We experience it everyday. While talking with a friend at a park someone throws a frisbee to another person in the background. Without trying you notice this change of motion even though you are not looking directly at it. You can thank the superior colliculus for this little attention interruption.As the authors describe it this region of the brain is not very sophisticated. But it does a good job of telling you to pay attention because something may be coming at you. You aren't sure what it is but you had better pay attention to it.
You don't read a screenful of text in a completely voluntary way. You're constantly tugged all over the page by various factors, including how your eyes jump around, what some submodule of your brain thinks is important to look at next instead of the words, and so on.Click here to find out more!If we know about these factors, we can make web pages easier to read by making other elements on the screen less distracting.In this article, we'll take a look at a fairly common online widget and talk about where it works and where it doesn't work, in terms of visual attention and its design objectives. We'll use the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist as our example.
O'Reilly Network -- Paying Attention (or Not) to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist
technorati tags:information+architecture, flickr, attention, fading+effects
People who understand the social interactions between people and the technologies they use to mediate the interactions need to understand the focus is on the social interactions between people and the relationship that technology plays. It is in a sense being a technosocial architect
Technosocial Architect :: Off the Top :: vanderwal.net
A long article explaining the various elements of being a "Technosocial Architect"
technorati tags:information+architecture, technosocial+architect
Dan Saffer just published his model for the relationships between Interaction Design (IxD) and the fields around it
[BEEP]: Dan Saffer's T-Model for Interaction Design
technorati tags:interaction+design, information+architecture
Design research is quickly becoming the theme of the month here on Functioning Form. Following my discussions with Steve Portigal about ethnography and an analysis of granular bucket testing, Matteo Penzo has published an informative article on UXmatters that analyzes my Web Application Form Design article with eyetracking software.
Functioning Form - Eyetracking Web Forms
technorati tags:ia, information+architecture, web+forms, eyetracking
I discovered the concepts in this article while preparing material for an introductory information architecture workshop. In the workshop, I thought it important to highlight that one aspect of designing for users was to understand the ways in which they may approach an information task. I was already familiar with the concepts of known-item and exploratory information seeking: they are common in the library and information science literature and are also discussed in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
In my work on intranets and complex websites, I noticed a range of situations where people didn’t necessarily know what they needed to know. Additionally, when I opened my browser history to look for examples from recently-visited sites, I noticed that the majority of my own time was spent trying to find things that I had already discovered. These two modes didn’t fit into the concepts of known-item and exploratory information seeking. I call these “don’t know what you need to know” and re-finding.
Design Vision is an ongoing conversation between four industry veterans who want to explore the boundaries and definitions of design leadership today, particularly in digital product design. The first four parts of this conversation appeared on Luke Wroblewski's Functioning Form; parts 9-12 are hosted at Jim Leftwich's Orbitstar Interactica, while the last four parts will debut at Bob Baxley's Drowning in the Current.
I gave my eTech talk today at 12:15pm. I followed an incredible sweeping history of computing by George Dyson.
I kept thinking, wow! how to follow someone like Mr. Dyson.
But the talk seemed to be well received. Most importantly several folks really got excited about the vision that I was putting forth. In a nutshell, a pattern library becames a vocabulary for a tribe. It becomes a nesting place for exposing solutions to help create a passionate design development community.
After struggling for years to design Internet applications around the limitations of HTML, I have been very excited by the recent release of a range of Internet applications with increased richness and interactivity.
Rich Internet applications (RIAs) can provide opportunities to design much better user experiences. They can be faster, more engaging and much more usable. However, this improvement is not without its downside—RIAs are much more difficult to design than the previous generation of page-based applications. The richer interaction requires a better understanding of users and of human-computer interaction (HCI). Although there is a lot of HCI material and research available, it can be difficult to determine how it applies to this new environment.
About Design looks like a promising resource; the UK's Design Council has pulled together useful information on a variety of design disciplines, ranging from information design to automotive design. Each section includes a variety of useful components, including definitions, examples, quotes, trends, events information, FAQs, tips, and further readings.