paper & pencil

blink

Malcolm Gladwell's new book Blink

We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievable powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.

the effect of content aggregators on navigation and page design

new digital web article Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content

Despite our long hours and good intentions, content aggregators throw this site-centric idea out the window. They allow users to bypass a large portion of the design, whose sole purpose is to get them to target content. In this way the information architecture the designer envisioned may go unused, with users never clicking on the carefully crafted navigation links, never using the location-specific breadcrumbs, and in some cases never even seeing the much-fretted-over home page.

joshua porter prescribes the following in designing for content aggregators:

• Use web standards including the use of the id attribute to name sections of your content and allow others to link directly to those sections.
• Focus on the page level
• Design for different aggregator types - new strategies needed to have people link to your content
• Move toward user-driven aggregation systems such as faceted classification - articles by topic, articles by author, etc.

organizing the ux field

david heller talks about the need for a common vocabulary in the UX field: Organizing the User Experience (UX) field!

For me the core of this problem is in the nomenclature and taxonomy that we use to represent the field of User Experience to the “outside” world. It is vital that we don’t give double meanings to words of the trade, that we substitute the politics that seem to be dividing us for the practicalities that we need to put forth. This needs to be done no matter how uncomfortable those most greatly effected get. There needs to be made room in people’s vocabulary to allow new terms to replace their old ones. Terms like “usability”, “HCI”, “UCD” which have been used almost as synonyms need to be made to be particular of each other and of other new words like “information architecture” and “interaction design”.

david goes on to provide his definition of terms and how they relate to each other:

There are those disciplines which are creative, solution oriented:

* Information Architecture - structure

* Visual & Information Design - presentation

* Interaction & User Interface Design - behavior

These disciplines have some level of cross over, but basically represent the disciplines used for bring a final product strategy to its tactical realization.

There are those disciplines that are informative:

* Usability Engineering - evaluative

* HCI - research

These disciplines bring guidance to the the first set. These help set up guidelines and best practices in different mediums changing random creativity towards a more successful overall solution. However, they do not form solutions, as they are not applications of guidelines, as they alone are not enough to move from evaluation to design.

Finally, there are those disciplines that are strategic which for the most part exist outside of the user experience sphere usually more connected to the business side of the equation than most practitioners of disciplines in User Experience get to go.

david has since developed a presentation (pdf) that defines UX and IxD and describes how IxD fits into UX.