Month: March 2004

I have two entries in the Flash wallpaper contest being held at mesh on mx. I think they came out pretty well. Mine are the ones from infinitewebdesign.com. There are a ton of really nice entries and I expect we’ll see some even more impressive designs before the contest ends. If you like you can enter too, just visit the link above and submit a design. They range from mad 3D renderings to simple, elegant designs. This is the follow up to the Central design contest they just finished. I think it’s a fun way for designers to try something creative outside of the bounds of what they have to do at work. Here are my two entries so far… […]

The average bloke learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from other people’s mistakes too. In design, as in life, you can learn from watching others. See what they do wrong and what they do right. Break down the successful design to see why they are successful and do the same for those that you deem bad or just imperfect. I have found that spending a little time regularly analyzing and exploring the work of other designers has really helped me improve my designs. This doesn’t mean that I stopped experimenting or exploring on my own. But seeing where other designers fall on their faces or where they have really nailed a technique or style helps me to […]

Usability is often regarded as a nebulous concept or ideal. This is the natural result of usability professionals developing their own odd little language with their unique acronyms and buzzwords. Outsiders are sometimes left with just a fuzzy notion of usability. Part of the difficulty lies in distilling down usability into something you can describe to the uninitiated at a party or in the first 30 seconds of a meeting. People come away with ‘you make things easier to use’. In some ways this works to the advantage of usability designers. We retain some of the aura of power that practicing a mysterious discipline imparts. It’s hard to explain how varied and complex the activities involved in our jobs are. […]

I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about the outsourcing trend that has taken hold in so many industries and how it affects usability in information systems. Of course I may be a bit biased since I am part of the group whose potential jobs are being shipped overseas, but as with other issues in life I think it is possible to get past those personal biases to look at the issue from many perspectives. In this case I think we need to stand back and ask why we would want to move our designers overseas. What value is to be gained and what is lost in the process? Usability and user experience design is part science and […]

Anticlue posted a five stage timeline of Internet Business Maturity. Today I’d like to focus on the first stage which they call Publish. This is the way that most organizations enter the Web. They create a static brochure that has Home page, an About Us page, a Contact Page, perhaps a map, and maybe a few pages of static content describing products or services. I call these types of sites Brochure Sites. They are essentially the online equivalent of the three-fold brochures you see by the receptionist’s desk. Now before anyone objects, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Creating a Brochure Site gives an organization a rudimentary Web presence. People can find a phone number or e-mail address to […]

Heuristic Evaluation is a method for quickly examining an interface based on a set of usability rules. A good list of heuristics was proposed by Jacob Nielson and we will use them here. This article will discuss the role of a heuristic evaluation in your design process. The Role of the Heuristic Evaluation One common mistake made by those practicing User Centered Design (UCD) as they start to advance beyond the novice stage is that start to believe that they know their users well enough without really talking to the users. They make up a few user personas and use scenarios, they write up a few paragraphs on their audience demographics and they think that they understand how their users […]