day 2007 on November 8, 2007. The Applied Psychology Program and Cognitive Engineering Research Institute at ASU’s Polytechnic Campus have graciously agreed to host the event on their campus in Mesa. The event will take place from 6-9 p.m. on the evening of Thursday, November 8, 2007. There will be no cost to participants to attend the event.
For more information, check out the full message at the PHX UEX Google group. If you’re interested in presenting (or sponsoring of course!) definitely throw your hat into the ring.
On July 13, 2007, Todd posted this entry in Information Architecture.
This is too interesting to pass up. In a move sure to polarize progressive librarians and curmudgeonly taxonomists, Phoenix Public Library Maricopa County Library District is dropping Dewey as its classification scheme. Hear the podcast (.mp3) courtesy of KJZZ.
From KJZZ:
Maricopa County Library District’s Marshall Shore led the charge to arrange the Perry Branch collection like a megachain bookstore… The nation’s first Dewey Decimal-less library celebrated its grand opening on Tuesday in Gilbert… Librarians hope the move lures back readers drawn away by chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders.
Image credits: Wikipedia (Melvil Dewey, left) and Marcos Najera (Marshall Shore, right)
On April 27, 2007, Todd posted this entry in Information Architecture, Interaction.
I came across this wonderful design pattern that is employed by eBay in its search results. What’s so hot about this?
Performing a search is a difficult process, not so much by what is returned but understanding what isn’t. As a result, it can be difficult to anticipate the effect of changing search parameters since it’s often unpredictable whether you’ll receive a larger or smaller result set–or more signal and less noise.
This pattern, however, identifies that concern and provides a comparative display of what else is out there if you were to loosen or constrict your parameters a bit. For me, I was looking for a mid-century modern sofa near Phoenix. I’m open to other possibilities though, and with this pattern I can start to juggle my priorities intelligently. Do I really care if it’s local–or am I more concerned that it adheres to a certain style?
Years ago, right when the Google API first came out, I wrote a prototype that performed a synonym search using Princeton’s Wordnet service. The goal there was to provide a better search experience for a user who might not know the best terms to use when articulating a query. So, a user could identify a terms that they were unsure of by prefixing it with a character–I used a tilde.
A standard search would be performed but additional information would be returned that showed alternative terms and the number of results. That way, a user could re-assess their keywords in case the results didn’t meet their expectations. Thankfully, Google ended up doing this on its own. And it used the tilde too. But I digress.
On April 5, 2007, Todd posted this entry in Design, Information Architecture, Usability, Development.
Today, April 5th is CSS Naked Day. That means that the site you’re seeing today has been stripped of all css, rendering the site in all its non-styled glory. Why do this?
The main reason is to draw attention to the the underlying markup of a page, and to demonstrate how people with screenreaders might be seeing the site. In particular, it calls to attention the structure of the xhtml and the benefits of using semantic markup.
What’s Wrong
It’s been since dev that I have really looked at my site unstyled. I’m fairly pleased with how it renders but I’ve noticed a few problems that I want to mention.
What’s Right
Overall, I think the presentation degrades decently. I don’t have any problem reading or navigating the site. But I’d really like to hear your opinions. So far, the good points that I see are:
There are probably a number of other things that are positive and negative about my design. Please voice your opinions because, well, my time is up and I have to go to work.
On February 4, 2007, Todd posted this entry in User Experience, Information Architecture, Usability, Interaction.
I’ve just started a Meetup for people interested in user experience design in Phoenix. Having just arrived here a little over 3 weeks ago, I’m surprised that there wasn’t a community for local Phoenicians to get together and discuss this discipline. That said, a bit of trolling of LinkedIn, Meetup, IxDA, and Google revealed that there is a nascent group of like-minded individuals.
So, this is a call to arms. If you’re interested in things like:
…then I entreat you to check out the group. In the future, I’d like to bring this group toward a full chapter status of the Usability Professionals Association. That’s still a ways down the road, I suspect. For now, I’m super excited about drawing together people from around the valley to discuss everything from “rules and tools” to war stories. Bring it!
On October 2, 2006, Todd posted this entry in Information Architecture.
Alok Jain, over at iPrincipia started a topic where he considered extending Web 2.0 techniques to information architecture (I/A). One point in particular that he mentioned got me thinking: how might tags be used in the context of card sorting?
For those who might not know, card sorting is a way to develop an I/A by asking users to group information in ways that make sense to them. Typically, index cards are created for each nugget to be categorized. Stakeholders are then asked to group them together. So Audi, Mini, and VW might be grouped under the category “Car”. Tagging, similarly, allows users to attach keywords to content items. So what’s the difference?
The difference, I feel, is in the relative flexibility that the two models provide. Card sorting tends to be more structured and rigid. Performing a card sort can force users to arbitrary groupings–the card either goes into this group or into that one. Often, items to be organized are multivariate and they can reasonably associated with multiple categories. This is incredibly common when working with a cross-functional group whose members have their own particular vocabulary. Think snow to us and aniu, kaneq, and pirta to the Eskimo. Choosing one “bucket” over another can cause some anxiety–and rightly so. Allowing only exclusive choices, we implicitly bound users’ creativity. In the process, we start to lose the thoughts that provide the context and qualify the choice. To compensate we take notes, but that data is harder to extract for analysis.
Along the same lines, the rigidity often leads to reproducing the current I/A or organizational structure. There seems to be a barrier when asking users to perform a large sort. Groupings are rarely absolute and it can be frustrating for the participant to rethink how information should be exclusively organized. Often, this leads to a risk-averse approach where they fall back upon the prevailing structure because they feel it is “correct.” This can lead to less-than-breakthrough results, especially with wary, uncertain participants.
For its issues, card sorting remains a useful tool. But we might consider complementing it with tagging. Tagging provides an implicit, almost conversational way of capturing more context behind the sort. When a user sorts the items into primary groups we would allow them to tag the item with additional keywords. This “phrase”, if you will, captures more context surrounding the sort and provides granularity, contrast, definition, and other semantic facets.
As we iterate, we could produce a “tag pool” to give users a starting vocabulary–with instruction that they can add to the pool at any time. Kinda like magnetic poetry. As tagging data is captured, this can drive further analysis to see what items are more commonly described in similar ways. Obviously, this would drive the raw taxonomy but it would also provide greater evidence and material for fleshing out thesauri and data dictionaries…
Oomblog is a stream of thoughts, ostensibly focused on user experience.
