Location of the Scrollbar

This is an interesting read [pop-up] from my friends at Human Factors International on the location of the scrollbar in computer interfaces. They looked at how users interact with a website to determine whether the scrollbars were located close enough to where they typically work.

Goodbye Blogger

I finally pulled the plug on Blogger tonight. After several false starts this site has been completely migrated to movable type and a tableless layout using CSS.

There are still a few things that need to be migrated such as my old web portfolio, but those things shouldn't take long to do. The project samples in that section need to be updated with the latest projects anyways.

There may be a few quirks with the layout that I may not be aware of yet. Although I have tested the site on the dominant platforms and browsers, one never knows what sort of funkyness may be out there with something like iCab.

If you notice something funky, please let me know and be sure to tell me what browser and platform you were on when you saw the problem.

Ah Maine, Fall Colors...photos and thoughts

I really enjoyed going back to Maine in October. Although the weather did not cooperate as much as we had hoped, we loved going back to Bar Harbor (Bah Habah) and touring around Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island.

The more I saw of the area, the more I can imagine myself living up there in a small cabin in the summer and working out of Boston for the remainder of the year.

This is the view from Jordan Pond within Acadia. We spent an entire afternoon having tea and popovers in the outside garden at the tea house there. It was cold...good thing we had tea and a few sweaters.

TiVo: If music be the food of profit

According to C|Net TiVo will be rolling out a new set of set top boxes and services that will expand the unique DVR device's ability to record and manage programming. This will include the ability of TiVo devices to record and play MP3's and potentially route them through a high end amplifier.

This is definitely another reason to consider TiVo. After a few months of owning one, I can't imagine using a VCR to record or watch TV anymore.

Can experience be designed at all?

v-2's interview with Nathan of the late great vivid studios has some great arguments on why information architeture and visual design is not the end all to developing the user experience. As I have heard Nathan describe in the past, a user experience is made up of many elements that are all too often lost in the shuffle of visual design and information architecture.

In many respects, he argues that Experience Design as he has described in his book is an umbrella term that covers information architecture, interaction design, sensoral design (visual/graphic design along with audio, voice, intent, and personal experience) combined with other contexts like socialogical and pshycological to help shape an user experience solution.

AOL's approach to user experience

I ran accross an interesting interview with the director of AOL's user experience group. With over 30 million users, AOL needs to worry about the overall customer experience. They firmly believe in anticpating user needs before a AOL customer asks for a piece of content, thus making items available to users.

Balancing the needs of your user

Back in October I was in Boston @ Jared Spool's User Interface East conference. One of the topics we discussed is the balance of user needs against the needs/desires of the site owner.

Invariably what ends up happening is the user is only interested in finding the content they are looking for and will not be suceptible to suggestive selling. There is however the opportunity to pertform a cross-sell to a user at the very moment they have found what it is they are looking for on the site.

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