Kategoria: Herkut (Page 1 of 45)

What makes a good usability evaluator? This study attempts to define the features and qualifications.

Miia Kososen verkkoyhteisöjä koskevan väitöstutkimuksen lektioluento.

The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, was held in the beginning of December. Nearly all the presentations are available online and they are worthwhile exploring.

This paper presents a macro level model of design with three internally coherent modes of design. These are immediate des ign dealing with users’ immediate situated challenges, traditional product design creating generally appealing solutions, and remote design, which elaborates on preconditions for design such as knowledge, platforms and standards. The need for the model is justified by a discussion addressing a set of conflicting trends called design tensions within the design of complicated human-technology systems. These include technology, innovation, competence, readiness and generality tensions. Finally, the impact of immediate and remote design on design education and design business is discussed. (via Ville)

Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? We can learn a great deal from organizations whose strong and adaptive ownership cultures give them a powerful competitive edge. Here are our top 10 lessons.

See the picture.

Created by Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, also of NowandNext.com, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead. Core themes include: Uncertainty, Ageing, Global Connectivity, Anxiety, and Power Shift Eastwards.

Back in 2005 the leading user experience companies from France, Germany, Spain, UK and US met in Barcelona with a single common goal in mind: how to provide effective international user experience services to our clients. Having worked together on international projects for many years, we recognised that we were ideally placed to lead international user experience research. Thus, the UXa was born. (And still they don't know how to give titles to web pages.)

Servicedesign.org is a glossary of terms related to Service Design.

"We have reused Peter Kim’s wonderful predictions gathered from social media influencers, we summarized the predictions, used tag clouds to help you focus, added insights gathered from Read Write Web and of course, added our own inputs. So here it is – the first from the influencers and experts collection."

Overshare has increasingly been used to reference those who divulge excessive personal information, online as well as offline.

More than five million people are expected to use the internet to carry on shopping on Christmas Day, the online retail group IMRG says. IMRG estimates more than £100m will be spent online, compared with the £84m spent last year.

This is a wiki for capturing design patterns about service design.

This wiki aims at collecting cases, methods and reflections about Service design. (It has a weird name, tho.)

Constantly updated list of technology predictions for 2009, a round-up of what some of the leading industry prognosticators are saying about what they think is in store for everyone's favorite pervasive global network next year.

Next year is all about nichetributes, luxyoury and econcierge, to name a few of the key trends.

IDEO's How-to Guide offers principles of design for social impact and a menu of offerings for types of social impact engagements that might make sense for your firm.

Anyone who works with fast moving technology knows that there is always a new shiny tool that gets all the attention. It tends to change every few months and anytime you start to use a new tool, you do secretly wonder if it will be around all that long. By any measure, Twitter has passed these boundaries. It has been around for several years. Every day more and more people discover it and it's usefulness in their personal lives. Yet many of the people who declare themselves "converted" and have opened Twitter accounts aren't getting the best benefit.

Sosiaalinen media tarjoaa yrityksille merkittäviä liiketoimintamahdollisuuksia, mutta vaatii ajattelutavan uudistamista ja avoimuutta. Parhaita osaajia ei enää synny pelkästään koulun penkeillä ja yrityksissä, vaan yritysten ulkopuolella on paljon internetissä itseoppineita eri alojen asiantuntijoita, joiden osaaminen yritysten tulisi hyödyntää. Luovien liiketoimintamahdollisuuksien kehittäminen sosiaalisessa mediassa vaatii myös innovatiivisia muutosagentteja.

As soon as you work on developing a website or web apps in a large organisation, you usually can’t but help think, "Surely there has to be a better way to build this stuff." So many meetings, so many requirements and design documents, the pain of testing, and the inflexibility to focus on actually creating a good design – they all contribute to a process that feels bulky, cumbersome, and long winded.

Are you testing your design with humans or just test subjects?

"Every blogger has the same list I do. A list of things they want to fix on their blogs, if only they had the time (or technical ability). Over the next 30 days I’m going to tackle the small things and big things that I have wanted to change on my blog for months (and sometimes even years) since I launched it. More importantly, I’m going to share the results of the project here, in case some of you readers are comtemplating doing the same thing with your blogs, or just interested in seeing how this experiment turns out. "

"One of my colleagues fends off lots of cold calls from all sorts of companies wanting to speak to various directors. The IT suppliers seem to be the easiest to get rid off as she politely asks them if the software is accessible (she usually has to explain why that’s important to the RNIB) and that seems to do the trick in getting rid of 90% of the sales folk."

First of all, less is sometimes more. We all know that, but it was really obvious in this case: Pownce was the Twitter fan’s dream come true, adding groups, file sharing and several other highly requested features without cluttering the service with too many options. However, sometimes simplicity and lack of options are what differentiates a service and makes it worth your while.

"Candlelight is romantic."

This toolkit offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can be used throughout the user-centered design process.

Half (48%) of tech users need help from others in getting new devices and services to work, and many experience tech outages when there is a glitch with their home internet connection, computer, or cell phone. Coping with these failures is a hassle for many tech users and helps to distance them from technology use.

"Syksyn mittaan olen useaan kertaan joutunut keskusteluun jossa toinen osapuoli miettii verkkosivujen vieritystarvetta. ’Kyllähän sivun pitää näkyä kokonaan ilman vieritystä’, on sanottu, kuten on myös ’Vieritys on huono juttu, sillä käyttäjät eivät vieritä’. Että häh, siis anteeks’ mitä? Viimeksi kun tarkistin kalenterista, totesin ettemme enää elä 1990-lukua."

Your content needs to sound like a human being crafted it, not like a system regurgitated it.

Be consistent. Pick one language variant and stick to it. Varying the style confuses everyone and signals poor attention to detail, says Jakob and for the first time ever, uses a smiley in his column!!

"Unless you know for sure that your web site is something people want, no amount of SEO or usability input is going to make it successful for years to come. Make every dollar and minute of your time on your project productive, and be honest about who your project is really for."