Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 22, 2013

The New Search App in Hue 2.4

Filed under: Hadoop,Hue,Interface Research/Design,Solr,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

The New Search App in Hue 2.4

From the post:

In version 2.4 of Hue, the open source Web UI that makes Apache Hadoop easier to use, a new app was added in addition to more than 150 fixes: Search!

Using this app, which is based on Apache Solr, you can now search across Hadoop data just like you would do keyword searches with Google or Yahoo! In addition, a wizard lets you tweak the result snippets and tailors the search experience to your needs.

The new Hue Search app uses the regular Solr API underneath the hood, yet adds a remarkable list of UI features that makes using search over data stored in Hadoop a breeze. It integrates with the other Hue apps like File Browser for looking at the index file in a few clicks.

Here’s a video demoing queries and results customization. The demo is based on Twitter Streaming data collected with Apache Flume and indexed in real time:

Even allowing for the familiarity of the presenter with the app, this is impressive!

More features are reported to be on the way!

Definitely sets a higher bar for search UIs.

June 19, 2013

Hosting a Page Description Workshop

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 1:27 pm

Hosting a Page Description Workshop by Colin Butler and Andrew Wirtanen.

From the post:

You’ve met with your stakeholders, created personas, and developed some user stories, but you still find yourself having a difficult time starting the process of sketching layouts for your web project. Sound familiar?

It can be quite challenging making that last step from goals to content in a way that addresses your stakeholders’ needs well. You can build a Page Description Diagram (PDD) independently to help you determine the priority of each component on a web page, but you are still potentially missing some valuable information: input from stakeholders.

In our efforts to improve the requirements gathering process, we’ve had considerable success involving stakeholders by using what we call a Page Description Workshop (PDW).

Developing a topic map UI?

How is that different from a webpage?

At least from the user’s perspective?

Useful as well for ferreting out unspoken requirements for the topic map.

June 5, 2013

Usability & User Experience Community

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Usability,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 3:51 pm

Usability & User Experience Community

From the webpage:

This web site is a forum to share information and experiences on issues related to the usability and user-centered design. It is the home of the Usability and User Experience Community of the Society for Technical Communication.

Home of the Heuristic Evaluation – A System Checklist resource.

An abundance of usability resources, particularly under “New to Usability?”

Every hour you spend at this site may save users days of unproductive annoyance with your products.

Heuristic Evaluation – A System Checklist

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Usability,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 3:13 pm

Heuristic Evaluation – A System Checklist by Deniese Pierotti.

An interface review checklist, topic followed by # of questions:

  1. Visibility of System Status (29)
  2. Match Between System and the Real World (24)
  3. User Control and Freedom (23)
  4. Consistency and Standards (51)
  5. Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors (21)
  6. Error Prevention (15)
  7. Recognition Rather Than Recall (40)
  8. Flexibility and Minimalist Design (16)
  9. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (12)
  10. Help and Documentation (23)
  11. Skills (22)
  12. Pleasurable and Respectful Interaction with the User (17)
  13. Privacy (3)

Almost three hundred (300) questions to make you think about your application and its interface.

A good basis for a web form populated with a history of prior ratings and comments, along with space for entry of new ratings and comments.

Being able to upload screen shots would be a nice touch as well.

I may be doing some UI evaluation soon so I will have to keep this in mind.

May 17, 2013

Organizing Digital Information for Others

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Usability,Users,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 4:14 pm

Organizing Digital Information for Others by Maish Nichani. (ebook, no registration required)

From the description:

When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of “metadata”, “controlled vocabulary” and “taxonomy” without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily.

Web and intranet teams are not the only ones facing this challenge. Staff in companies are finding themselves tasked with organizing, say, hundreds of project documents on their collaboration space. And they usually end up organizing it in the only way they know—for themselves. Team members then often struggle to locate the information that they thought should be in “this folder”!

In this short book, we explore how lists, categories, trees and facets can be better used to organize information for others. We also learn how metadata and taxonomies can connect different collections and increase the findability of information across the website or intranet.

But more than that we hope that this book can start a conversation around this important part of our digital lives.

So let the conversation begin!

The theme of delivering information to others cannot be emphasized enough.

Your notes, interface choices, etc., are just that, your notes, interface choices, etc.

Unless you are independently wealthy, that isn’t a very good marketing model.

Nor are users going to be “trained” to work, search, author, the “right way” in your view.

An introduction to be sure but this short (50 odd pages) work is entertaining and has additional references.

Very much worth the time to read.

May 14, 2013

CHI2013 [Warning: Cognitive Overload Ahead]

Filed under: CHI,HCIR,Interface Research/Design,Usability,Users,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 9:52 am

I have commented on several papers from CHI2013 Enrico Bertini posted to his blog.

I wasn’t aware of the difficulty Enrico must have had done to come up with his short list!

Take a look at the day-by-day schedule for CHI2013.

You will gravitate to some papers more than others. But I haven’t seen any slots that don’t have interesting material.

May be oversight on my part but I did not see any obvious links for the presentations/papers.

Definitely a resource to return to over and over again.

April 14, 2013

Let Them Pee:…

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Usability,UX — Patrick Durusau @ 3:46 pm

Let Them Pee: Avoiding the Sign-Up/Sign-In Mobile Antipattern by Greg Nudelman.

From the post:

The application SitOrSquat is a brilliant little piece of social engineering software that enables people to find bathrooms on the go, when they gotta go. Obviously, the basic use case implies a, shall we say, certain sense of urgency. This urgency is all but unfelt by the company that acquired the app, Procter and Gamble (P&G), as it would appear for the express purposes of marketing the Charmin brand of toilet paper. (It’s truly a match made in heaven—but I digress.)

Not content with the business of simply “Squeezing the Charmin” (that is, simple advertising), P&G executives decided for some unfathomable reason to force people to sign up for the app in multiple ways. First, as you can see in Figure 1, the app forces the customer (who is urgently looking for a place to relieve himself, let’s not forget) to use the awkward picker control to select his birthday to allegedly find out if he has been “potty trained.” This requirement would be torture on a normal day, but—I think you’ll agree—it’s excruciating when you really gotta go.

The horror of SitOrSquat doesn’t stop there.

Greg’s telling of the story is masterful. You owe it to yourself to read it more than once.

Relevant for mobile apps but also to “free” whitepapers, demo software or the other crap that requires name/email/phone details.

Name/email/phone details support marketing people who drain funds away from development and induce potential customers to look elsewhere.

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