April 2010 issue of Boxes and Arrows
The April issue of Boxes and Arrows is recommended reading:
Designing for social interaction – strong, weak and temporary ties
by Paul Adams, senior UX researcher, Google
Our social web tools must start to understand the strength of ties, that we have stronger relationships with some people than with others. Understanding the difference between strong, weak, and temporary ties will help us build better online social experiences.
Faceted finding with super-powered breadcrumbs
by Greg Nudelman
Most of the today’s finding interfaces do not support integrated finding effectively, often creating disparate search and browse user interfaces that confound people with a jumble of controls competing for their attention. In this article, I propose the Integrated Faceted Breadcrumb (IFB) design that integrates the power of faceted refinement with the intuitive query expansion afforded by browse.
Case study of agile and UCD working together – Finding the holistic solution
by James Kelway, senior information architect, Hello Group
Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods. This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group.
How to win friends and influence people remotely
by Patrick Stapleton, principal applications engineer, Oracle
Once remotely located a designers ability to interact with other team members and effect change are funneled through the telecommunication mediums that the team uses to communicate. This article, subtitled “Tools to enable simple online collaboration of design and distribution of usability testing” lists the available mediums and analyzes their respective strengths and weaknesses and provides suggestions for their effective use.
