Peter Merholz has a great article at Adaptive Path titled – Metadata for the masses that explores the benefits of open tagging systems like those used at Flikr, 43things and del.icio.us. Peter states that:
Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways.
Adam Mathes has a very good article titled Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata that discusses the strenghts and weaknesses of user generated metadata systems that are used in services like Flikr and del.icio.us.
Interaction designer Bruce Tognazzini offers A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts at his AskTog website. The questions deal with the principals of Fitts’s Law which states that “the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target”.
Bruce Tognazzini, a human computer interaction guru, offers his First Principles of Interaction Design. The principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective GUI or web interfaces.
Jeffrey Veen at Adaptive Path offers 8 quick ways to fix your search engine. If you run a site that has any kind of content search mechanism, this article will go a long way to helping your visitors find what they are looking for.
The Usability Special Interest Group has provided a great Usability Toolkit that contains a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.
GotoMedia suggests that offering Free Beer for User Testing can be an excellent way to get sound market feedback on your next site redesign or product launch. Sounds like a cool concept to me, and potentially a very cheap way to test your sites usability.
[link via mezzoblue]
fiftyfoureleven.com offers a nice article titled – Contingency Design – Leveraging Google when your database server takes a holiday . They have some really good suggestions on how to supress mySQL/PHP error messages, followed by some examples of information that can be presented to your users in the event of a database error.
In a follow up article titled – Contingency Design – More Ideas for mySQL Failures, the author has a nice solution that gives the visitor the opportunity to bookmark the existing page by clicking on a link. This allows the user to quickly get back to the page once the mySQL problem has been fixed.
Boxes and Arrows has a nice article on a technique known as Card Sorting. Card sorting is a great, reliable, inexpensive method for finding patterns in how users would expect to find content or functionality.
This technique is used by many information architects as a means to define the structure of a site or product.
Design By Fire has a series of thoughtful articles that deal with some current issues around interface design.
Here is the complete set of 6 articles:
