Webmonkey on Information Architecture

Great article about Information Architecture from webmonkey. I think i came across this article for the first time around 2005. It appears it has been assimilated into the wired site.

Reading through it I came across the following interesting section:

"Metaphor Exploration
This next step, which is called “metaphor exploration,” can help refine your vision of the site’s structure, but it’s important to remember that this step is only an exercise. It will give you many good ideas, but they may be impractical, at best. Don’t let that discourage you, though - it can be a lot of fun.

It’s useful to explore various metaphors in trying to determine the site’s structure. A good metaphor can go a long way in helping users understand how to use and navigate the site. However, no metaphor is perfect, so don’t feel that you have to adhere rigidly to just one. You could take the best parts of several metaphors and roll them into one (or you might not find any useful metaphors at all).

Three types of metaphors are useful to site design:

Organizational metaphors

Organizational metaphors rely on the existing structure of a group, system, or organization. For example, if you are creating a site to sell groceries, your metaphor could be a supermarket, where products are grouped logically by type (canned vegetables, dairy products, cereal, snacks, household items, etc.). Beware that copying the organizational hierarchy of your client company is usually not a good idea - grocery customers couldn’t care less about a supermarket’s corporate structure.

Functional metaphors

Functional metaphors relate tasks you can do on the site with tasks you can do in another environment. Photoshop, a graphics program, relies on a lot of functional metaphors:You can figuratively “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” graphics on a computer - as though you were using real-world scissors and glue.

Visual metaphors

Visual metaphors are based on common graphic elements familiar to most people in our culture. If you are designing a music site that allows users to play songs, you might want to use the traditional “start,” “stop,” and “pause” icons found on CD players everywhere.

To begin exploring metaphors, gather your people and brainstorm ideas. Review and evaluate each metaphor. Try not to discourage any suggestions you do not like, at least not right away. A metaphor’s punch might not be obvious right away. Try to map out the major sections of the site by connecting elements from the content inventory to each metaphor.

After what was probably a lively and entertaining experience, you must choose a metaphor or a rationale for the site’s structure. Remember, no metaphor is perfect. The overall site might not be explainable as a metaphor, but perhaps the navigation system (or smaller subsets of the site) can be."

Hadn't thought about it like this before! :)

Yahoo mail is utter crap

Pauldj_05

Quite a bold statement don't you think? Unfortunately it's true. There's a lot wrong with it (e.g. looking more like outlook/hotmail than gmail, always starting with the "what's new" tab, big annoying animated banners), but the absolute biggest failure is that it's not possible to send email in an easy straightforward way. Every other message I want to send I have to proof being a human being by solving an at some times very difficult to read CAPTCHA image.

I appreciate them trying to weed out spammers, but this is ludicrous! What use is a mail program if it isn't easy to send an email? To make matters worse you won't have this problem by using the iphone mail client. So that's the route I'd choose if I was a spammer :' )

One last thing, there's no way to give feedback to the development team. So that's why this is here. Anybody want to comment on this?

99% Behance Conference and Threadless

"Jeffrey Kalmikoff and Jake Nickell, the masterminds behind the hugely successful, crowd-sourced t-shirt design website Threadless, chart their changing working styles and mindsets throughout eight years of partnership. Their "Do-First Work Ethic" encompasses virtues like: staying scrappy, being 100% reactive to your community, embracing a DIY approach, learning from failure, and always (always) taking the first step."

Great video of my favorite t-shirt company :D

See here for more video's of this amazing conference!

Google Goggles alternative AR?

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via TechCrunchimage

Today, at their Search Event in Mountain View, Google demoed a brand new product set to launch in Google Labs:Google Goggles. Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotrashowed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots. You also be able to use Goggles to look up things such as CD covers and bar codes (this is likely similar to the popular Android app ShopSavvy). For text, Google Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to try and read things like logos and labels to aid the search.

It seems as if this new functionality, which should be live in Google Labs soon, will be destined for Android phones at least at first.

In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country.Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages usingGoogle Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate.

I wonder if this could be called an alternative form of Augmented Reality? 

Combining sleep cyle and ipod or how I tricked my iphone into multitasking

Photo

Sleep cylce is an iphone app that's topping the charts in itunes at the moment. I heard al lot about it from my friends so I decided to give it a try! I didn't realize however that I have a bit of a ritual when i fall asleep. That is I usually listen to music or an audiobook when I fall asleep. Currently that's not a feature Sleep cycle supports and given that I rather listen to the ipod app than have insight in my sleeping patterns I havn't used sleep cycle once..

Today I decided to have a look at the sleep cycle site to see if I could post a feature request. To my delight the faq already stated they are working on it: "Planned in future versions: Listen to music or audio books when going to sleep". So that's great, but then I suddenly realized that it's already possible to trick the iphone and sleep cylce into this! :D

  1. enable ipod controls (settings > general > home > ipod controls > on)
  2. go to the clock app, set a timer and use it to "Sleep iPod" when it elapses (you don't wan't to have yourself brainwashed all night ;)
  3. start your ipod music or audio book
  4. start sleep cycle and WHILE it's booting double tap the home button!  <-- this is the trick part
  5. a window with ipod controls pops up now, wait for the app to completely boot up and stop the music
  6. now you can click the play icon in the pop up window, the music starts playing. Close the pop up and use sleep cylce!

It's great to outsmart your iphone ;)

User experience strategy

This is a topic I'm researching a lot lately :) 

Today I was reminded about an article I found some time ago: "Why Microsoft had to destory Word" by Peter Merholz. His article is about the design process of the Microsoft Office Ribbon interface. They used what he calls Experience Principles:

Harris and his team realized that they had to essentially burn down the interface and rebuild it. After conducting deep research on how people actually use the tool, they came up with a set of what they called "Design Tenets" that guided the decision-making for the new Office UI:
A person's focus should be on their content, not on the UI. Help people work without interference.
  • Reduce the number of choices presented at any given time.
  • Increase efficiency.
  • Embrace consistency, but not homogeneity.
  • Give features a permanent home. Prefer consistent-location UI over "smart" UI.
  • Straightforward is better than clever.
These tenets were the new religion of Office 2007. Any suggested UI functionality was mapped against these tenets, and if any were violated, that function wouldn't make it in. So, a tool like Clippy, which tries to figure out what you're doing and offer suggestions, gets removed because "straightforward is better than clever."
 This is also something that is a part of the process they use at Miskeeto:

How we do it
To develop your user experience strategy, we do the following:
  • Evaluate the usability of your site/product and any competing sites/products
  • Interview stakeholders (we travel to your offices)
  • Define business and project goals
  • Evaluate technical and business constraints
  • Define success metrics
  • Establish the guiding tenets for your “experience vision”
  • Establish design criteria for all designs
  • Create sketches, wireframes, and prototypes (when needed)
  • Work with your team on implementation considerations
  • Communicate the experience vision to the team via training and presentation
  • Create documents to help you communicate the vision and our findings throughout your organization
  • Communicate and collaborate with you throughout the process
For more background information read "Developing a user ecperience strategy" by Robert Hoekman Jr. Very interesting!

At the end of Peter Merholz's article he thanks his colleague at Adaptive Path,Brandon Schauer, who turns out has also   got some great insights into this subject matter :)

I havn't read much yet of his blog, but some things I like to reference:

4 Experience hacks

I’ve been looking at my own practices and thinking through the case studies of others to identify relatively low-cost and low-effort activities that can up your slugging percentage. While none of these are panaceas, I hope they can really help improve the chances of success. I’m still working on the exact language, but here’s where I stand today:

  1. Get customer empathy into your business — see a handful of customers face-to-face, finding patterns of insights that tell you how to meet your business objectives. I think this can become almost recipe-like given the right picture of integrating business objectives and customer insights.
  2. Define the experience you want customers to have — this is an obvious step that’s too often skipped. Beyond being freaking “friendly” and undoubtedly “easy to use”, what should the experience be like? Create some experience principles to guide every design decision.
  3. Customer experience ideas are cheap. Have lots of them, but only execute the best handful. — Avoid the decision-making bias of primacy. Your first idea is rarely the best idea. Don’t waste development cycles and customer attention to find that out. Instead, have many ideas and use your insights and experience principle to vet them and find the best bets.
  4. Return to the customer context. Often. — Working on a fast-paced design project we realized that we had become so engrossed in our own understanding of the business requirements that we lost the perspective of the customer. We didn’t have budget for usability testing, so we instead conducted a “dry-run-of-one.” We found a single representative customer, halted the design process for an afternoon, and walked the customer through our best paper-based simulation of the current design. We learned tons. It was such a good use of valuable time that we stopped and conducted other dry-runs-of-one at other points in the design process. It’s may not be as rigorous as full usability testing, but it was a great ROI.

to be continued.. :)

 

Optimal width for 1024px resolution?

I’ve been using 960 for some time now, as it’s slightly smaller than full width, and it’s divisible by 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 16 (imagine the grid possibilities). I’d love to hear what all of you are wrestling with.

I was wondering why 960 was the magical number for a 1024 resolution screen when I found the above. Also see http://960.gs/ for more on grid systems!

Games are the next best thing for the music industry!

Tap tap revenge 3 has just been launched for the iPhone. Check their site, or this review.

I think this is a great example of a way find new revenue for the music industry. No doubt that they have taken a heavy hit with illegal downloads on the rise.

The idea with tap tap is that you can buy this game for (almost) free. Only one problem, it hardly has any content (songs). This is not really a problem, because you can download a song for free a week. Because waiting a whole week for a new random song is probably too much for most users, they offer various bundles of songs you can buy for the game!

This is such a great idea: to control the player (the game in this instance) instead of the distribution of music. On top of that you have the possibility to sell the same song mulltiple times (in different games) to the same user.

So f*ck the illegal downloads, let them make your songs populair. Make money by being inventive!

Just found this Wired article about Guitar Hero which is has the same model of course. Instead of embracing this concept the music industry is still complaining:

"The success of these games is good news for the music biz. They're breathing new life into old bands (Weezer, anyone?) and helping popularize new ones. They're even becoming a significant distribution outlet for new releases. So the record labels ought to be ecstatic, right? Nope. They're whining over licensing fees.

"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told analysts last summer. The money Warner receives for the use of its songs is "paltry," he said, and if the gamemakers don't pony up more cash, "we will not license to those games." In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations."

Very weird if you ask me..

Top 10 UX Myths

"Al Gore invented the Internet. Drinking alcohol keeps your body warm. You won’t get pregnant if you stand on your head after … well, you get the idea. Myths are those hard-and-fast rules that often start as a plausible idea or once-off observation that grow and distill into ‘common knowledge’ as they virtually spread. I know I’ve believed a few of these. I’ve also asked my UX expert Twitter friends for their UX Myths – and they have many!
So, let me entertain you with a list I compiled of my favorite ‘User Experience myths’. Then perhaps you, like many UX folks, will have some myths of your own to share …"

Short summary via guuui.com:

- If the Design is a Good One, You Don't Need to Test It
- People Don't Change
- Design to Avoid Clicks
- UX Design Stops at the Edges of the Product
- If you Have Great Search, You Don't Need Great Information Architecture
- Can't Decide? Make it a Preference
- Design Always with Implementation in Mind
- People Know What They Like
- People Read
- The Design Has to be Original