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2 Sep 2006Pew Internet & American Life Project recently updated and revised it's "Usage over time" spreadsheet showing how Americans use the Internet. This reminded me of a presentation that Susannah Fox gave a few months back about these trends. To paraphrase what she said: Level of education is the biggest factor that determines whether a person uses the internet or not. Not age, not ethnicity. This is apparent in the demographics. Percentages show what percentage of Americans use the...
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1 Sep 2006I know we don't recommend small fonts to our clients, but sometime you have to find fonts that look good on a screen at teenie sizes. For those situations I recommend minifonts, which feature some great bitmap fonts.
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1 Sep 2006I just finished reading an article that discusses the relationship between branding and the user experience. Namely that user experience should be consistent and reinforce the perception of the brand. The author explores examples mostly of corporate web sites and I was left wondering how should we think about this for the non-profit world. There aren't too many non-profits that have a strong branding presence. WWF is one. Those panda are easily recognizable. There are even smaller number of...
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31 Aug 2006Thanks to Oscar for finding this excellent article discussing how to present large sets of data in tables, in a usable way, through the appropriate use of controls, filters and sorting mechanisms. The author does a great job of illustrating all the presentation methods with diagrams and real-world examples from the web. When tables are chock full of information, it's quite likely that people will need to filter out information that isn't relevant to their queries. In such cases, exposing a...
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30 Aug 2006Jared Spools interviews Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swathmore College who wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. The premise of his work is simple: Limit the number of choices and you make people happier. When you present 30 flavors of jam at a store, you get more interest but less purchasing than when you only show six flavors of jam. Read the full interview. Or better yet, listen to the podcast .
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30 Aug 2006Jared Spools interviews Barry Schwartz, a professor at Swathmore College who wrote The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. The premise of his work is simple: Limit the number of choices and you make people happier. When you present 30 flavors of jam at a store, you get more interest but less purchasing than when you only show six flavors of jam. Read the full interview. Or better yet, listen to the podcast.
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29 Aug 2006Graffletopia is a great site that is collecting stencils for OmniGraffle. I just came across it while looking for a stencil of a map of the US. In an interesting twist, I recently checked emails to my now abandoned personal blog, and there was an email from the guy who runs Graffletopia saying that he has linked to the wireframes stencil I created ages ago that is featured inside an article I wrote on Using Wireframes on my blog. (3/31/2007) Also see post on Visio wireframe template and...
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14 Aug 2006We're on vacation in Germany, and had a fun talk with friend Thomas Maier, a journalist with Deutche Presse-Agenture, about the German Wikipedia community. Thomas related how enthusiastic and active is the Wikipedia community in Germany - saying something like "we (Germans) just love this kind of thing!" (Thomas wrote about Wikipedia in conjunction with the 2005 Wikipedia congress in Frankfurt. I grabbed some Wikipedia stats and meshed them with data on world language speakers, and...
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14 Aug 2006We've been doing a lot of cardsorting recently for various projects. It would be nice to recap on the basics as outlined by Mr. Gerry McGovern. His orginal article is also worth reading. A 13-step approach to card sorting Write out all the classification terms gathered during the situation analysis on cards. Ask readers, authors and representatives of management, to go through these cards, choosing what they feel are the relevant classifications. Try to get 10-30 people to do...
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2 Aug 2006I recently participated in one of Seth Earley's monthly Taxonomy Community of Practice calls called Social Tagging. I was particularly interested by Bill Ives' review on tagging trends for intranets. Here's an interesting article he wrote on the topic. A few examples from the session and from Bill's article include: IBM's Dogear You can tag intranet as well as internet material, and your corporate-directory presence can have your tags (as can your blogs). You can see others within your firm...
