Differentiate by Usability
Selling good design to industrial age dinosaurs

I was asked recently by a client to detail, for senior management, exactly what features we had incorporated into our design to differentiate our new product from the competition. I couldn't answer the question immediately and let it pass without comment. The reason for this was simple. It's an Industrial Age question that requires an Industrial Age answer. It just isn't so easy to differentiate with features when you are designing an Information Age appliance using the very latest in User Centered Design techniques. However, communication with and education of senior management is an important part of all IT related work, so the question had to be answered and it was, with a Usability study!

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What the readership is saying about this article...

CHI Keynote
and other interesting stuff from around the web this month

John Thackara details exactly what it might take to design for the forthcoming age where computers will be everywhere. This is the text of his presentation to the CHI 2000 conference.

An interesting and pretty good article covering WAP enabling an existing website for a geographic search engine, at GB Direct.

Multidisciplinary teams designing interactive systems invest a lot of their time and energy in a battle between the different disciplines. An account of his own personal recent experience in a web shop struggle for process, method and design supremacy, Sim D'Hertefelt, The battle of the disciplines in designing interactive systems.

more Use Case debate
and Alan Laird talks about the new list subscription

Briony Pope from the UK, takes issue with the Feb 99 editorial voicing concerns about the adoption of Rational Unified Process and more specifically Use Cases for writing requirements. Briony's well made points required a careful, thoughtful reply. read more...

Alan Laird of likk.net who recently implemented the uidesign.net list serve subscription scripts which power the "Subscription" box on the sidebar, makes some good points about whether or not the HTML Form is a better user interface than the original email method. Despite Alan's concerns the new Form is much more popular and the rate of list subscription has risen 4 fold since we implemented it. However, this letter makes an interesting point that command line interfaces can sometimes be hard to better. read more...

Dressed to Impress
A review of Great Web Architecture

Design For Usability
April 3rd, London, England

On April 3rd Design Agenda organized a conference in London, starring Jakob Nielsen and a host of other names from the GUI Design scene of the recent past. Our roving reporter on the scene was "The other Scottish UI Designer", Calum Benson, who took a day off from the rigors of CAD tool design and drove down the M4 to take it all in.

Calum concludes, "All in all it was a worthwhile day out for me, although I was familiar with much of the material already. It was my first opportunity to see any of these guys perform live, and put faces to all the names on my bookshelf."

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Great WAP Ideas
and other readers mail

Sridahr Dhulipala gives us his take on what makes a killer WAP application.

and a couple more letters criticizing the sloppiness of editing or the format of the of othewise acceptable Content at this site. read more...

Keep those letters coming as we rely on the site readership to help us keep uidesign.net the foremost location on the web for Interaction Design and User Interface Architecture.

Write Once Display Anywhere!
Analysis and Comment on the XML Document Navigation Language

Much of the hype surrounding XML has been the promise that it will allow the development of device independent Content which can be formatted by the web server at runtime using an XSLT Stylesheet which will deliver the Content to the target browser device in an appropriate format. It became obvious fairly quickly that for vastly different form factors of device this alone would not be enough. NEC Corporation of Japan have submitted a proposal to the W3C suggesting that an enhancement called XDNL (or XML Document Navigation Language) is the answer. This paper seeks to demonstrate that although XDNL is a step in the right direction, it in itself is still insufficient for real working systems.

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Click-Click-Patent
The rhythm of the Interaction Design Dance

We are going to see a lot more Interaction Design Patents approved in the US and possibly in Europe. The Amazon "One-Click" Patent and the "Affiliate Program" are just the beginning. Things will get a lot worse before they get better. Here's why?

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Lifestyle Snapshots
Solving the Context Problem for Wireless Design

In her recent interview with uidesign.net, Laura Arlov, stated that one of her biggest design problems, when considering Wireless Internet design, was the lack of Context understanding. Optimizing a design is best done when the Context of the User's Interaction with the software, device or machine is understood.

Laura Arlov was merely pointing out that with Wireless Internet devices, it is so much more difficult to predict the Context for an Interaction.

I have had some success with a technique I am calling, "Lifestyle Snapshots". A Lifestyle Snapshot is an addition to existing techniques for defining Personas (or User Roles) and Usage Scenarios.

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