Forum One: User Experience & Design Blog - Entries from August 2006

Presenting usable tables

Thursday, August 31. 2006

Thanks 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 complete list of data filters is an effective way of quickly communicating what refinement options are available.

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Usability, Web Design at 12:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Less choices = happier choices

Wednesday, August 30. 2006

Jared 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.

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Usability at 12:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

OmniGraffle Wireframe Stencils

Tuesday, August 29. 2006

Graffletopia 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 stencil

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Software at 16:53 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

Cardsorting Basics

Monday, August 14. 2006

We'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 this.
It better for people to go through these cards quickly, rather than thinking over them for a long time.
Ask them to choose the top 10-15 classifications that they would want to see at a top level.
Ask them to prioritize this list based on the most important getting the highest mark and so on. Let's say that someone chooses 10 classifications. They would then give a mark of 10 to their first choice, 9 to their second choice, and so on.
Create a spreadsheet with all the classifications listed in alphabetical order.
Create a print-out of this spreadsheet, with a box beside each classification. Give a copy to everyone carrying out the card sorting. Ask people to place their marks in the relevant boxes.
Create another spreadsheet with all the classifications listed in alphabetical order. Create a column for everyone who is carrying out the card sorting.
Place the relevant score in the appropriate column for each participant.
Create a total column at the end, which will give a total mark for each classification.
When all the respective marks of the participants have been entered, sort your spreadsheet based on the total column, highest mark first.
What you will get is a list showing the classifications that have received the highest total marks from all the participants.
This classification list and how it is prioritized becomes a very valuable input into what your top-level classifications should be and how they should be ordered.

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Information Architecture, Usability at 11:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Social bookmarking trends behind the firewall

Wednesday, August 2. 2006

I 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 with the same bookmarks as well as the bookmarks of individuals. and you can subscribe to them through RSS. IBM added collaborative filtering to infer stuff that people might want from their tagging activity and let them know about it. IBM has also integrated its enterprise social bookmarking system with its corporate search engines, giving the user access to the benefits of both.

Currently there is an auto-complete feature that encourages consistency. Another option being considered is to recommend recent and popular tags. They are also looking at how social bookmarking taxonomies map to corporate taxonomies to discover ways to improve corporate classification systems.

Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's H2O Playlist

Borrowed from Apple's Playlist concept for the iPod, or for those of you unfamiliar with Playlists, they're like mixed tapes (I know, I know, but I'm not that old!) for web content.

The Playlist can have a title separate from its tags, which makes it a unique entity that can be shared through its URL. At the same time you can add multiple tags to a single Playlist to retain this tagging benefit. You can also reorder your Playlist to reflect changing priorities instead of being limited to reverse chronological order in del.icio.us. Like iTunes, a person can set up a library of all their links, and then create multiple Playlists that draw on these links, adding to the flexibility. You can also see all the Playlists that contain an item, as well as all the comments that others have made about the item. When looking at a Playlist you can also see links to other Playlists:
- by the same author
- influenced by this one
- derived from this one
- with the same items
- with the same tags

Follow this link to see an example -
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/80825

Raytheon Intranet

Raytheon's employee tagging is reflected in intranet search results as well. We heard that results are grouped by audience type because as it turns out, different tags/terms mean different things to the various functions within the organization.

****

What excites me most is that instead of resisting uncontrolled vocabulary and the chaos that might arise from it, we're beginning to see how terms from our peer's vernacular are influencing taxonomy language (the Library Sciences folks are cringing). Progress in the field of usability.

Posted by Sophie Campagne in Web 2.0 at 14:44 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Pop vs. Coke vs. Soda

Wednesday, August 2. 2006

Love this map: A map of what people around the U.S. call a soft drink

Posted by Nam-ho Park in Information Architecture at 12:44 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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The User Experience & Design Blog covers issues that affect the web user's experience, which include information architecture, usability, accessibility, web development and latest trends. It is authored by the User Experience & Design Team at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.

Comments

Johan about Primary Navigation Image Replacement
Sat, 02.08.2008 08:49
Thanks a lot for the help! This technique is really nice.

shopping cart about Hierarchy - Design's pecking order
Wed, 16.07.2008 04:20
Nice article about placing and choosing right matter while desiging a web page.

Jan about Hierarchy - Design's pecking order
Sat, 21.06.2008 14:10
very nice

James Dowsett about Primary Navigation Image Replacement
Tue, 03.06.2008 05:13
Hi, Regarding Method #3: You can get rid of the long dashed focus border that shows in Firefox by adding 'overflow: [...]

Jared about Primary Navigation Image Replacement
Tue, 29.04.2008 17:45
Thank you for the assistance. It worked perfectly.

Dave Yuknat about It's Called Usability Testing, not User Testing
Mon, 31.03.2008 09:38
Ditto what Anna said. Each time a Project Mgr or a biz owner asks me, "when are we doing user testing"? They are [...]

Anna Marshall about It's Called Usability Testing, not User Testing
Thu, 27.03.2008 16:35
Your points on the idea that you're testing a site, not the user, are well taken. But I think "user testing" can be [...]

Michael Julson about Scaled Visio Wireframe Templates & Stencils
Thu, 27.03.2008 13:18
Thanks for the great stencil. Could I talk you into applying a license to the stencil like from Creative Commons or [...]