User Experience Design Blog

Jan 22, 2008 - Neglect Advanced Search, Never More A new article on Boxes and Arrows calls advanced search “an under-utilized tool hampered by its own design.” “Normal” people don’t use it. The “old framing” of search versus advanced search, of “geeks versus normal people”, is prohibitive and doesn’t allow users to tackle the problem of too many results. The [...]

Jan 15, 2008 - Engagement in Web Metrics Print advertisers buy space. Broadcast advertisers buy time. We used to measure the success of online ads by page views. The Washington Post this week suggests that given multi-tasking users and the rise of development techniques like Ajax, a better measure of success would be to develop new metrics, like “engagement”–a way [...]

Jan 8, 2008 - In the tradition of the New Year, best-of lists and some things to look forward to… Ten Best Intranets 2008 From the Alertbox, Mr. Nielsen reports the Ten Best Intranets of 2008. Half the winners are from the U.S., among them Bank of America, Barnes and Noble, Campbell Soup and Coldwell Banker. The financial industry is strongly [...]

Dec 11, 2007 - On November 7th, 2007, RollingStone published an interview with William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’. In the interview, Gibson suggests that one of the “challenges” we will face is the prospect of ubiquitous computing. He prophesizes: One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that [...]

Dec 4, 2007 - Like Pointillism, Web Metrics? This past week, The Economist ran an article on web metrics and banner advertisement. The piece explores the difficulty involved in interpreting metrics and the meaning and evolution of measurements like page hits, page views, and user sessions. But perhaps the most important point in the article is its last sentence: “Advertisers [...]

Nov 30, 2007 - Below is a listing of events in December 2007 related to user experience design in the San Francisco Bay Area, North America, and throughout the world. If you would like to add an event, feel free to leave a comment below with its details. User Experience Events in the San Francisco Bay Area The Future of Search December [...]

Nov 27, 2007 - Amazon releases the Kindle With a 6″ display, 600×800 pixel resolution, 4.9″ x 7.5″ x 0.7″ dimensions, free EV-DO, and the “visual flair of an Apple IIc“, the Kindle sold out within 5.5 hours of its release on November 19th. Though many books are available for $9.99, including 101 of the 112 current New York Times [...]

Jan 30, 2007 - The latest issue of Usability News from the Software Usability and Research Lab (SURL), has a very interesting study - “Eye Gaze Patterns while Searching vs. Browsing a Website” - on web users’ eye gaze patterns while browsing and searching web sites. Findings from the study show that the ‘F’ pattern as described by Jakob [...]

Dec 21, 2006 - What if you could measure how perfect your website was? If you could definitively say that your website was 100%, pure perfection, wouldn’t you grasp the chance to test how it fares in the test? Well, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) recently released the results of a study commissioned by Rackspace Managed Hosting which [...]

Dec 14, 2006 - On Wednesday, TechCrunch and Mashable reported the release of Stumble Video, the latest offering from StumbleUpon. Like the core offering, Stumble Video allows users to surf through categories based on preferences and previous ratings, serving up videos instead of websites into one central video player. Beyond a great idea, the implementation is clean and engaging, [...]