BarCamp Hyderabad

barCamp Finished with the marathon of presentations which went till 9:00 pm yesterday. It was nice to see old pals from pramati and progress making presentations. Cordys made their mark with their presentation on the UI. Impressive stuff....
You can find the event reports on the page http://barcamp.org/BarCampHyderabadPostMortem.

Barcamp Hyderabad & Web 2.0

I will be making a presentation on "User experience- parallels in tangible interfaces & Web 2.0" at BarCamp event at Hyderabad on Apr 08,2006. This is a (Un)Conference on Web 2.0 and Next Generation Internet Architectures (details:http://barcamp.org/BarCampHyderabad), where many presenters will be talking about the Web2.0 and how it is changing the web space.

My invitation to all who are in the Hyberabad to come and join the event at IIIT Campus. see you there.

Persona development

It is becoming very important to identify the target users in many of the organizations since the understanding of the users (and not the super users) have helped them to clearly define the exact goals of the product. Here are some of the reads for the persona development

Persona at SAP
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/index.asp?b=/philosophy/User_Experience/cooper.html&t=/philosophy/philosophy_topnav.asp

Steve Mulder's presentation "Bringing more science to persona creation" at the IA Summit
http://www.iasummit.org/2006/conferencedescrip.htm#14

Robert Reinmann’s excerpt from Dan Saffer’s book – http://www.designingforinteraction.com/reimann.html

IDEO – MIT Media Lab on wearable computers
http://www.ideo.com/mit/index.html

Cooper’s:
http://www.cooper.com/content/why_cooper/powerful_personas.asp

RFID

RFID is slowly becoming an integral part of the warehousing. There are some experimental works done in the field:

Timo arnall projects
www.nearfield.org

Chris Noessel paper
http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/c.noessel/RFID/RFID_research.pdf

"RFID Vision in the DOD Supply Chain" at http://www.almc.army.mil/ALOG/issues/MayJun05/rfid.html

RFID Resources
http://www.rfidjournal.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
http://radiofrequencyidentification.org/
http://www.spychips.com/
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=17981&isYear=1999
http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/~eee05/panel/panel_rfid.html
http://www.rfidgazette.org/
http://www.rfidnews.org/

Tangible Interfaces

Some links to the interesting work done in the field

Eco -Pods
http://www.tiltool.com/Eco_Pods.htm

MIT Tangilbe Media Group
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/

Some TUI applications...
http://www.ehornecker.de/Tangibles.html

Open Source TUIs
http://www.sonicforms.org/

TUIs in biology
http://www.scripps.edu/mb/olson/tangible_models/

Emerging framework for TUIs
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/content/papers/pdf/ullmer-isj00-tui-framework-pub.pdf

Thesis - Augmented reality TUIs for CAD design review http://www.hci.iastate.edu/TRS/THESES/MS-Ronald-Sidharta-2005.doc

CLI- Command line interfaces

Some interesting reads on the command line interfaces

In the Beginning was the Command Line
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html


about Unix CLI conventions
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/graphics/taoup.pdf



Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design-author
Deborah Mayhew's

Text label & field Alignment in Applications for international audience

While designing the applications for international audience, many a times software fails while displaying the text labels (it turncates) or face aligment issues. Here is the Tip for developers

The text label should be placed above the textfield/textarea. This will take care of expansion of text label (eg in Chinese, Indic) and alignment(eg Arabic).
example
==============================================
Name:
___________
[___________]

==============================================
Here are some of the interesting read on the topic

Microsoft Windows XP SP2: Internationalization Best Practices
http://www.bhashaindia.com/MSProducts/XpSp2/Articles/I18NBestPracitces.aspx

Localisation and Internationalisation
http://www.issco.unige.ch/projects/ecolore/localisation/Components/White%20Papers/lecture7_handout.pdf

Microsoft PowerPoint - Pan_Asian_Summit1
http://www.panl10n.net/Presentations/Pan_Asian_Summit1.pdf

The impact of Internationalization on Guidelines Contents and Usage
http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi/publications/2003/Vanderdonckt-UAHCI2003.pdf

I18n in Software Design, Architecture and Implementation
http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/archi18n.html

Case study
http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/briefing/jfk.htm#U29

GUI Design Softwares

A lot of time UI designers are struggling with the deadlines and don't even have time to test the application. There are quite a few softwares available which can help to make quick and dirty prototype.

For web

• Dreamweaver
• Axure
• Denim

For Desktop

• Visio
• Flash
• GUI Design Studio

I have written an application for developing the web interfaces pretty fast and quick... yet to publish for the community.

Anthropometric softwares

Open Ergonomics offers educational versions of its PeopleSize 2000 anthropometry software
http://www.openerg.com/psz.htm

Integrated Performance Modelling Environment (IPME) http://www.maad.com/index.pl/ipme by Micro Analysis & Design


Delmia Human (formerly Safework). They may have academic packages to make things a bit more affordable.
(http://www.delmia.com/gallery/pdf/DELMIA_V5Human.pdf)

Another leading package is SAMMIE.
(http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/cd/research/groups/erg/sammie/samver.htm)

The Technical University of Delft has a package called ADAPS.
(http://www2.io.tudelft.nl/research/ergonomics/DA/content_14.php)

Icons resources

Some of the icon design by designers

Yegor Gilyov
http://yegor.gilyov.com/eng/

Dmitri Dubrovin
http://www.iconstories.com/

Jan Koehler
http://www.jankoehler.com

Yuri Mezentsev
http://www.mezich.ru/

Rapid Prototyping (RP) tools for mobile apps

Some of the products which generates the code also. Painful.... for the designers but in case you are looking for something that fits ur requirement
Kaleido by : http://www.digitalairways.com/kaleido/sol_servp.asp
Rapid Plus by : http://www.e-sim.com/home/index-h.htm
Altia -http://altia.com/

Windows Vista? No its an assortment pack with goodies from best of interfaces

The much gung-ho about the Windows Vista aka Longhorn unleashes quite a few copied interfaces

1. 3d app switching inspired from Sun's project "Going 3D with Project Looking Glass"- http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/Desktop/lookingglass/. http://webcast-east.sun.com/archives/GSN-1312/GSN-1312_forjds.mov. Yessss Its Java...
2. Gadgets- look at konfabulator
3. L&F- No need to tell from where ;), Aqua..
4. RSS Feed display on browser - I can count many of applications like pluck browser
5. Tabs in browser - IE wakes up late to this requirement when opera introduced it in 2000 and many others including firefox adopted it lately
6. File Open and zoom functionality in the browser - check out picasa interface (free download at http://picasa.google.com/download/) This product is a killer app
7. Most importantly search & other features: have come from the tiger OS of MAC
   

All the new features have been around for quite a while in many products but now that the "Most popular" OS is adopting it... that’s becoming a "de Facto" to most of us...

just when you are out of ideas

Interesting site which talks of the idea generation methods and works well when you get stuck and want help

http://www.ideagenerationmethods.com/

Designer and Developer Too

Wearing different boots of designer and developer and still walk straight is one of the toughest thing i have experienced so far in the software industry. As a designer i always want to break away from the rules and as a developer i encased myself into the implementation couch.

Wayne Smallman talks about "Really bad design versus very good programming" in his post at
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7948_0_5_0_C shared similar views

Pop up usability guidline

Franks blog talk about the pop-ups usability guidelines at http://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/

Frank Spillers is a web and software usability expert and has been recognized by the U.S. Dept. of Labor as a subject matter expert.

ROI on Usability

ROI on Usability
Usability and accessibility in the press
http://www.louiseferguson.com/resources/research-roi.htm http://www.louiseferguson.com/resources/press-roi.htm

e-commerce usability

Ziff Davis Internet's Evan Schuman warns e-commerce companies that they have to simplify. A new survey is giving evidence that complexity repels consumers. So has every other survey since the Web was born. Now will someone listen?
Consumers to E-Commerce Sites: Simplify or We Walk

Findings from an extensive survey analysis by the team reporting to Terry Golesworthy, president of the Customer Respect Group, an Ipswich, Mass.-based research/consulting firm:

• dial-up toleration for page download stops at about 77K. For broadband, that number increases to about 300K. "Only 13 percent of the Top 100 companies have a page size of less than 77K" and barely 20 percent have pages that would be acceptable even to broadband users
• Almost one in five business-site visitors told Golesworthy's team they would abandon a site if they found it too difficult—or insufficiently intuitive—to use.
• The survey found that 56 percent of people will not wait more than one day before they will write off an e-mail as ignored.
• the survey found that an impressive 87 percent of Web sites today are not resizable for different gadgets
• Another problem area for Web sites today is cookies. Cookies have morphed from being a site visitor convenience to often being essential.
• most sites are not sufficiently accessible to the visually impaired, despite the fact that one out of five Americans have such a hardship

How people write their addess Fields

Have a look at the site
http://ns.hr-xml.org/2_3/HR-XML-2_3/CPO/PostalAddress.html and you shall find most of the answers.

Some of the example how people write their addresses
United States

Mailstop: B1-210
Karen Barber
Market Surveyors
2455 University Blvd
Denver, CO? 80237
USA

Santhi Mwanza
MinnBest Corp.
4982 E Beauregard Ave.
Minneapolis, MN
50493-1234

Sarah Olson
c/o Mrs. Cole
2000 Merrill Lane
Sunnyvale, CA
93121

H.L. Mencken
PO Box 350
Hollywood, CA ?93029-1200

Major Carmen Li
111th Maint Co
Unit 342
APO AA? 00932

Germany
Ringstr. 25
D-80395 Frankfurt am Main

Finland
From outside of Finland:
Hallituskatu 6 B 27
FIN-33200 TAMPERE
FINLAND

From within Finland:
Hallituskatu 6 B 27
33200 TAMPERE

Japan
456-0042
Tokyo-to Shibuya-ku Shibuya
4-5-5

Switzerland, Belgium, France, Italy
Georges Dupuis
Route des Clos 7
2012 Auvernier
(Country)

China
Mr. Wang, Tai-sheng
4th Floor, #6, lane 15, Alley 283,
Section 1, Hsin Sheng South Rd.,
Taipei, ROC 12345

South Korea
345 Bomun-Dong Sungbuk-Gu Seoul, Korea 136-086

Spain
28 C/*Alameda
28034 Colmenar, Madrid

These abbreviations stand for:
Avenue = Avda
Boulevard = Blvr
Street = C
Paseo = P?
Should be written in front of the name, followed by /.

Brazil
Rua Francisco Deslandes, n? 470
apto. 201. Bairro Anchieta.
Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais.
Brasil.
30320-500

Russia
308061, Belgorod
А.Я. 495
А.Я. stands for abonentny yashik which is Russian for Post Office Box.The format is inverted postal code and municipality are on the first lines, followed by the street address and finally by the recipient. The above example is for a delivery address ? in a return address the city comes before the postal code.

UI Design Tools

These are some WYSWIG tools
Axure RP3- www.axure.com for html rapid prototyping
Macromedia Dreamweaver- www.macromedia.com for html prototyping

Some open source tools i love to work with
HTML-kit- www.chami.com/html-kit/ a html editor
SciTEFlash-www.bomberstudios.com/sciteflash/ , a Scintilla-based ActionScript editor

To "Ok" or "Save"

One of the question always haunt the UI developers and designers that whether to use "Save" or "Ok" button to confirm the user inputs?

Here is the suggestion:
Scenario A- Dialog in desktop application when the dialog disposes after user’s action of create/edit
Solution-> Use "Ok" button
Scenario B- Multiple actions Dialog in desktop applications
Solution-> Use “Save” button
Scenario C – Web ApplicationsUse “Save” when the screen doesn’t change after user have performed action on the screen