One of my good friends currently in Singapore, Michael Lim, has uploaded a copy of his 2004 Showreel.
Ubiquitous Computing – Vodafone’s vision of the future
Last year I had the opportunity to study a post-grad subject called Interaction Design at UTS with Dr. Toni Robertson.
The subject taught us about usability, HCI, heuristics and touched on ubiquitous computing.
This Vodafone website, Vodafone: Future Vision explores a vision of interaction design in the near future, and looks at some possibilities in mobile and portable technologies.
Somewhat experimental and at times, unbelievable, it is well worth checking out.
Dynabook Revisited – a conversation with Alan Kay
Peter J. Bogaards from BogieLand has posted an interesting link to a series of essays by Alan Kay from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).
One of the essays is titled, The Dynabook Revisited, which looks at the human relationship with the Book and the Computer. It is a great read.
Animals: The Inside Story on ABC
There was an amazing documentary on ABC tonight titled, Animals: The Inside Story.
Part 2 of a 3 part series explored the birth of new animal life – from baby elephants, emperor penguins, alligators through to the amazing metamorphosis of a moth and caterpillar.
The final episode of the 3-part series is on next Wednesday at 8:30pm on ABC.
IAThink on colour blindness and usability
Heidi Adkisson from IA Think has posted an interesting blog entry on some of the usability concerns with colour blindness and the hyperlink.
CSS Vault is a great CSS resource
The CSS Vault website contains a selection of css websites which both inspire and are a great CSS resource.
The website is a great place to visit for any designer, developer, programmer, manager, or CSS advocate.
IA and User Experience books from 2003
Jess McMullin from IAslash has post a list of some of the User Experience and Information Architecture books from 2003.
Below is the list
- Universal Principles of Design Condensed design wisdom for capital ‘D’ Design. Outstanding.
- Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment Seminal collection of HCI/Engagement thinking. The academic reference for peeps who want more than “good experience needs to be engaging” platitudes.
- Emotional Design In May 2002, Don Norman posted to CHI-WEB looking for beautiful and usable designs. A year and half later, this book brings together his thinking about the importance of emotion in design. Destined to be a classic, and hopefully help drag the old skool “ugly boxes everywhere – but it works” HCI crowd into the 21st century.
- Information Architecture for Designers I like Peter’s book. It’s visual in a way that other IA books aren’t, and that connects to a certain crowd in a way that another chapter on facets just won’t. Recommended for quick illustrations of IA to others.
- About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design Alan Cooper enlisted Robert Reimann’s help with this sequel. It’s a good overview of Cooper’s process, but leaves out a lot of detail that I wished was there, particularly about persona creation. Still very useful as an introduction to interaction design, and a reference for particular situations. Most of the examples focus on application development. If you’ve read About Face 1.0, you’ll find some repetition, but there’s enough new material, and updated past material to make it worth the money.
- Paper Prototyping Carolyn Snyder takes her years of experience with paper prototyping, and makes them available here. Very cool. I’m still not convinced that the effort to make complicated paper widgets to simulate interaction is worth it for most web sites. Where paper prototyping rocks is in managing expectations – seeing polished mockups or even clickable wireframes can give the illusion that the project is farther along than it is. If you deal with people thinking the project is ready to launch after seeing a design comp, paper prototyping is just the ticket.
- Observing the User Experience Adaptive Path’s Mike Kuniavsky brings together a lot of thinking on user research, with a lot of attention to usability testing, rounded out with other common techniques, from focus groups to ethnography. Solid how-to advice can provide a platform for actually going out and actually studying users.
- Design Research : Methods and Perspectives Brenda Laurel brings together a stellar cast to cover a wide range of design research methods and issues. With any edited volume, the quality varies with each chapter – but overall it’s very very good.
- Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do This book is important. Credibility and persuasion are going to become increasingly recognized issues in developing interactive products, and user experience people will be on the front lines of the debate.
Differences between vocabulary, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology & meta-model
A great article which discusses and looks at the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus, an ontology, and a meta-model.
Contributed by Woody Pidcock of the Boeing company, it contains an overview of each and also interesting links and discussions.
Thanks to XPlane for the link.
Creating better 404 error pages
AlistApart have published a great article on creating better 404 error pages.
A server 404 error page or message occurs when a website page is missing or cannot be found. 404 error messages range in content from server to server, but a few intuitive links, content and techniques can improve the user experience.
Voyager 1 spacecraft reaches edge of solar system
View PostKeeping Found Things Found
A great article from the AScribe Newswire on Web users and their ability to find, store and later recollect links and useful information.
The article comments that keeping track of Web pages doesn’t always mesh well with how people work with the Web.
Digital Cameras are making us better photographers
A BBC technology article looks at some of the reasons why Digital Photography is making us better photographers and could be an end of film.
Personally, I hope that digital technology doesn’t completely remove the enjoyment of shooting and developing film in a dark room.
An intro review of Windows Media Centre Edition
Anandtech have posted a really interesting and thorough introduction to the new set-top Personal Video Recorders (PVR).
In particular the review, looks at Microsoft’s XP Media Center Edition (MCE), hardware requirements, watching and recording programs, listening to music and some of the other tasks and features involved with PVR.
Wireless hotspots in Australia
An interesting article in the Sydney Morning Herald which looks at some of the open Wi-Fi hotspots in Sydney.
Information Design paper
An interesting paper by David Sless from CRIA titled, Theory for practice.
The paper looks at five principles of Information Design – politics, position, parsimony, politeness, and performance and was forward within the Interaction Designers mailing list.