From UX booth: "Like most things today, the world of interaction design moves quickly. Although a pen and notebook may suffice when it comes to simply jotting down ideas, planning a series of website screens can sometimes demand additional precision and cohesion. This is where today’s wireframing tools come in."

Wonderful post from Brain Traffic on using personal pronouns in your web copy. I do agree, at times, it can be difficult to sell this in some organisations, but I also agree, it may be just a matter of adopting or getting comfortable with a style. Using personal pronouns may sound like a simple, common-sense web writing best practice. Speaking directly to users with the word "you" is something most companies get on board with easily enough. But those same clients often ask us to avoid self-referential pronouns like "we," "our," and "us" in their web copy.

A nice story from the NY times on a Kenyan product called Ushahidi. This is an informant mapping tool and works like this: anybody on the ground can call a cell number and and point out a location, it could be of a rape or a terrorist hideout, and all of this information is aggregated and represented on a map. If there are many pointers to a particular location, troops can be called in to look. Brilliant stuff. "When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went again into action. An emergency texting number was advertised via radio. Ushahidi received thousands of messages reporting trapped victims. They were translated by a diffuse army of Haitian-Americans in the United States and plotted on a ‘crisis map.’ From a situation room at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, outside Boston, Ushahidi volunteers instant-messaged with the United States Coast Guard in Haiti, telling them where to search. When the Chilean earthquake struck, Ushahidi deployed again."

Big finding from Jakob Nielsen. Now clueless managers are going to sing this mantra and demand that everything be above the fold. "Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold. "

A good article with two really good videos explaining information architecture. "Although it’s tempting to skip ahead to the look and feel of a design, the importance of first defining an Information Architecture (IA) can’t be overstated. Often we find that an existing system has been built as a monolithic solution that jumbles the raw plumbing of the system with the business process and the user interface. Unfortunately this leads to a brittle solution that can’t evolve with new user interfaces, new underlying systems, or new business realities. In fact we often hear the words "Information Architecture" naively applied to only one aspect of an experience (like "Information Architecture for the Web") and then disregarded or ignored when an experience bridges interfaces (like when a user has to interact with a mobile application that integrates with related information in physical places)."

.prezi-player { width: 500px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }NESTLE KERFUFFLE on Prezi

The design research section of the IDSA now has a website. Also, the current issue of IDSA’s publication Innovation is jam packed with design research related articles. Cool!

My new post over at PebbleRoad is around the new categorisation of TV channels proposed by local cable TV provider Starhub. My peeve is that the new categorisation is designed to serve internal needs and not the needs of the viewers. We’re required to just memorise the new numbers even though the assignment is ambiguous and confusing. To complete the article, however, I’ve also proposed a faceted classification of the channels and even given a mock of an iphone like interface to replace the last-century-looking remote. Enjoy!

From Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd, guest blogging at HBR. "Ubiquity First, Revenue Later. Build an audience first and then uncover how it can lead to increased employee productivity or faster time to competence. Since microblogging is a modest expense, (often as low as $1.00 per user per month) there need not be elaborate ROl studies prior to piloting the service. However, you do need to identify key business goals you want to measure as microblogging rolls out across the company, such as increased brainstorming or greater ease in seeking feedback from employees. Then follow the impact on revenue."

A while ago I wrote an article on Designing Collections for the Web. In this article I stated that Twitter was a collection and there are 4 objectives of a collection: To help users easily contribute to a collection (contributing objective) To help users find an item in a collection (identifying objective) To help users easily co-locate similar items (co-locating objective) To surface relevant and interesting items (relevancy objective) In the Chirp Developer Conference, Twitter finally added the two objectives that were missing: surfacing relevant and interesting stuff (promoted tweets, although marketing influenced) and co-locate similar items (Twitter annotations). I am really interested how the Annotations feature will take off. It could really extend the service beyond what we know of it now.