Reviews
User Friendly 2007: Connecting User Experience Communities
Published: March 24, 2008
User Friendly 2007 was held in Beijing on November 23–25, 2007, as shown in Figure 1, and—like the previous conferences in Beijing (2004), Shanghai (2005), and Hangzhou (2006)—was a rousing success. UPA China
saw the 2007 event as an opportunity to return to Beijing, giving attendees the opportunity to visit the 2008 Olympics host city as it prepares for its moment in the spotlight.
The capital of China, Beijing is the heart of China’s economy and culture. With a 3000-year history, there are many places of interest for people to see—such as the Great Wall of China, The Forbidden City, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, and many more.
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OZ-IA 2007: Conference Review
Published: November 19, 2007
For any community of practice, especially one that is still growing, it’s crucial to have opportunities to interact and collaborate with our peers and build a vital sense of community. It’s also necessary to set a direction for the profession, find out what our peers are thinking and doing, and recognize and foster talent within the community. And it’s important that all of this occurs—not based on outside influences—but within the local community. This is the situation the information architecture (IA) community currently faces in Australia.
It is for these reasons that the organizers of OZ-IA took the important step of establishing an IA conference in Australia. As IA practitioners, we had previously been forced to travel to the USA or Europe to participate in such events. We needed a local gathering: OZ-IA, now in its second year.
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Book Review: Sketching User Experiences
Published: October 22, 2007
Sketching User Experiences is a rambling stream of consciousness through Bill Buxton’s head—spanning a treatise on the role of design in business, a history lesson on sketching, and an analysis of specific design solutions. The topics—shifting gently—are often intriguing, and their overall trajectory is completely unpredictable. As, in my current professional context, I am struggling with communicating the power, strategic importance, and benefits of design to the business, I was extraordinarily pleased to find the book speaking about these very topics. You wouldn’t know that you’d find this information in the book from reading the cover or even the first 100 pages.
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Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part I
Published: August 20, 2007
The Usability Professionals’ Association
(UPA) held its UPA 2007 conference at the Hilton Hotel in Austin, Texas, on June 11–15, 2007. This conference has a lot to offer, with a blend of
- the inspirational—keynotes and other invited speakers
- the didactic—tutorials, presentations, and peer-reviewed papers
- the participatory—workshops, idea markets, and special interest groups (SIGs)
- the social—cocktail receptions, networking breaks, lunches, and evening fun
This year’s theme focused on Patterns and how they serve as “blueprints for usability.” Conference co-chair, Carol Smith (shown in Figure 1), articulated the pertinence of this theme. “As usability professionals, our ability to observe users and to discover their patterns of interaction is integral to our work. By defining these patterns, we can then leverage that knowledge to create usable interfaces that are familiar and useful to our users.”
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Conference Review: UPA 2007: Part II
Published: August 20, 2007
Wednesday: Designing Designing Interfaces: How Not To Write A Pattern Catalog
Presenter: Jenifer Tidwell
Jenifer Tidwell, author of Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, shared her motivations and the lessons she learned as she wrote her book.
One of the few conference sessions that actually related to patterns, this session promised to be interesting. Given everyone’s varying definitions and usage of patterns, I think it would have been helpful if Jenifer had started off this session with a clear definition of what a pattern is and how designers can use a pattern catalog. Afterward, when I spoke with attendees, I found not everyone was on quite the same page with the speaker when her talk began. Well into the session, Jenifer finally did define what she means by a pattern.
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From Reluctance to Enjoyment: My Journey Through CHI 2007
Published: July 10, 2007
On Sunday, April 29, 2007, when flying from Montréal to San Jose to attend my first CHI conference, I worried I might have made the wrong decision by choosing CHI as my conference for this year. When reviewing the program a few days before, I had found myself thinking “I really don’t think these academic-centric and very specific papers will interest me and help me in my practice. Oh! I shouldn’t have chosen this conference!” I even thought of changing my return ticket to go back to Montréal earlier, so I could get back to work on my mental model project, which I’d been enjoying so much. My first morning at CHI seemed to confirm my feelings and even made me feel worse. I wasn’t really turned on by the opening plenary, and listening to the day’s program during CHI Madness—a great concept other conference organizers should use—confirmed my impressions. To give you a bit of context, I’m a practitioner who thrives on user research and on learning new insights and methods from others in a practical, didactic, and clear way, including many concrete examples I can relate to and learn from.
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Conference Review: CHI 2007
Published: July 10, 2007
This year, SIGCHI celebrated its 25th annual Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) conference. CHI 2007 took place at the Convention Center in San Jose, California, USA, on April 28 through May 3, 2007. Its theme: Reach Beyond. The organizers asked us to “reach beyond …our comfortable methods and praxis; beyond our exciting and innovative technology; beyond our established scientific frameworks and reputations; beyond the common ground of professional and national cultures; and beyond our far-flung social networks.” To what?
Opening the conference, Mary Beth Rosson, Conference Chair, said, “HCI folks are in the middle of everything now, and we’ve earned that.”
While Design Community Co-Chairs John Kolko and Bill Lucas brought us Bill Moggridge’s remarkable opening plenary, “Reaching for the Intuitive,” and the exceptional interactive session “Who Killed Design?” I still found the overall amount of design content at CHI 2007 lacking. This was particularly disappointing, because the conference convened in the heart of Silicon Valley—world center of the technology industry and home to many UX professionals. If ever there were a CHI that should have been centered more on practice than academia, this was it.
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The STC 54th Annual Conference
Published: June 4, 2007
Describing a professional conference is a lot like the proverbial tale of the blind men and the elephant. One felt the leg and thought it was like a tree; another, the side and thought it was like a wall; and yet another, the tail and thought it was like a rope. Jared Spool opened his blog about the recent STC conference, “Where Did Technical Writing Go?” with the following observation:
“It is at the 54th Annual Conference of the Society of Technical Communicators, this week in Minneapolis, where I’m getting a glimpse into what I believe to be the demise of technical writing.”
I think Jared must have been standing at the wrong end of the elephant. What I saw was a society of professionals emerging from a process of reflection and redefinition with a vitality and momentum that said, “There’s a new sheriff in town, and she’s brought the posse with her.”
The sheriff is Susan Burton, the new STC Director who opened the conference by reporting on some significant changes that have happened this year.
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Conference Review: STC Technical Communication Summit, Usability Track
Published: June 4, 2007
As a technical writer, I’ve been aware of the Society of Technical Communicators (STC) since I was in college. However, I’ve never joined the organization. This year, the STC Technical Communication Summit was held just a short drive away from me in Minneapolis, on May 12–16, 2007, and my employer paid for me to go.
The best part of my experience at the STC Summit was meeting people who, like me, are craving information on the trends of which we are such a large part—such as Web 2.0, user-centered design, and new software tools. For the most part, I got the information I craved. As a technical writer who is professionally heading deep into usability and user interface (UI) design, I actually went to the conference for the usability certificate program.
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Book Review: Effective Prototyping for Software Makers
Published: May 28, 2007
Last year, I had the pleasure of contributing to Jonathan Arnowitz and Michael Arent’s special issue of Interactions magazine that focused on prototyping. Based on our conversations and the other contributions to that issue, I looked forward to seeing their forthcoming book on the topic.
I’m a great believer in prototyping as a means of rapid application development and am always looking for ways to improve my craft. Imagine my delight at the prospect of cruising through 600 pages devoted to the subject!
Effective Prototyping is an ambitious undertaking that in some ways redefined the meaning of prototyping for me. No reader is likely to absorb this tome from cover to cover—certainly not in one sitting and maybe never. The authors have tried to include as much information as possible on the topic, resulting in an extensive reference that paradoxically leaves me unsatisfied.
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Conference Review: IA Summit 2007: Part I
Published: April 26, 2007
In 2006, I attended my first Information Architecture (IA) Summit. It was the best of the many conferences I attended that year, making this year’s conference a must-attend event. The 8th annual ASIS&T IA Summit was at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, March 22–26, 2007. The theme of the conference was Enriching Information Architecture—“examining three trends: rich information…, rich interaction…, and rich relationships…”—but the sessions I attended were more about process, methods, and strategy.
Opening Keynote: The Lost Art of Productively Losing Control
Presenter: Joshua Prince-Ramus
The Web That Wasn’t
Presenter: Alex Wright
The Brave New World: Usability Challenges of Web 2.0
Presenter: Jared Spool
WebPatterns: Design Patterns in Web Site Architecture and User Interaction
Presenter: John Allsopp
Communicating Design: An Astonishingly Close Look at IA Documentation
Presenter: Dan Brown
Where Does IA Fit in the Design Process?
Moderator: Peter Boersma
Panelists: Larisa Warnke, Peter Merholz, Livia Labate, Leisa Reichelt, and Josh Seiden
Maximum Value Information Architecture: Big IA Is the Way You Do, Not What You Do
Presenter: Austin Govella
Conference Review: IA Summit 2007: Part II
Published: April 26, 2007
More session reviews and the conclusion of my conference review.
Finding Innovation in the Five Hundred Pound Gorilla: Or Overcoming Fear, Building Trust, and Making Believers
Presenters: Kevin Cheng and Tom Wailes
Communal Computing and Shared Spaces of Usage: A Study of Internet Cafes in Developing Contexts
Presenter: Jason Hobbs
Startup Case Studies: How Five of Us Started Our Own Businesses
Presenters: Victor Lombardi, Frank Ramirez, Lou Rosenfeld, Gene Smith, and Christina Wodtke
Closing Plenary: Fast, Cheap, and Somewhat in Control: 10 Lessons from the Design of SlideShare
Presenter: Rashmi Sinha
Book Review: Information Dashboard Design
Published: April 9, 2007
Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data defines the state-of-the-art of information dashboard design. Few, who is an expert in data visualization for the communication and analysis of quantitative business information has provided a complete, practical, and illuminating guide to dashboard design. If you are designing front-ends for executive information systems for Business Performance Management (BPM) or for monitoring and analyzing the performance of sales, marketing, or information systems, Information Dashboard Design provides all you need to know to ensure your dashboards communicate efficiently and effectively.
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Conference Review: UIE Web App Summit 2007: Part I
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
Conference Review: UIE Web App Summit 2007: Part II
Published: March 6, 2007
More session reviews.
RIA Patterns: Best Practices for Common Patterns of Rich Interaction
Presenter: Bill Scott
Communicating Concepts with Comics
Presenter: Kevin Cheng
Best Practices for Form Design: Bridging the Gap with Your Customers
Presenter: Luke Wroblewski
Web Application Page Hierarchy
Presenter: Luke Wroblewski
Conference Review: UIE Web App Summit 2007: Part III
Published: March 6, 2007
More session reviews and the conclusion of my conference review.
Building a Great User Interface, the Netflix Way
Presenter: Sean Kane
Tagging in Your Web World
Presenter: Thomas Vander Wal
Learning from Social Web Applications
Presenter: Joshua Porter
Design Strategies for Web-Based Recommender Systems
Presenter: Rashmi Sinha
Usability in China: Encore
Published: January 8, 2007
Our story starts in late 2004, at the Make the World Simpler event in Shanghai, China—a modest-sized meeting of UX professionals that was organized by the China chapters of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA). At this meeting, leaders of the mainland China and Hong Kong UPA chapters met to discuss organizing a usability conference in China. We decided to call the conference User Friendly.
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Interaction Frontiers 06: Conference Report
Published: November 20, 2006
On June 16, 2006, Interaction Frontiers
was held at the Bicocca University, in Milano, Italy.
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A Day at Interaction Frontiers 06
Published: November 20, 2006
There are not many interaction design conferences in Italy, so you can imagine the interest a conference about the frontiers of interaction design engendered. Interaction Frontiers 2006—the second edition of this conference—had as its mission the exploration of the future of interaction design. Though I’m Swiss, my native language is Italian, and this topic attracted my attention.
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The Atmosphere at Interaction Frontiers 2006
Published: November 20, 2006
Matteo Penzo was the brain, the hands, and the energy behind Interaction Frontiers 2006. The recipe for this event was deceptively simple: Gather some fine thinkers in a room and let them speak about technology and people. The 2005 edition of Interaction Frontiers had been just an appetizer—a taste of things to come.
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Book Review: Designing Interfaces
Published: November 6, 2006
I must admit that I am not a fan of pattern books in general—especially in the field of design. I’ve always felt they are excellent sources of inspiration if you’re crafting a quilt or stenciling a wainscot for your living room, but for more involved design activities, I’ve concluded they are too simplistic—perhaps even limiting. I suspect this opinion was informed by my architecture professor’s intensely negative reaction to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and A Timeless Way of Building when they were first published. Years later, when I learned that software engineers were enamored of Alexander’s books, and the emergence of software patterns had its basis in Alexander’s notion of design patterns, I was bemused and skeptical.
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Conference Report: The Web and Beyond
Published: October 23, 2006
In the beautiful surroundings of the Pathé Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam, the Dutch chapter of SIGCHI—SIGCHI.nl, now rebranded as CHINederland.nl—on June 8th, 2006, held its 10th annual conference, which was entitled The Web and Beyond, as shown in Figure 1. The conference focused on the challenges and opportunities Web 2.0 presents to the field of user experience design.
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The Web and Beyond: SIGCHI Conference in Amsterdam
Published: October 23, 2006
The Netherlands’ tenth annual SIGCHI Conference took place on Thursday, June 8th, 2006, in Amsterdam. Titled The Web and Beyond, the conference focused primarily on interaction design for Web 2.0. The conference drew a capacity crowd to the fabulous art deco Theater Tuschinski, shown in Figure 1. There could be no more beautiful venue for a design conference.
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Strategy06: A UX Professional's Experience of the Conference
Published: September 25, 2006
Strategy06, the second annual IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) Institute of Design Strategy Conference, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA), Illinois, on May 17 and 18, 2006. The organizers characterized this conference as “an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage.”
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Book Review: Designing for Interaction
Published: September 11, 2006
Dan Saffer’s Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices was an ambitious undertaking. In fewer than 300 pages, he has attempted to cover the history, current practice, and notions about the future of the rapidly evolving discipline of interaction design (IxD). Whether you are simply curious about interaction design, are entering the profession yourself, or are collaborating with an interaction designer, Designing for Interaction is a good place to start your journey down the road of interaction design.
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Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint: Part IV
Published: August 28, 2006
Wednesday brought greater diversity in my experience of the conference. In addition to attending a course, “The Art of Speaking,” I checked out the Exhibits in The Commons, heard part of a panel discussion titled “The Route to the Sea for User Value,” and in the evening, joined the crowd at the Hospitality Events.
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Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint: Part V
Published: August 28, 2006
On Thursday, the last day of the conference, I attended Part III of the three-part series on public speaking for HCI professionals and the closing plenary session.
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Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint: Part III
Published: August 14, 2006
On Tuesday, I attended a full-day course, “Repositioning User Experience as a Strategic Process.” Then, in the evening, colleagues from the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and the User Experience Network (UXnet) gathered for dinner at Buonanotte.
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Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint: Part II
Published: July 24, 2006
On Monday, after Scott Cook’s excellent Opening Plenary Session, I attended a series of three courses presented by Jared Spool, CEO and Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), shown in Figure 1. Jared is a very engaging speaker and his knowledge about product usability is both broad and deep, so his presentations are always enjoyable and informative. For me, this was a day well spent.
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International Usability Evaluation: Issues and Strategies
Published: July 24, 2006
Like many UX practitioners, I’m often involved in designing products that will be sold across the globe. Half of the challenge is acknowledging there is no one-size-fits-all set of design criteria. The other half is knowing the tradeoffs when choosing between usability methods for requirements gathering and evaluation. What many may find surprising is that our tried-and-true methods themselves can have limitations, depending on the context in which we apply them.
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Experiencing CHI 2006: From a Practitioner's Viewpoint: Part I
Published: July 12, 2006
The twenty-fourth annual CHI conference—CHI 2006—was held at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal,
Québec, Canada, from April 24th through 27th,
2006. In setting the theme Interact • Inform • Inspire, the organizers
encouraged “researchers and practitioners from all segments of the CHI community—design, education, engineering, management, research, and usability—[to] interact, inform and inspire each other.” Two days of workshops preceded the conference on April 22nd and 23rd; however, I did not attend the pre-conference workshops.
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Faceted Metadata for Information Architecture and Search
Published: June 30, 2006
Sometimes first impressions are a great way to gauge the likelihood of a successful experience. This wasn’t one of those times. I was deeply concerned that I’d signed myself up for some esoteric discussion on the proper use of metadata, but pleasantly surprised to find a real-world interface solution for dealing with large information collections—exactly what the summary said this course would cover.
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Journeying Through CHI 2006
Published: June 5, 2006
When I signed up to attend CHI 2006, for the very first time
in my seven-year career, I didn’t expect that I’d
spend most of the event helping to staff our company’s
exhibit space and drive hiring for the St. Jude Medical Human
Factors Engineering team. In 2001, a paper
I’d
co-authored with Robert Reimann was accepted for CHI, but I
was unable to attend due to conflicting project duties. Over
the years, events always seemed to conspire against my attending
CHI, although I’ve had the pleasure of attending other
conferences such as DIS and DUX. At CHI 2006, I hoped to educate
myself about leading research and fresh trends in the field
of computer/human interaction, as well as network with folks
I’ve worked and communicated with, especially through
the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). In the end, though,
working the St. Jude Medical booth consumed the bulk of my
time. More on that later, however.
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Returning to CHI: Different Experience, Same Rush
Published: June 5, 2006
CHI 2006 took place on April 22–27, in Montréal, Québec, Canada, at the Palais des Congrès. Its theme: Interact. Inform. Inspire.
In April of 2001, a small dotcom sent a young Webmaster to
a conference called CHI in Seattle. That was my first CHI experience.
I had been forced to read The Design of Everyday Things,
the author of which was some guy the owner knew from when he
was working on his PhD at the University of California, San
Diego—that’d be Don Norman. I’d never been
to Seattle, never been on a business trip before, knew hopelessly
little about the concept of usability—except that I was
grateful when somebody blamed her problems with doors on the
designers of the doors and not her inability to intuit in which
direction a door will open—and was chaperoned by most
of the dotcom’s management team.
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Book Review: Paper Prototyping
Published: May 8, 2006
Carolyn Snyder’s Paper Prototyping: The Fast and
Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces provides
the only complete guide to paper prototyping.
It teaches you everything you need to know to successfully
do paper prototyping and offers many practical tips. However,
only about a third of the book is actually about doing paper
prototyping. The majority of the book’s content
comprises a basic reference on usability testing. While some
of the information on usability testing describes how to
test paper prototypes, most of it is applicable to any type
of usability testing. If you’re already an expert in
usability testing, you may not find this information as useful,
but Snyder has honed her approach
to usability testing over her many years of experience
as a usability professional and provides a wealth of practical
information.
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Dogma Free Design at SXSW 2006
Published: May 8, 2006
South by Southwest (SXSW) began as a music festival in 1987
and has grown to include festivals and conferences for the
film industry and interactive media. It is a colorful event,
held each year in Austin, Texas, and drawing an eclectic crowd.
(Need I mention the roller-derby girls handing out flyers outside
the main entrance?)
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IA Summit 2006: Gathering of the Tribe
Published: April 14, 2006
During March 23–28, 2006, over 500 people gathered
in Vancouver, Canada, for the seventh Information Architecture
Summit sponsored by ASIS&T (American Society for Information
Science and Technology). The delightfully diverse attendees
included not just people with the job title information
architect, but also librarians, Web developers, business
analysts, user experience designers, and others.
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My IA Summit 2006 Experience: Part 1: The Pre-Conference
Published: April 14, 2006
The seventh annual ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit—IA Summit 2006 for short—was held at the Hyatt® Regency
in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada,
shown in Figure 1, from March 23 through 27,
2006. Its theme was Learning • Doing • Selling.
While I attended the IA Summit Redux in San Francisco at Adaptive
Path last year, this was my first IA Summit.
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