UXnet is working to foster collaboration among the many professional groups serving user experience professionals. Efforts are under way to build collaboration and create exchanges at both the local and national levels. Please visit http://www.uxnet.org/ (originally posted December, 2005).
In October, 2005 the Interaction Design Group (IxDG), which has served practitioners, teachers, and students of interaction design worldwide since 2003, incorporated as a non-profit, member-supported organization called the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
Interaction Design Interaction design (IxD) defines the behavior of interactive products and how products communicate their functionality to the people who use them. (more…)
The Eyetrack III research on news websites, released by The Poynter Institute of the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media together with Eyetools, may help answer questions such as: Is homepage layout effective? … What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? … When is multimedia appropriate? … Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?
In Eyetrack III, researchers observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. An overview of the observations is available (originally posted July, 2005).
A server can track the number of times a link is followed to open a page, and the code can remove links that are not followed. For an example, visit this news map. Here the size of the font for each headline increases as the links are followed. Links that are not followed decrease in size and eventually become too small to see (originally posted July 2005).
The June 2005 issue of Fast Company features several articles on design. One discusses recruiting design executives. “The big trend right now is the search for designer as turnaround agent, or design savior. These are designers who think strategically and speak the language of business, in addition to being incredibly talented.” (This was originally posted in June, 2005.)
The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) held the first European Information Architecture Summit, Building Communities, at the Tulip Inn, Brussels, Belgium, 15-16 October 2005.
The objective of the Summit was to build the IA community in Europe by bringing together a number of disciplines and practitioner communities in a stimulating environment for debate with opportunities to establish cooperation. This community is not limited by language or region, and encompasses specialisations including designing for mobile devices and multilingual solutions.
Examples of activities of community members include, but are not limited to, developing the IA practice in an organisation or country by documenting methods, applying IA principles to European-focused platforms, providing multilingual solutions and designing devices like interactive TV or mobile devices. The goal was to explore work concerning new features, design elements, methods or processes, controversial topics, and work in progress. The call for papers was posted in June, 2005 by the ID-IA SIG.
AIGA (the American Institute of Graphic Arts) held a Digital Information Design Camp for from June to August, 2005. Online orientation was held June 27 to July 1, 2005, with the online instructional program from July 5 to July 25, 2005. Preparation for the online exhibition was from July 26, with online launch August 1, 2005. Participants were AIGA members who applied to participate. The program of study is conducted online both to allow participation by working people, and to provide experience in online design. The goal is to provide training in computing technologies for traditional designers, and to provide traditional design education for professional designers trained primarily in digital design. For details, visit http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/didcamp (originally posted in June 2005).
The ID Strategy Conference was held in Chicago May 18 and 19, 2005. Slides from the presentations are available on the conference website. Topics include the relationship of strategy and design, the implicit needs of the audience, design and the developing world, and creating value through design (originally posted June 2005).
The Interaction Design Group (IxDG)–an association that serves the needs of the international community of practitioners, teachers, and students of interaction design–launched the IxDG Resource Library in May, 2005 at http://resources.ixdg.org.
The IxDG Resource Library is a repository of information about interaction design (IxD) that the IxDG community has created. It includes documents, compilations of discussions from the Ixd Discussion mailing list, and descriptions of and links to many interaction design resources on the Web. IxDG members may also comment on resources and contribute items to the Library. This notice was originally posted in 2005.
In April, 2005 a new book, visuosT by Clemens Lango, was published. This work will be of interest to developers and designers of interactive systems, user interfaces, hypermedia systems, system architects, and people dealing with knowledge work systems: http://visuos.com (originally posted in 2005).
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