haveuheard's favorite 08/31/2008

• Phoebe Sengers - ACM author profile page

  www.acm.org - The premier society in computing brings you the Computer Portal.

  tags: researcher, user, information, communication, design, bibliography, sengers

haveuheard's favorite 08/25/2008

• Edge 255

  tags: 255, tv, media

haveuheard's favorite 08/23/2008

• NPD Insights - The Monthly Newsletter from the NPD Group

  tags: npd, marketing, statistics, consumer, resesarch, documents, database

haveuheard's favorite 08/19/2008

• EyeTracking-ResearchApplications.pdf (application/pdf 객체)

  tags: eyetracking, research, pdf

haveuheard's favorite 08/11/2008

• Technology News: Social Networking: Social Networking's Next Frontier: The Mobile Phone

  tags: no_tag

  • A complete mobile social networking experience is composed of three specific elements:
    

    
    
    • Sharing and storing personal information and profiles, including browsing for friends and contacts, reading status messages, commenting on photos and blogs, uploading photos to a personal profile and updating personal status messages.
    
    
    
    • Asynchronous messaging, including e-mailing and sending messages. These types of messages are generally stored and are available in offline mode.
    
    
    
    • Real-time messaging, including instant messaging and the ability to chat synchronously with friends. This type of communication is online, interactive and collaborative in nature.
  • New sets of diverse and niche social networks are being launched around any topic, theme or interest people may share, such as cultural-specific networks, special-interest-based networks (politics, nonprofits); local community-based networks (schools, volunteer organizations); professional-based networks such as LinkedIn and other professional associations and enterprise-based networks.

• Taejon Weather Forecasts on Yahoo! Weather

  tags: taejon, weather, forecast

haveuheard's favorite 08/07/2008

• Gui Prototyping Tools

  tags: prototyping, design, tool

• GUUUI - Results from a survey of web prototyping tools usage

  tags: gui, survey, prototyping, tool, usage, designer, design, ux

  • Some key findings:

    
    

    
    
    • There is currently no distinct consensus on what is the best tool
      to use for web prototyping
    
    
    • HTML and diagramming tools are the most commonly type of tools used
      for web prototyping
    
    
    • Macromedia Dreamveawer and Microsoft Visio are the most widely used
      tools
    
    
    • Respondents feel that the tools they use fall short on some high
      priority criteria, such as laying out and making changes to pages
    
    
    • Few seem to be perfectly happy with the tools they are using though
      users of HTML tools are strikingly more content than users of diagramming
      tools

  • The results showed that prototyping tools primarily have to support:

    
    

    
    
    • Quick and easy revision of pages
    
    
    • Quick and easy layout of pages
    
    
    • An easy way to demonstrate the prototype to clients and team members
    
    
    • Quick and easy site wide revisions
    
    

    
    

    Less important is it that a web prototyping tool:
    
    

    
    

    
    
    • Is able to simulate advanced functionality (e.g. scrolling and selecting
      items from a drop-down list)
    
    
    • Is easy to learn
    
    
    • Produces good-looking prototypes
    
    

    
    

    The answers about whether the tools that the respondents use live
    up to their requirements showed that the tools fall short on some high
    priority criteria. They primarily fail in supporting:

    
    

    
    
    • Quick and easy revision of pages
    
    
    • Quick and easy site wide revisions
    
    
    • Quick and easy layout of pages
  • • HTML tools have a high overall score, with site wide revision being
      the major problem
    
    
    • Diagramming doesn't score high on any criteria, and is considered
      particularly poor at supporting site wide revisions and simulating
      advanced functionality
    
    
    • The respondents using a presentation tool find that their tools
      are very easy to use and suitable for presentation and setting up pages
    
    
    • Respondents using non-computerized tools feel hat the approach fall
      short when having to do site wide revisions

• Dotty Studio | 애플의 디자인 프로세스와 디자인 중심의 조직

  tags: design, apple, process

• Designing for Ludic Aspects of Everyday Life

  tags: gaver, researcher, probe, cultural, latent, visual, ucd, method

• A List Apart: Articles: Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe

  tags: probe, visual, user, ucd, cultural, method

haveuheard's favorite 08/04/2008

• Persona Creation: Persona Types

  tags: persona, profile

• Persona Builder: Web based tool for creating personas - Home

  tags: personas, persona, builder, application, tool, profile

• For Motorola scientists, nosiness can be a virtue -- chicagotribune.com

  tags: chicagotribune, nosiness, sns, social, tv, iptv

  • The earliest type of messaging was sending a simple thumbs up or thumbs down to the other home, using a repurposed TiVo remote. Later, participants could use a keyboard for real-time chatting or invite friends to watch a show

  • Patterns in behavior

    Metcalf's team is still combing through the latest testing data but observed some general behavior patterns. Elaine Huang, senior staff researcher, said "conversations are pushing out beyond TV," with one group of users proposing a pizza outing over chat. Joe Tullio, senior research scientist, saw that male viewers were chatting more with their friends' significant others.
  • The researchers print important quotes or observations on notecards, which are then tacked on the walls of a conference room in the Galvin Center at Motorola's Schaumburg campus. Noel Massey, principal staff research engineer, came up with the idea of printing bar codes on the cards so they could be easily scanned into a computer database.

• Three Important Benefits of Personas

  tags: personas, persona, profile, benefit, effect, application

  • Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space.
  • While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.
  • Any tools that help designers prevent the natural behavior of grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their target user in mind.
  • Benefit #1: Preventing Grounding with Personas
  • Personas are model users that the team creates to help understand the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use the interface. The persona represents behavior patterns, helping the designer understand the flow of the user's day and how the interface will fit into it.
  • Benefit #2: The Oral Tradition Lives On
  • The team members had made up lives for these people, usually based on the actual observations they made when they studied real users. They constantly used these imaginary lives to relate important stories about how these users would interact with the proposed designs.
  • Using just the oral tradition, the stories become distorted with every new telling. Many of the teams prevented this distortion by capturing the stories along with the persona descriptions.
  • Benefit #3: The Role Personas Play in Role Playing
  • From an early age, we use role playing as a way to safely explore the world around us. By pretending to be different people, we can try things out from their perspective, seeing if their viewpoint is different from our own
  • When we adopt a role, we can start to view the world around us from that person's perspective. Using the persona as the target role, we can identify how that person will interact with the design and the issues that will arise.
  • To get the benefits, the personas have to have rich, relevant detail. They need to accurately represent the users the team is aiming for.
  • The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.

• Personas vs. User Descriptions; Apples vs. Tomatoes » UIE Brain Sparks

  tags: uie, persona, user, description

  • In my mind, Christopher is clearly confusing Personas with User Descriptions. User descriptions are what-we-think-we-know-now writeups of who uses our design and why. Personas, on the other hand, are carefully researched and crafted personalities we create to focus the design energy.
  • User descriptions help us see where our thinking is, help new team members come up to speed, and help us identify where we may have made assumptions that could turn out false. Personas helps us get past the this-design-is-for-every-breathing-being problem and help us focus our attention on the needs of three to seven specific individuals.
  • So, I recommend we call things by their names and not try and bunch different types of design activities and deliverables under one name. (And don’t even get me started with the folks who often refer to usability tests as focus groups.

• Don Norman's jnd.org / Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus

  tags: jnd, jnd.org, persona, norman

  • Empathetic focus. By focus I mean that the design must be clean and coherent. It is not a collection of features added willy-nilly through the life-span of the product, even if each feature by itself makes sense. Rather it is having a clear image of what the product is meant to be -- and what it is not meant to be -- and rejecting features that do not fit, only accepting ones that do. By empathy, I mean an understanding of and identification with the user population, the better to ensure that they will be able to take advantage of the product, to use it readily and easily -- not with frustration but with pleasure.
  • We quickly invented one relevant Persona per case: a hard-working, single mother (case one), a serious full-time student with no outside experience or responsibilities (case two), and a lackadaisical, laid-back goof-off (for three). Unlike traditional Persona studies, these were all made-up, but each was described in sufficient detail (including names), so that the group all agreed they felt like people they knew
  • I have found that an excellent way to use a Persona is to have someone role-play the part.

• Practical Personas: The User Is Always Right

  tags: personas, usability, persona

• Cooper Journal: The Origin of Personas

  tags: personas, cooper, profile, user, behavior

• Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin

  tags: goaldirected, design, persona, interview, researcher, ux, interface

  • emphasizes identifying goals of users
    before doing any formal design.
  • "Who's really using
    this, and what do they really want to accomplish?
  • they are powerful design, measurement, and communication
    tools.
  • the technology industry is doing things
    backwards
  • If you start with a deeply
    flawed design, usability testing will diagnose many of the problems, but won't
    necessarily point to a cure. Iteration won't get you to a great design
  • That moment of conceptualization is an intuitive leap
    I don't think any methodology can replace. The Goal-Directed methodology reduces
    the size of the leap and provides tools for evaluating the quality of the result--in
    that sense, I think it's probably better for inexperienced designers than some
    other methods.
  • Because any application designed for
    the web can be distributed almost for free, companies take that as permission
    to launch products or services in "web time," without really thinking
    through the business plan, the design, or a whole host of other crucial factors.

• Cuil

  tags: search, searchengine, cuil, tools, web, engine, search-engine, searchengines

haveuheard's favorite 08/01/2008

• AVING Korea - Global News Network

  tags: aving, shopping, product