http://caitlingannon.com notes on user experience design for the web Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:35:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Jacob Nielsen just proclaimed the lightbox the "interaction design technique of the year": In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user's attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen. Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It ... http://caitlingannon.com/2008/08/13/lightbox-fatigue/ Great presentation about the perceived lack of women in open-source development. (I love that she mentions ravelry.com, my favorite web community, as an example!) Form an orderly queue, ladies (OSCON, 2008) view presentation (tags: oscon2008 foss women in technology) http://caitlingannon.com/2008/07/28/where-are-the-women-in-open-source/ I came across an interesting article on hand-drawn interfaces here. Sometimes a Sharpie and good, strong paper tell the story better -- and faster -- than a fully fleshed out wireframe. (I must confess that ballpoint sketches on notebook paper don't pack nearly the same punch.) So hang on ... http://caitlingannon.com/2008/06/27/hand-drawn-uis-for-the-web/ If you've ever tried to communicate a site design via paper, you know the value of also presenting an interactive version with live hyperlinks. Visio users know that it's pretty easy to create an interactive HTML prototype from a set of wireframes (File>Save as Web Page), ... http://caitlingannon.com/2008/03/16/how-to-create-an-interactive-pdf-prototype-in-visio/ The November/December 2007 of Ragged Left, the newsletter of the STC Berkeley Chapter, is now online. The issue includes my summary of a talk given by Adaptive Path's Sarah Nelson and David Verba, entitled "Lessons Learned from Web Applications and User Centered Design". In their talk, they defined Ajax and ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/12/10/stc-berkeley-writeup-on-ajaxweb-20/ Sliders in web design are becoming as ubiquitous as the fading yellow highlight. They certainly offer a more interesting and sophisticated way of interacting with a lengthy data set (remember the old days: choose from a drop-down, click Submit, wait, look at new page, click Back button, get lost ...). Some ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/11/06/using-sliders-to-filter-results/ I'm intrigued by the complexity of presenting statistics on a map, and in my research I've come across two compelling but different approaches to mapping crime data: Oakland Crimespotting and the LA Times Homicide Map. Oakland Crimespotting Created by Stamen Design, Oakland Crimespotting uses data from CrimeWatch, Oakland's community mapping website. Crime ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/10/31/the-human-side-of-statistics-two-crime-mapping-websites/ Twitter is a strange entrant onto the social networking stage ... I must admit I don't really see the point. People share little 120-character bits of information about themselves ("just had a great burrito for lunch", "waiting for my dad to pick me up", etc.), and their friends -- or ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/10/11/reassuring-bits-of-nothing-from-all-over-the-globe/ Via Ajaxian, I learned about a new data visualization project called JsVis, released in January 2007. JsVis, by Kyle Sholtz, is a JavaScript framework for creating "Snowflake graphs" like this one: There is a lot of potential for visualizing complex relationships with this sort of tool. The basic layout is best for ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/09/21/jsvis-javascript-visualization-software/ Simile, a project MIT, has created several open source tools for visualizing data on the web. The interfaces are clean and free of unnecessary decoration, and the AJAX interaction encourages exploration and questioning. These are an excellent addition to the information design toolbox. Timeplot is a "DHTML-based AJAXy widget for plotting ... http://caitlingannon.com/2007/09/21/data-visualization-tools-from-mit/