I read a lot of news online, geek and otherwise, but lately I've been trying to read more about human-computer interaction online. There are certainly a lot of blogs and web sites on society and technology in general, but I'm thinking more about resources that focus on HCI and usability. Here's what I've found so far, in no particular order. I welcome more suggestions:
By the way, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mix HCI entries with everything else, like entries about food, in one blog, but it seems like having two blogs wouldn't really solve the problem.
Also last month, I went to a San Francisco Bay Area ACM meeting on component-based user interface design, which turned out to be a talk on UI design patterns. Aha! It turns out that SAP has developed an extensive collection of design patterns for their domain of business applications, and they have an extensive web site for designers. The main points I got from the talk:
- SAP has 3 types of patterns
- patterns for frequently discovered user requirements
- patterns for composing UIs from components
- patterns for executable UI components
- The only way to drive adoption of patterns is to build them into the tools that designers and developers use
- SAP validates their patterns through user testing
- Patterns do "freeze" UI innovation overall, but the patterns themselves will evolve over time
- There is always a tension between those who use the patterns and those who deviate from the patterns to innovate on the UI
Time to plow through my backlog of stuff to post. Last month I went to the BayCHI meeting on Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information, which was about social search and recommender systems. I got a few things out of that meeting.
How do you recommend to someone that they'll like obscure song B if they like popular song A? How does the connection between those two songs get made in the first place? The speakers from Netflix, Live365, and Pandora agreed that you need experts to make that connection, since the public at large doesn't know enough to make that connection on its own.
Also, if a person likes a popular song, you can't recommend a completely obscure song that appears unrelated even if it is. The user must be gently led down the long tail.
Finally, I started using Pandora for listening to music. I gave it one song, "Venus de Milo" by Miles Davis, and it set up a station that played that song and about 100 other songs that are similar. An instant instrumental jazz station, perfect for listening to at work.
