brightly colored food

Louis Rosenfeld has a couple of good posts in his Bloug about presenting search results, especially listing out a Best Bets section. I’m not a search engine expert, but I did do a bit of work on the intuit.com search results.

Notice anything? Best Bets maybe? I haven’t had enough time recently to do a follow-up study, but it tested well in usability and I’ve heard positive comments secondhand. It’s good to hear about others emphasizing this approach - seems like one of those obvious things that isn’t implemented very often.

Other improvements to searching? How about improving the interaction between search results and browse categories - two alternate ways of getting to the same information. It’s been done since Yahoo, and Google does a good job of highlighting categories on a more general search as well, but still, you still don’t see it done often on sites that aren’t internet search engines. It’s especially bad because sites that own the final searched/browsed-to content can place even more connections between searching, browsing, and the final content.

Such an approach would be particularly great on a tech support site, which could leverage users who are already accustomed to browsing through Help in desktop applications, and whose browse categories would (hopefully) already be well-honed. The search would have to do a good job of tying into the browse, but it could be pretty effective. Do you see many tech support sites doing this? I haven’t.

After almost a month of recording, edits, re-edits, and mixing, I’m finished doing all of the audio post-production on Dan Wu’s film, Untitled Hitman Film. What a relief and a thrill to be done - that was the biggest artistic undertaking I’ve completed for quite a while.

This may sound preachy, but what the hell: go create stuff, call it arts, call it crafts, whatever. We all spend too much time consuming and not producing. Even the little things feel good. If you’re like me and start a lot of little solo things that never get finished, get involved in a bigger project, preferably one with a deadline. It’s rejuvenating and life-affirming, the most fun way to extend your life expectancy without getting a pet or married.

The film is premiering tomorrow night as part of APAture: A Window on the Art of Young Asian Pacific Americans. If you’re there, come say hi.

Run out of things to read? Want to see what others cite, read, or otherwise recommend?

Last week I was organizing a couple of binders full of mostly academic HCI articles and I happened on some good reading lists I’d printed out, fearful the pages might disappear eventually. I typed them in, and they’re all still there. I had a couple of others bookmarked more recently, so I thought I’d share them. Call this a meta-reading list.

Yes, there are redundancies across lists. Use it as an indicator for the “classics”, though there are also some books that seem like real gems that are only on one or two lists. Except for a couple of my faves near the top, they’re in no particular order for now. While I don’t have my own recommended list, I do have a list of some stuff that sounds interesting.

If enough people find this interesting and/or want to contribute other lists (I’m sure I’ve missed a ton), I’ll probably turn this into its own section on the site.
- freeware
var linktext = “Let me know”;
var email1 = “chad”;
var email2 = “brightlycoloredfood.com”;
document.write(”” + linktext + “”)
//–>

DesignWritings: Reading List
Erin Malone’s reading list. Nicely divided into subject areas, it shortlists the best of each category. No comments about the books. Recommended.

A look in my HCI bookshelf
From Jonas Löwgren. Mostly academic, and a fairly good overview of HCI literature. Thoughtful commentary on each book.

Kem’s Interaction Design Reading List
From Ken Mohnkern, an Interaction Designer at Carnegie Mellon. Strong communication, media, design emphasis. No comments. Recommended.

Cooper Interaction: Book Reviews
From Alan Cooper. A fairly diverse and interesting-sounding list. Thoughtful commentary and why he likes/recommends each book. With photos and comments.

UIWeb: Annotated References on Design
From Scott Berkun. Another short, excellent, “canon of user-experience design” type lists.

ACIA IA Guide
Everything on information architecture, from the crew at ACIA. Like the good IAs they are, you can view by Author, Title, Subject, or Expert Picks.

Viridian Design: Recommended Books
From Bruce Sterling and his crew of ecological designers/hackers in the Viridian Design community. Industrial design, product design, history, art. Interesting, insightful recommendations. With comments.

Elegant Hack: Information Architecture and User Centered Design Reading List
What seems most likely to become the UX/IA “canon”, from Christina. Broad-ranging, nice selections. With comments, photos.

Peterme: Interface Design Recommended Reading List
A list from Peter, from a couple of years back. With comments. I *know* he reads interesting stuff - maybe he’ll update his list…

WebWord.com: Recommended Books
John Rhodes’ wide-ranging list on everything from usability (obviously) to science fiction (?). With comments.

STC Information Design: Booklist
Essential works, as voted by the InfoDesign Cafe members. Fairly broad, with an emphasis on information design. There’s also selected additional works. No comments.

Suggested Readings in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), User Interface (UI) Development, & Human Factors (HF)
From Gary Perlman, who runs HCI Bibliography. More academic than most of the other lists. With comments and photos.

20th Century Information Design Bibliography
From a distance class taught out of RIT. Information/Graphic Design, typography, visual literacy. No comments.

Usability Bookshelf
From the STC Usability SIG. Huge, with comments. Not just about usability, it’s a fairly comprehensive survey of recent publications in HCI/UX/usability. With some comments. Check out their Top 10 for a “best of” list.

Weinschenk Consulting: Bibliography
Good overview list of HCI books. With comments.

I always enjoy reading Don Norman — he’s usually just grumpy enough to make his insights and arguments bite a bit harder. This time he’s taking to task the Behavior, Cognitive, and Social Sciences (BCSS) academic departments for poorly training students to efficiently function in industry (though, admittedly, most academics probably don’t care about this too much). He points out that there are plenty of analytical techniques, but few for synthesis or design; for the few we do have, there’s no system set up to train people to apply them.

In academia, we teach how to critique: to analyze a published study and find the flaws. We are superb at finding flaws. We are also superb at doing carefully controlled studies that minimize biases of all sorts, that are able to detect subtle differences. Problem is, these studies take months to perform, and they are designed for subtleties. Individual creativity is valued, and the reward system encourages publications, with concern about the order in which a person’s name is listed as author.

In industry, we need to provide products that offer value to consumers. Speed and cost are critical parameters. Competition with other companies is intense. On the whole, the subtleties that interest academics are of little interest to consumers: if you like, they are beneath the threshold of perception. Group work is encouraged. Criticism is frowned upon. Publication isn’t relevant: shipping a product is. Thee is little time for writing – each product is a rush job, and when it is nearing completion, well, the next ones are already underway.

Evidence of what JND says: 1. there really aren’t any academic programs (yet) that are widely acclaimed for putting out great interaction designers, and (less-directly) 2. the richness of the (informal) user-experience community interacting over the internet seems to have derived partially as compensation for this lack of effective formal training. It would be interesting to hear from people in other disciplines, see if there are any cross-disciplinary correlations.

Good comments from Phil Agre on participating and contributing within a network of fellow professionals.

From IA Slash

From LucDesk
Peter, webmaster of the always excellent InfoDesign, talks with Louis Rosenfeld about his website as well as the historical differences between Information Design and Information Architecture.

From the September issue of First Monday. Compares the search experience of three different interfaces, including one they’ve designed that looks fairly similar to the one at MSDN. They found out (big suprise) that theirs works best. Might be an example of where using frames is actually a good idea.

Elan thinks you should all read this. And his BBQ chicken isn’t too bad. He’s looking for a new consulting gig these days, so you should hire him — if you like Alan Cooper, you’ll loooove Elan Freydenson.

My new career as a foley artist begins in earnest this week. I have a random collection of props laying around my room, and I spent several hours out this weekend in the Outer Sunset looking like a fool holding a microphone at toward nothing in particular while recording ambient noise for several scenes. I’m not gonna quit my day job yet, but if doing the sound effects on the fight scenes proves to be enough fun, I may have to reconsider.