Rob Grady » UX

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization

Rob — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:38:23 +0000

Here are 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization HERE

Christian Watson’s Elements of Design Showcase

Rob — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:15:10 +0000

Christian Watson has put together a Design Showcase with over 70 different elements. It’s a great reference when brainstorming and wireframing.

Q and A with Luke Wroblewski

Rob — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 20:07:47 +0000

Design Sessions has a good interview with Luke Wroblewski. In particular, I thought the following passages were very interesting:
“Q: How do you know when a design is successful? How does your definition of success relate to usability, technology, and art?
Luke: A site is successful when it achieves the goals you set for it. I know that’s a simplistic way of looking at things, but there are so many considerations that impact user experience: findability, usability, desirability, accessibility, credibility, technology, etc. Focusing on any one of these as a measure for success may cause you to lose track of the big picture.
As an example, I hear a lot of designers complaining about the design of eBay. They point to a cluttered home page and dated aesthetics. Granted, these could be improved, but looking at these factors alone ignores the broader impact of the eBay service. eBay is the 30th largest economy in the world. 700,000 people make their full time living selling on eBay. Individual sellers can reach a global audience of millions from their home using it. If you compare those metrics against eBay’s goal of creating a level playing field for sellers of all sizes, and thereby truly democratizing commerce, the service is actually a huge success of which the design is no small measure.
Unfortunately, we lack an effective way to evaluate designs of this significance. So instead, critics focus on what they know best: aesthetics. Until we develop a better way of judging interaction designs that manage things like global economies or communities, we’ll continue to define success with visual design awards, which is unfortunate because only a portion of my time is spent making things pretty – most of it is spent making experiences that are useful, usable, and more desirable.”

“Q: Do you consider visual design and usability to be two separate disciplines? If so, where do they meet, or how do you bridge the gap?
Luke: The visual design of a website bears the responsibility of communicating the possibilities, limitations, and state of interactions. It tells users what they are seeing, how it works, and why they should care. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the websites we design.
However, the wrong message may be sent to users when visual elements are applied without an understanding of the underlying interactions they are meant to support. Visual styling that obscures or clouds crucial interaction options, barriers, or status messages can have a significantly negative impact on user experience.
You can think of visual design as the ‘voice’ of interaction design and information architecture, and therefore directly responsible for the usability of a website.
Now I don’t think that means usability & visual design are the same discipline, but there is certainly a symbiotic relationship between the two. Bridging the gap between them requires an understanding of that relationship and its impact on the final design of a product.”

Great article on sharing UX with the team

Rob — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:27:46 +0000

Great UX team article on UXmatters.com by Pabini Gabriel-Petit. The article does a great job outlining real world problems such as ‘throwing docs over the fence‘, the discrete discipline roles and how they should work together. While organizational roles differ by organization, I’ve found that the more disciplines represented in the process, the more innovative the UX solution. As Scott Berkun notes in The Myths of Innovation great innovations build on others work and collaboration.

SHIFT 2006 Presentation By Luke Wroblewski

Rob — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:00:05 +0000

While I didn’t hear the presentation, I downloaded Luke Wroblewski’s presentation from Shift 2006 and it has some very forward-thinking points. I’ve read over the last year that ‘creative thinking’ is more in demand and the decisional sciences being more of a commodity. I do think this is a long-term change just and while I agree in principle, I also believe that a lot of people won’t want to hear this and it will take time.

Bradley Horowitz: Lowering Barriers to Particpation

Rob — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 05:23:03 +0000

Bradley Horowitz, the VP Product Strategy for Yahoo, gave a great presentation on some of the latest technology implementations going on at Yahoo. While the topic was ‘Lowering Barriers to Participation’, I found the session more general. Good Take-Aways:

Yahoo is doing Agile and they have their own variant called YAgile. Very cool and I heard multiple people talk about how they’ve implemented Agile.
Yahoo is focused on developing community through Flickr and their grass roots initiatives. Multiple initiatives providing open APIs for Flickr is showing how Yahoo is reaching out to the developer community and going broader. They’ve hired a great group of folks to put the pieces in place to share the technology. This includes not only Flickr but opening up their YUI tool kit as well.
Communities are made up of Creators, Synthesizers and Consumers. The Creators will make up approximately 1%, Synthesizers make up about 10% and Consumers are 100%
Interesting phrase you can fill in blanks: “Anyone with a ________________ is now a _________________ ” such as “Anyone with a keyboard is now an Author” really describes how enabled users have become. It talks to the mass amateurism

While most of the published content is ‘Low-Brow’ there is a lot of great content too
By providing an Open API, the community is providing ways to interface with the system such as tools to help work with Flickr, adding Flickr plug-ins to other posts