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Richard MacManus on Rojo’s new sort by relevance feature: “any RSS Aggregator that is making an effort to tackle the ‘attention’ problem of 2006 is alright in my book.”
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A working bibliography on the internet of things. A rich list of links to interesting articles on what happens when real world objects get hooked up to the net.
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Erick Schonfeld reports on a speech by Barry Schwartz: “Too much choice makes people more likely to defer decisions. It raises expectations and makes people blame themselves more often for choosing poorly.”
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“build the thing so that it stays the hell out of the way and lets the user get on with what they really want to do.” — Kathy Sierra on what it means to create a good user experience or better yet: user enchantment.
Month: March 2006
links for 2006-03-17
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In insanely cool ambient rabbit-shaped device that wirelessly connects to the internet and gives feedback on your e‑mail, the weather or anything else you can think of. Must have.
Construction continues — tag cloud in the archives
Now and then I get around to adding another feature to this blog. A few days ago I plugged hitormiss’ weighted list into the archives page. Now I know tag clouds are the new mullets, and usability of these things is contested, but I just had to have one. It’s my blog and I’ll tag if I want to!
links for 2006-03-16
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Shirky proposes the construction of a pattern language for moderation strategies in social software.
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16 ways to “think in web 2.0”. Never shocking or new, but a nice summary of current ideas floating around.
NRC.Next
Een hele site in Flash optuigen, en deze vervolgens alleen gebruiken voor een slideshow met wat “prikkelende” foto’s? Kom op NRC — dat kunnen jullie beter.
links for 2006-03-15
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“Most fonts presented below are absolutely license-free which means that you can use them for both private, personal and commercial purposes without any limitations whatsoever.”
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Jeremy Keith reviews Newsvine. He says he mainly uses it to browse news story, as well as what other people are linking to. He doesn’t like the comments though: “Most comments suck.”
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Another great post from the Creating Passionate Users crew. Here they describe how anyone can become an expert, with enough time and dedication — it’s not (just) about talent. Resonates with my experiences in martial arts training.
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On why nerds don’t get MySpace, that they think “marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil” and that they “should be destroying them and then redefining them: making them […] more about the deep 2.0 principles that in fact, are revolutionizing
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“what if we treated the time invested into the IA community as a deposit into a communal bank? Mightn’t we be more inclined to make a deposit if it might enable us to eventually make a withdrawal?” — Rosenfeld on his vision for a new IAI.
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Khoi Vinh proposes the use of wikis to revamp style guides for the web because “the best design solutions are in fact living systems that can grow and adapt with changing needs.”
Restaurant usability
I ran into this curious sign while out for lunch today. A small restaurant specialising in pie (vlaai) had these huge letters in the window, saying: “you can sit here as well”. Obviously, if they made it obvious to potential clients that they had seating, they wouldn’t need the sign – or is it a case of people not wanting to sit down and have a piece of pie?
To me, the sign was quite similar to those texts in web pages reading “click here to …” – always a clear sign of bad usability. Perhaps the pie shop is in need of some user experience consulting?
links for 2006-03-14
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Cool presentation on what makes a great web designer.
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Jeff Veen describes how a top down approach to software adoption in the corporate arena usually doesn’t work. He describes how the AP wiki was gradually introduced into the organisation through a few key users.
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Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls,” — another case for the importance of good design.
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Bill Scott’s eTech talk on how interaction design patterns can be used to engage the user, to create relevance and loyalty.
links for 2006-03-10
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Robert Young wonders whether any other services could outdo MySpace in the race to create the ultimate console for consumer control (C3).
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“[…] full-text feeds will be where the value resides in the near future. If you’re still publishing excerpts then, your brand will be living on borrowed time.”
Next generation tag clouds
Joe Lamantia recently published a two-part essay on tag clouds. He’s managed to create a nice primer on tagging from an IA’s point of view. His tone of voice is a bit academic, which may turn you off, but his predictions of future directions for tagging and tag clouds are spot on quite interesting.
A while ago I tried to come to grips with the tagging phenomenon in a series of posts on open.info.nl (in Dutch). The last one was on facetted tagging. Lamantia briefly mentions this as a new direction, but doesn’t really describe how he imagines this would work.
I’m in the planning phase of a facetted tagging demo, and still not sure how to approach it: should content editors specify the facets within which content users can tag, or should the facets be tags as well. In other words – how far should we go in relinquishing control over metadata?