Month: November 2006

Great advice from Cameron Moll over at Authentic Boredom – When building web apps, don’t start with the home page ….

Convivio – the European Network for the Human-Centered Design of Interactive Technologies – has kicked off a series of interviews with leading voices in the field of human-centred design. Interviews will feature people from all over the world, but with an emphasis on European voices (and I’m biased, but it’s wonderfully refreshing to have a European perspective on all things HCI).

The first interview is with Jan Chipchase, Principal Researcher at Nokia, who maintains a photo-blog at Future Perfect.

The second interview is with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing.

Adam finishes with some great advice for designers who are interested in getting involved with ‘ubiquitous computing’:

“[…] I’d imagine that getting comfortable with user observation and ethnography, contextual inquiry, and other techniques for the qualitative understanding of the experience of use will stand you in good stead. And if neither of these two suggestions appeal, about all I can say is sit just where you are – because it seems fairly likely to me that some kind of Everyware will come to you.”

In a related vein, and also from Europe, Nat Torkington blogs about his conversation with Matt Webb, who works for creative design consultancy Schulze & Webb.

User Interface Engineering (UIE) have released a 54 page report called The Designer’s Guide to Web Applications, Part I – Structure and Flows . It’s US$35 – but there’s a free chapter available for download.

I’ve read the free chapter, and it’s very good. It helps conceptualise how most web applications should be structured – useful if you’re struggling to envisage how screens should ‘flow’ from one to the other.

In a similar vein, there is Bob Baxley‘s Task Flow for Web Applications, part 1 – Views & Forms and Task Flow for Web Applications, part 2 – Wizards & Guides.