NYT Magazine Article on Teen Blogging
After interviewing a number of first year undergrads about their use of IM and blogs last semester, this article definitely echoed some of the things I heard…
UsabilityNet
Just stumbled across UsabilityNet. Not a bad little overview of usability, with a nice table of methods (though their typography could use some work). Similar to Usability.gov, but from the EU.
From Research to Personas
Kim Goodwin from Cooper has a nice short article that gives some insight on analyzing data gathered from ethnographic inquiry in order to produce more valuable personas.
Web Navigation
Those who really want to delve into issues of web navigation might want to check out this Masters thesis: Transitional Volatility in Web Navigation: Usability Metrics and User Behavior. It’s by David Danielson, and his thesis was advised by Terry Winograd and Clifford Nass. You might also want to check out his list of Important [...]
Becoming a Usability Professional
In Jakob’s latest column, he describes what he thinks makes a good usability specialist. I agree with his points about experience and ability at detecting patterns, but I don’t buy his claim that the ability to arrive at a “conceptual insight that can drive the design” is one of the most important skills to have [...]
Gibson Affordances and Norman Affordances
Found another good article called Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept [pdf] that describes differences between J.J. Gibson’s original concept of affordances and how it was later extended by Don Norman. It gets a bit nitpicky about how each has used the term affordance, and goes so far as to do a literature review on [...]
Affordances and Visual Perception
Killing time waiting for class to start, I’m reading a book on visual perception. It’s covering J.J. Gibson’s theories about perception, which revolve around what he called “affordances” – yep, the same ones Don Norman writes about. Don Norman has two good articles that clarify and extend the use of the term for the design [...]
Flirting as Interaction
Elan recently linked to the Guide to Flirting, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford. He linked to it because, well, he’s a flirt (and he’d be the first to admit as much). But it got me thinking a bit, and it’s worth a link for a couple of other reasons… It’s a concise [...]
Text Messaging on Mobiles
BBC article on a redesign of cellphone keypads – it does an elegant job of interspersing two separate sets of keys amongst each other. The article mentions that the designer was the head of human factors at Apple for five years. I wonder if this will actually end up on any mobiles….
Boxes and Arrows
Well, after months of work, it’s up. Boxes and Arrows Christina put it nicely: “sometimes you can find content; sometimes you have to go make content.” If I might toot my horn for a sec, check out my interview with Jakob Nielsen. It was great interviewing him – like most people, he’s a lot more [...]