Interaction Design
and the return of the Coad Letter

Craig Marion has set about to define the meaning of Interaction Design in a two part article where he also looks at how interactive assistance can be provided in systems. (via webword.com)

Defining Interaction Design, read more...
Interactive Assistance, read more...

Many readers at this website are interested in Object technology and modeling. This month sees the return of the Coad Letter at the Togethersoft community site, which is now edited by a friend of uidesign.net, Stephen Palmer. In this first of the new series Palmer looks at how to use the Domain Neutral Business component and apply it to a Video Rental Business. Many friends of uidesign.net were involved in the development of this technique, including Jeff De Luca and Phil Bradley who was the first person to coin the term, Archetype, in relation to UML modeling.

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Nokia and small screen design
and other recent mail

Terry Simpson of Connected Systems Ltd, a UK based Usability Engineering firm, takes some time to comment on the review of Jared Spool's book, Web Site Usability. read more...

Regular commentator Douglass Turner adds his views on "The Myth of the Big Screen", suggesting that Nokia may be the company to solve the design challenges, read more...

uidesign.net outage
May 25th - June 8th

On the afternoon of May 25th, our ISP likk.net went down. likk.net the website of Laird Internet KK in Tokyo Japan had suffered a serious hardware failure. Unfortunately there was no quick remedy to the situation. As a result uidesign.net has been unavailable for a period of 14 days.

uidesign.net would like to assure readers that every effort will be made to ensure that this does not happen again. uidesign.net is definitely still in business and we hope that you continue to enjoy it and we look forward to your continued support and feedback.

Evangelize with Usability
Using 'invalid' Users to sell UCD in a large organization

In larger technology companies it can often be difficult to develop an understanding of the advantages of doing good product design early. As Alan Cooper told us, "The word 'design' is toxic in the world of business". More so with Interaction Design and User Centered Design processes which require to be done early, close to the beginning of a project while the product is being defined and the requirements written. It is not unusual to find a number of very skeptical people around, who question, the time, budget and effort which must go into these activities.

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Tipping with Usability
Little things that can make a good design better

The Tipping Point is the point at which something mundane suddenly becomes popular or hugely successful, or where something controlled suddenly breaks out and becomes uncontrolled. There are three key motivators behind Gladwell's Tipping Point: The Law of the Few; The Stickiness Factor; and The Power of Context. The Law of the Few states that to spread an epidemic you only have to infect or affect a few people. Those people have one of 3 key traits. They are Connectors, Mavens or Salesmen. The Power of Context states that behavior is very environmentally affected and that behavior will change in different environments and indeed the effect of The Law of the Few or The Stickiness Factor may be dissipated if the environmental conditions are wrong. However, it is The Stickiness Factor and one of the anecdotes given to back it up which are most interesting for Interaction Design.

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