List of IA blogs

A list of blogs concerning information architecture is available at Stefan Freimark's blog.

Elements of Style

For a presentation I gave last week on the origin of patterns I found a quite condensed version of Christopher Alexander's latest book "The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe". The abridged version "Elements of Style" was featured by Wired in December 2003. You can find my version in English and German at Slideshare.net:

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(Let me know if anyone has high resolution images. Mine are a bit jagged.)

Jef Raskin found by Anarchaia

Anarchaia found and linked to my page with Jef Raskin's design rules. I'll have to check the other cool stuff collected by Christian Neukirchen.

interview questions and exercises

Interview questions for user experience design roles by Day Alexander and discussion at IxDA.

Related on LinkedIn: What are key questions for hiring managers and executives?

IxDA Patterns

The Interaction Design Accosiation has collected its discussions on patterns.
Find more resources on patterns (in general) at mprove: HCI Patterns.

James Kalbach's Designing Web Navigation

James Kalbach's Designing Web Navigation
Originally uploaded by vanderwal

Thomas Vander Wal is looking forward to read James' book on Web Navigation. Me too.

Produkt-Management ist...

...das Beobachten und Regulieren der Grenze zwischen Rot und Blau. (Siehe meine Notizen zum Vortrag: Kulturbeobachtung – ein Element dynamikrobuster Höchstleistung von Dr. Gerhard Wohland)

Visualization Methods

The 17^th User Experience Newsletter features “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods”. It's a wonderful collection and classification of different chart types for very different occasions... (read more)

it is the user's itch that needs to be scratched

The Summer 2007 issue of interfaces contains an article on our User Experience Project. If you are not a member of the British HCI group, you can read “User Experience for OpenOffice.org” on my website.

Quote:

The first rule of open source development is also the reason for an inherent usability problem: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."

The result is a self-referential system – developers develop for themselves rather than for the average user or the target audience. Usability engineering is considered as superfluous extra. However, to provide a good user experience, it is the user's itch that needs to be scratched.

This article presents user experience activities in the context of OpenOffice.org. The author – co-lead of the User Experience Project – will discuss the status of building an open source community of usability professionals to improve the usefulness and usability of the application.

(read more...)

FSOSS 2006 /webcasts

webcasts of 2006 symposium on Free Software and Open Source Software. Topics include OpenOffice.org and Sun's open source strategy.

Technorati Tags: openoffice, Sun, FSOSS