User Experience Design Blog

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 [...]

Apr 12, 2007 - I enjoy reading Read/WriteWeb, but Richard MacManus recently published a much hyped yet ill-conceived article titled ‘Google – The Ultimate Money Making Machine’. The article had some very interesting points, but the main analysis was simply wrong.

Mar 12, 2007 - Well, February was an extremely busy month, and for the shortest month of the year was packed with quite a few gems from the User Experience community. Here is a re-cap of a few articles and concepts that should not go without mention:

Feb 7, 2007 - An MIT and Harvard study (via Slashdot) unveils that the SiteKey system employed by Bank of America, ING Direct and Yahoo!, among others are likely ineffective at protecting users against fraudulent sites. The SiteKey system is based on assigning an image to a user’s account and presenting it prior to the user entering a password. [...]

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 [...]

Jan 24, 2007 - In a previous article, ‘4 Principles of Effective Navigation on the Web‘, one of the stated keys is letting users know where they can go. One of the most effective ways to let users know what paths are available to them is to expose subsequent destination points. In other words, bubbling up subsections and pages [...]

Jan 10, 2007 - Imagine that you are in a supermarket buying groceries for dinner. Imagine also that this supermarket does not label what kinds of items can be found in each aisle making it impossible for you to know where to go for the next item on your list. To make things worse, the aisles in the store [...]