WebWord

“An elegant design for an information-seeking task is one that leads a visitor through a well choreographed dance, with each turning point a delight along the way” (Author: Leo Frishberg, Source: UX Matters)
Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

“But how about users with a technical disability: Wireless devices, slow internet connections, old browsers, feed readers, etc. These should be considered as well, as there are probably more people with technological disability than functional disability.” (Source: JustAddWater.dk, Author: Jesper Rønn-Jensen)
The use of “disability” here is misleading. It smells like Jakob Nielsen. However, I very […]

Author: Joseph Carrabis, Source: iMedia — “…most people can only pay attention to three to four things at a time, and much of their non-conscious activity is involved in deciding which three to four things get their attention.”
Read about how to manage visitor expectations on your website…

“UPS has a horrible time staffing the facility - resorting at one point to driving vans around low-income areas of Chicago and offering a meal and pay at the end of the day. One person in HR intimated a rumor that in CACH it was a standard question to ask folks about gang affiliations so […]

Author: Jeffrey Zeldman, Source: A List Apart — “Wireframing AJAX is a bitch.”
Sorry, but I have to talk about this. Wireframing anything with any interesting and robust functionality is a bitch. Who said that Web 2.0 or Ajax or Flash was going to make life easier for developers? You don’t get power without pain behind […]

Source: Design Observer, Author: Michael Bierut — “And from a design point of view? Unbelievably boring. Or, I should say, unbelievably, wonderfully, perfectly, exquisitely boring. To a field that today seems to prize innovation above all else, The New Yorker makes a case for slow design: the patient, cautious, deliberate evolution of a nearly unchanging […]

(Source: Electric Net, Author: Corey Maple) — “GIS is a technology, not a business process. As a result, taking GIS into the field by itself creates a number of potential challenges. Applications can be too slow, with learning curves that are too steep for rapid acceptance among end-users. To ensure a successful transition, utilities will […]

“Technophobes will soon be able to pay for tutorials in how to use their iPods at an upmarket London store, even though the manufacturer does it for free in its shop just round the corner.”
Read the iPod survival article here…

(Author: Joshua David McClurg-Genevese, Source: Digital Web Magazine) — “In my opinion, the vast majority of constraints in a Web-based environment are brought about because of the limits of human interaction with technology.”
Read Designing for the Web

Authors: Steven R. Thomsen, Joseph D. Straubhaar, Drew M. Bolyard — “In so doing, we argue that online communities are far from the “imagined” or pseudo communities explicated by Calhoun (1991); that they are, in fact, “real” in the very way in which they reflect the changing nature of human relations and human interaction.”
Read about […]

“Conversation analysts study conversations - of all kinds. They are happy to put under the microscope anything from diagnosing schizophrenia to answering questions in court, and from talking over family matters at dinner to guiding a pilot through fog. All are done through talk.”
Learn more about Conversation Analysis…
p.s. I especially like the basic transcription notation […]

Author: Yvonne Rogers — “A core lesson that was learned, however, is that you cannot simply lift theories out of an established field (i.e. cognitive psychology), that have been developed to explain specific phenomena about cognition, and then reapply them to explain other kinds of seemingly related phenomena in a different domain (i.e. interacting with […]