paper & pencil

gaging user's expertise

from noisebetweenstations a post quoting Jakob Nielsen on the scale he uses to indicate a user's level of expertise:

divides computer users into six categories along three dimensions based on the user's experience: users with minimal computer experience and users with extensive computer experience for the dimension of knowledge about computers in general; novice users and expert users for the dimension of expertise in using the specific system; and user ignorant about the domain and users knowledgeable about the domain for the dimension of understanding of the task domain.

useful for personas.

widgetopia

Christina Wodtke's collection of UI elements [1] is fabulous!

It's also organized by type:

• article tools
• data entry
• download
• feedback
• html formatting
• interact
• navigation - global
• navigation - local
• ratings
• search_sitewide
• shopping tools
• site tools
• sort/narrow data
• views of data
• websearch
• writing tools

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1. http://www.eleganthack.com/widgetopia/

tim bray on search

tim bray has posted a series of essays on search technology. the series is ongoing.

no time to read them right now but here are the ones that i'd like to read most:

Intelligence Here’s the problem: searching for words isn’t really what you want to do. You’d like to search for ideas, for concepts, for solutions, for answers. Instead, your typical search engine moronically sorts through its postings, and tries to solve your problems by looking at which words appear where, and how often, and so on. What we’d really like is an intelligent search engine. This essay is mostly about why we’re not likely to get one any time soon.

got a chance to read this one:

Here’s what I believe, based on a lot of experience: any search system that could exhibit the kind of intelligence I’ve described could as a side-effect pass the Turing test, and perhaps qualify for citizenship and protection under the laws of the land.

Put another way: intelligence in search requires deep processing of human languages, which (many believe) is the single most important defining characteristic of human intelligence.

Metadata In the Web’s early years, the overwhelming favorite among search engines was Yahoo. Today it’s Google. Neither has actually had better text search technology than the competition. They won because they used metadata effectively to make their services more useful. In this ninth On Search, a survey of what metadata is, where it comes from, and how to use it.

Interfaces Herewith an investigation of how search software ought to interact with the outside world. I’ll start with a look at the current state of the art, and propose another (I think better) approach. This is, I think, the third-last On Search piece, so a few words at the meta level about that.

XML Searching is all about text, and the proportion of all the world’s text that is XML keeps getting higher and higher. So if you’re going to do search, at some point you’re going to have to think about searching XML. Herewith a survey of some of the issues and problems (which, like other essays as we approach the end of On Search, contains opinions among the reportage).

good design is good business

paula thornton nicely provides some quotes from an article in Fortune (online archives require a subscription).

One of Kotchka's [executive at Procter & Gamble] first steps was to give design its own department -- previously designers served in the marketing department.

More business-savvy designers are on the way, thanks to design schools that emphasize corporate skills as dell as draftsmanship. Northwestern's master's program in product development, introduced last year through its McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, includes courses in basic accounting, marketing, conflict resolution, statistics, and ethics. Design programs at Stanford and the Illinois Institute of Technology are also adding business courses to their curriculums. ...their bosses are starting to realize that many skills, such as interpreting customer needs and rapid prototyping, can extend beyond the confines of the design department. 'Design has to be seen as a cultural cornerstone -- it can't report to marketing,'...'There's an argument that in the next ten years, marketing will report to design.'

web-based e-notebooks

paper on JoDI: Implementation Challenges Associated with Developing a Web-based E-notebook

the paper looks at Information Assimilation - they shorten to IA, which confuses me since I think Info Architecture whenever I see 'IA' - the process of

gathering, editing, annotating, organizing, and saving of Web information, as well as the tracking of ongoing Web work processes.

and how browsers are an insufficient tool.

information assimiliation tasks:

1. Gather Web information (i.e. text, images, lists, tables and hyperlinks)
   by copying and pasting from multiple Web pages into an e-notebook; collect
   archival data pertaining to when and where original Web information was
   published
2. Edit original Web elements as stored in an e-notebook
3. Annotate e-notebook contents (i.e. add/delete text, highlight information,
   create cross-references)
4. Organize e-notebook contents (i.e. control the spatial layout, re-structure,
   combine similar information together, etc.)
5. Save the contents of an e-notebook
6. Track (represent) and save ongoing work processes.

my typepad site is pretty much a web-based e-notebook but I'm dependent on the sites I linked to remaining on the web and/or remaining at the same url. the authors look at tools that will allow users to save information (text & images) from the web to their local computer with little effort as well as be able to annotate those pieces of information.

another much needed tool, states the authors, is one that will

help them track, remember and rejoin their ongoing work processes.

the paper goes on to list a number of e-notebook systems that have been developed and to review one of them, NetNotes. they determined that this solution is the best currently available, but still limited.

functional specifications

the last of the printed articles is on functional specs - here they are:

joel spolsky's wonderful 4-part series Painless Functional Specifications

allen smith's Tutorial: Functional Specification

whitney quesenbery

in my search for the electronic version of a printout of a presentation titled Prototyping and Usability Testing with Visio by Whitney Quesenbery I found a list of other great papers and presenations:

The Five Dimensions of Usability
On Beyond Help – User Assistance and the User Interface
Designing Usable Search Interfaces: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Profiles, personas and stories
When the show must go on, it's time to collaborate or die

teaching interaction design

still cleaning up my pile of articles - here's another one:

Teaching Interaction

Dodging the seductive cloud of high-tech realizations, Loop features three sets of projects that look at ways to expose students to fundamental issues of interaction and interface design apart from technology—or at least in spite of it.

(November 2000 issue of loop)

adaptive design

i had printed out a copy of The Glass Wall - case study of the redesigned BBCi homepage in 2002 - and I'm glad I did as it has been removed on several sites that used to house it.

anyway, during this project the designers were aiming for adaptve design - here's some links on it:

Steve Hunt on adaptive design as applied to the BBCi homepage

In my head, Adaptation is not Personalisation. Personalisation implies that as a user I have had to make some conscious choices, or flicked some switches to alter some settings.

Adaptation should be more organic than that. It needs to learn the behavior of it's audience. By all means, indicate the learning process by offering feedback to it's user, but I really believe that the adaptation should be gentle by design.

Dan Hill- lots of stuff here

using the tube map for process flows

martin kay of kay initiatives in the UK uses elements of the famous Harry Beck London Underground "tube" map for creating process maps.

guide to using the elements is available as a PDF.

and he offers (for a fee) a
powerpoint file containing all of the elements.

example: