March 2007 Issue

User Research Doesn’t Prove Anything

Published: March 20, 2007

Recently, I was reading through a sample chapter of a soon-to-be-published book. The book and author shall remain nameless, as shall the book’s topic. However, I was disappointed to read, in what otherwise appeared at first glance to be an interesting publication, a very general, sweeping statement to the effect that qualitative research doesn’t prove anything and, if you want proof, you should perform quantitative research. The author’s basic assumption was that qualitative research can’t prove anything, as it is based on small sample sizes, but quantitative research, using large sample sizes, does provide proof.

This may come as a shock to everyone, but quantitative research does not provide proof of anything either. Read more

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Category: Columns

Wireframing With Patterns

By Lindsay Ellerby

Published: March 20, 2007

When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects. Read more

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Category: Features

Instructional Text in the User Interface: Some Counterintuitive Implications of User Behaviors

By Mike Hughes

Published: March 6, 2007

User assistance occurs within an action context—the user doing something with an application—and should appear in close proximity to the focus of that action—that is, the application it supports. The optimal placement of user assistance, space permitting, is in the user interface itself. We typically call that kind of user assistance instructional text. But when placing user assistance within an application as instructional text, we must modify conventional principles of good information design to accommodate certain forces within an interactive user interface. This column, User Assistance, talks about how the rules for effective instruction change when creating instructional text for display within the context of a user interface. Read more

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Category: Columns

Conference Review: UIE Web App Summit 2007: Part I

By Pabini Gabriel-Petit

Published: March 6, 2007

Jared Spool’s User Interface Engineering (UIE) thought the time had come for a UX conference focusing on Web applications and thus produced the first UIE Web App Summit. This conference definitely filled what formerly was an unmet need. The UIE Web App Summit took place at the Monterey Marriott, in Monterey, California, U.S.A., on January 21st through 23rd, 2007. It drew a capacity crowd of 218 people, who had traveled from far and wide to attend the event. While most attendees came from the United States and Canada, nine came from the UK and Europe and four hailed from Oceania and Asia.

Tutorial: Deconstructing Web Applications
Presenter: Hagan Rivers

Summit Keynote: Moving Towards Delight: Following the Rapid Evolution of Web-Based Applications
Presenter: Jared Spool

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Category: Reviews