October 2006 Issue
Interfaces for People, Not Products
Published: October 23, 2006
Without cooperation among designers of digital products, the proliferation of complex information systems can lead to unintended consequences—chiefly user fatigue, frustration, and the confusion that results from dealing with a host of variant user interfaces.
We can describe nearly every aspect of human life as a system—from the biology of our bodies to the houses in which we live, the documents we read, and the maps we navigate. Our lives comprise many systems, and information technology is making our interactions with these systems increasingly complex. Until recently, most people knew little about many of the systems they encountered and relied on specialists to help them navigate them. We have relied on doctors to understand how our bodies work, accountants to understand how our finances work, and contractors to understand how our homes work.
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Category: Columns
Conference Report: The Web and Beyond
Published: October 23, 2006
In the beautiful surroundings of the Pathé Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam, the Dutch chapter of SIGCHI—SIGCHI.nl, now rebranded as CHINederland.nl—on June 8th, 2006, held its 10th annual conference,
which was entitled The Web and Beyond, as shown in Figure 1. The conference focused on the challenges and opportunities Web 2.0 presents to the field of user experience design.
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Category: Reviews
The Web and Beyond: SIGCHI Conference in Amsterdam
Published: October 23, 2006
The Netherlands’ tenth annual SIGCHI Conference took place on Thursday, June 8th, 2006, in Amsterdam. Titled The Web and Beyond, the conference focused primarily on interaction design for Web 2.0. The conference drew a capacity crowd to the fabulous art deco Theater Tuschinski, shown in Figure 1. There could be no more beautiful venue for a design conference.
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Category: Reviews
Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before
Published: October 9, 2006
For UX designers, some of the most exciting projects to work on are new-to-the-world or breakthrough products that solve real problems people didn’t even realize they had. Get them right and they may be hugely successful in the marketplace, but they’re also the riskiest projects. While user-centered design (UCD) techniques can sometimes be valuable on new-product projects, more often, they don’t seem to work particularly well when designing breakthrough products. Here are some lessons I’ve learned from my own work on new-product projects.
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Category: Features
Designing the Mobile User Experience
Published: October 9, 2006
About a decade ago, the World Wide Web was just taking off, and people spent a lot of time trying to determine just what it would be useful for—other than online chat rooms and personal Web pages. Though it took us a while to figure out how to use the power of the World Wide Web, the Web has since revolutionized communications and commerce in modern society.
Today, we’re trying to understand how mobile devices—and by extension the mobile Web—can fit into and even enhance our day-to-day lives. As we do so, we should endeavor to avoid the mistakes we made before we understood the opportunity inherent in the Web.
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Category: Features