Matices en las definiciones de HCI

Apurando al máximo: definiciones precisas de los términos relacionados con el diseño de interfaces de ordenador, con los matices que diferencian unos de otros

ON: Digital+Marketing: ON: Experience Design 101

Getting The Terms Right

• User experience is a term used to describe the overall experience
  and satisfaction a user has when using a product or system. It most
  commonly refers to a combination of software and business topics, such
  as selling over the web, but it applies to any result of interaction
  design. Wikipedia definition

• Interaction design is a sub-discipline of design which examines the
  role of embedded behaviors and intelligence in physical and virtual
  spaces as well as the convergence of physical and digital products.
  Sometimes referred to by the acronyms “IxD” or “iD”… Wikipedia definition

• Information Architecture (IA) is the art and science of structuring
  knowledge (technically data), and defining user interactions. Wikipedia definition
• Usability is the measure of the ease with which particular people
  can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to
  achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of
  measuring usability and the study of the principles that may predict
  whether an object is found usable in practice. Wikipedia definition
• Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of interaction
  between people (users) and computers. It is an interdisciplinary
  subject, relating computer science with many other fields of study and
  research. Wikipedia definition
• Human factors engineering, also referred to as Ergonomics is the
  study of optimizing the interface between human beings, and the
  designed objects and environments they interact with. Wikipedia definition
• User interface design is the overall process of designing the
  interaction between a human (user) and a machine (computer). It
  includes graphic design, information design and a wide variety of
  usability methods. Wikipedia definition

Artículo de Will Wright sobre diseño de juegos de simulación

El mayor gurú de los videojuegos de final abierto, explica cómo se hacen!

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games.

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games.
A summary of Will Wright's talk, by Don Hopkins.



Will Wright, the designer of
SimCity,
SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games
from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at
Stanford.

He reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in
SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games,
including his current project, Dollhouse.

The anatomy of a simulation game:

There are several tightly coupled parts of a simulation game that must
be designed closely together: the simulation model, the game play,
the user interface, and the user's model.

Sim City, liberado para la educación

Electronic Arts ha donado el código fuente del SimCity original como código abierto, para ser usado en el proyecto educativo One Laptop Per Child.

Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project

Games that can educate: SimCity donated to OLPC project


"The goal is to enable the open-source community to renovate SimCity
and take it in new educational directions, by applying Seymour Papert's
ideas about constructionist education, Alan Kay's ideas about
interactive user interfaces and object-oriented programming, Ben
Shneiderman's ideas about direct manipulation and info visualization,
and many exciting ideas about multiplayer games, blogging,
storytelling, game mods, player created content, and lessons learned
from World of WarCraft, The Sims, Spore, etc," Hopkins wrote in a comment at Slashdot earlier this year.

HCI - Interrupciones humanas

Cuándo es el mejor momento para que el ordenador te obligue a cambiar de tarea. Human scheduler (attention manager).

Designed interruptions | BlogSchmog

Designed interruptions by Kevin Makice Last spring, Brian Bailey made the trip from Illinois to talk to our IU School of Informatics HCI group about his research on alerts. Bailey and fellow researchers—like doctoral student Shamsi Iqbal—have painstakingly explored the nature of task interruptions in trying to identify the best times to alert users to new information.

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Ubuntu Gutsy Howto

pasteler0 » Blog Archive » 10 Things To Do Just After Installing Ubuntu 7.10

10 Things To Do Just After Installing Ubuntu 7.10

Ubuntu is a very complete OS, especially the Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), but there are still make tweaks you can do just after installing it that will make Ubuntu shine like never. I will explain here some things I do just after have ubuntu installed. Remember that what I’ve written here are the best things to install for ME, you may consider not making some of them or installing many different things, but if so, please, share your wisdom with us all.

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Juegos gratis online

Artículo sobre los mejores juegos Flash, y comentario de la noticia en /.

Slashdot | What Are The Best Free Games Online?

CNET has just put up a story about what it thinks are the best online flash games of all time.
These include titles like Line Rider, Bejeweled, Desktop Tower Defense
and Portal, all of which I enjoy playing a lot. But my thirst for free
games is peaking at the moment, probably due to an incredibly boring
job and lack of imagination. Can you suggest any more good free games
online?"

The purpose of the article is Flash Games in specific. So your examples are neither here nor there. Personally, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned Newgrounds Rumble, one of the best brawlers of all time! It was one of the highest rated games over on Newgrounds, and hung around for AGES. More recently, it was ported to WiiCade so that you could play against your friends on the WiiMote controller. (Which is a lot more fun than trying to share a keyboard, let me tell you.)

Actually, I should probably expand on that a bit more. One of the nice things about the Wii is that you can have multiplayer flash games. Games like Wiimote Wars 2 and Slipstream are simply amazing when you get the chance to play against your friends and family members. Much, much, much better than playing single-player games. Which is good, because there isn't much in the way of online-multiplayer flash games.

Historia de la interfaz gráfica

Historia de los elementos más comunes de las GUIs modernas

Common Usability Terms, pt. I: Spatial Memory - OSNews.com

This is the first article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. We start off with spatial memory - my personal favourite.

Las 5 competencias para diseñar HCI

The Five Competencies of User Experience Design :: UXmatters

I use a framework I discovered early in my career: The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. This framework comprises the competencies a UX professional or team requires. The following sections describe these five competencies, outline some questions each competency must answer, and show the groundwork and deliverables for which each competency is responsible.

Information Architecture

Interaction Design

Usability Engineering

Visual Design

Prototype Engineering

Metáfora de Zoom en el One Laptop Per Child

El proyecto OLPC está desarrollando una interfaz con una metáfora no basada en el escritorio, sino en la red social de usuarios. Utiliza un ZUI basado en Zoom semántico para representar las actividades de los participantes.

OLPC Human Interface Guidelines/The Laptop Experience/Zoom Metaphor - OLPCWiki

Zoom Metaphor

Four distinct zoom levels define the laptop: Neighborhood, Groups, Home, and Activity

The mesh network is a permanent fixture of the laptop environment
and is represented explicitly in the interface. A zoom is used to
relate four discrete views, each of which caters to a particular set of
goals: Home, Groups, Neighborhood, and Activity. Using keyboard
shortcuts or controls in the Frame, children may zoom in and out on the mesh community.

Zoom Metaphor
Four distinct zoom levels define the laptop: Neighborhood, Groups, Home, and Activity
Four distinct zoom levels define the laptop: Neighborhood, Groups, Home, and Activity

The mesh network is a permanent fixture of the laptop environment and is represented explicitly in the interface. A zoom is used to relate four discrete views, each of which caters to a particular set of goals: Home, Groups, Neighborhood, and Activity. Using keyboard shortcuts or controls in the Frame, children may zoom in and out on the mesh community.

Gadgets de Google Social

Google Social es la nueva API de Google para integrar las redes sociales de la competencia bajo su control. Google Gadgets es su librería para facilitar el desarrollo de web apps.


Getting Started - Google Gadgets - Google Code

Welcome to the Google Gadgets API! This developer
guide is intended for people who want to use the Google Gadgets API
to write gadgets. Gadgets
are so easy to create that they are a good starting point if you are
just learning about web programming.

Contents

1. "Hello,
   World"
2. What's In a Gadget?
3. Google Gadgets Editor: Get Started Now
4. Where to Go From Here

Shelves: una funcion muy util de control de versiones

Las Shelves son un concepto muy práctico en control de versiones, son una versión "ligera" de la creación de ramas. Este artículo explica cómo usar Subversion para crear Shelves.

Shelves in Subversion

Shelves in Subversion There is a popular feature called "shelves" that was included in Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System. I am fairly certain that VSTS is not the first or only tool to have this feature and in this article I will show you how to get the same feature from Subversion. I think of shelves as essentially creating and using a branch to save some changes you have been working on, but now need to set aside, or shelve, for a while.

Documentación Visual Studio:

The Purpose of Shelving

Shelve your pending changes when you are not ready to or cannot check in a set of pending changes. There are primarily five shelve scenarios:

• Interrupt When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to work on a different task, you can shelve your pending changes to set them aside.

• Integration When you have pending changes that are not ready for check in but you need to share them with another team member, you can shelve your pending changes and ask your team member to unshelve them.

• Review When you have pending changes that are ready for check-in and have to be code-reviewed, you can shelve your changes and inform the code reviewer of the shelveset.

• Backup When you have work in progress that you want to back up, but are not ready to check in, you can shelve your changes to have them preserved on the Team Foundation server.

• Handoff When you have work in progress that is to be completed by another team member, you can shelve your changes to make a handoff easier.

Demasiados megapixels no son buenos

Al aumentar a demasiados megapíxeles en una cámara compacta, se reduce la calidad de la imagen por culpa del ruido introducido.

» Best picture quality with 6 megapixels!

The reason we bring this up is the vicious circle we are in and have to break out of. Most people heard that a lot of pixels make a good camera hence they buy cameras with the most pixels. Therefore the manufacturers produce cameras with more and more pixels so that they sell better. But this does not improve the quality of the pictures.

This website is our little contribution for clarification and will hopefully get noticed by the public and the manufacturers.

The reason we bring this up is the vicious circle we are in and have
to break out of. Most people heard that a lot of pixels make a good
camera hence they buy cameras with the most pixels. Therefore the
manufacturers produce cameras with more and more pixels so that they
sell better. But this does not improve the quality of the pictures.

This website is our little contribution for clarification and will hopefully get noticed by the public and the manufacturers.

6
megapixels- the best compromise between number of pixels and image
noise. It is demonstrated: the increase of details with more pixels and
the increase of errors if the pixels get too small.

kompromiss.jpg 6 megapixels- the best compromise between number of pixels and image noise. It is demonstrated: the increase of details with more pixels and the increase of errors if the pixels get too small.

Usabilidad de motores búsqueda

La usabilidad no se consigue con focus groups, porque éstos son encuestas de opinión a un grupo de gente. La usabilidad mide actividades/ acciones reales de un usuario concreto, no opiniones de un conjunto.

Understanding Search Usability

Focus groups measure group opinions about an interface. A focus group's measurements are not task oriented. The negative aspect of focus groups is a herd mentality. Granted, if I do not like an interface and genuinely would not use it, no amount of peer pressure is going to get me to change my opinion. But that is just me. Peer pressure often yields poor interfaces.

Berrypicking: cómo busca información la gente, en realidad

Artículo seminal sobre la teoría de la búsqueda. Information foraging, refinamiento iterativo de la búsqueda, search engines...

The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques

ABSTRACT

First, a new model of searching in online and other information systems, called
"berrypicking," is discussed. This model, it is argued, is much closer
to the real behavior of information searchers than the traditional model of
information retrieval is, and, consequently, will guide our thinking better
in the design of effective interfaces. Second, the research literature of manual
information seeking behavior is drawn on for suggestions of capabilities that
users might like to have in online systems. Third, based on the new model and
the research on information seeking, suggestions are made for how new search
capabilities could be incorporated into the design of search interfaces. Particular
attention is given to the nature and types of browsing that can be facilitated.

Figure 2 represents a berrypicking, evolving search.

In Figure 3 we see the size of the picture shrunk in order to show the context within which the search takes place.

Como comprar/construirse el Media Center perfecto

Designing FiringSquad’s Reference Home Theaters

Designing
FiringSquad’s Reference Home Theaters
Building a home theater is no different than building a custom
computer. Just as you can buy a complete PC from HP starting for a
couple hundred or a Blackbird 002 for a couple grand, you can certainly
save time by going with a pre-packaged home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB).
HTIBs aren’t synonymous with budget-quality performance either. While
Wal-Mart’s $59.87 “5.1 Durabrand Home Theater System” won’t bring the
full movie theater experience home, I’m sure it’ll outperform the
speakers on the $300 TV it is probably going to be used with. Likewise,
there is probably no better premium pre-packaged HTIB solution than the
JBL Synthesis line, which starts at $15,000 for an entry-level setup,
sufficient to provide reference quality movie experience in the home,
to the Synthesis Everest, retailing at over $200,000 and featuring four
18” subs, and 800 watts per channel into 11 speakers.

Slashdot | Building a "Reference" Home Theater

Here's a much more useful article for anyone who actually wants to setup a great HT. My version's also going to be much shorter and based on much better research, since I actually occasionally work as an independant HT consultant to help people out:

1. For speakers go to Ascend Acoustics. The 170's are great, if you have a small room, go ahead and get the even smaller ones. Buy them w/the mounting bracket and aim 'em all towards the center of the "sweet spot" you want in your room. $1200 w/shipping and brackets.

Gnome Online Desktop

Gnome ha creado un proyecto para integrar el escritorio con los servicios y aplicaciones web más famosos. Es un campo de pruebas para la GUI de comienzos del siglo XXI.

OnlineDesktop - GNOME Live!

Online
Desktop
The goal of the GNOME Online Desktop is to adapt the desktop to become
the perfect window for online applications like GMail, Photobucket,
Facebook, EBay, Wikipedia, and countless others that user and developer
momentum is shifting towards.

Online Desktop - Online Desktop Developer Wiki

Introducing the Online Desktop

RedHat, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Firefox, Salesforce.com, and
countless other organizations are changing the software we use by
shifting applications from Desktop Operating system to the web.

Microsoft will move too slowly. The next
version of Windows may be well-integrated with Windows Live, but
there's a big difference between Windows Live and the Internet. Open
source doesn't have an agenda like this; our online desktop will be
integrated with anything and everything users want to use.

As people and organizations realize they aren't really using
desktop operating systems anymore, except to launch their web browser
— open source will be there with a free-of-cost, free-as-in-freedom and super-simple alternative.

This is the right strategy for the open source desktop community. It's time to remix GNU/Linux and GNOME into a completely new take on the desktop for an online era.

[edit]

Slides from GUADEC

At GUADEC we held a talk with slides.

[edit]

Philosophy

This is not a web-based desktop or "webtop"; we are trying to create
the ideal experience outside your browser. The fact is, you need
hardware drivers, and the browser itself can't be web-based. The
computing environment of the future won't be "turtles all the way
down." But neither does it need a bunch of complexity designed for a
pre-web world.

Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can
use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a
newly-installed computer, or visit a friend's house, your whole
environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the
techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are
somewhere else.

Because our desktop is open source, it will work with all
the best-in-category web sites and services that you use, no matter who
owns them. It can also support a diverse "long tail" of sites and
services for every interest and geographic location, as long as someone
interested in a particular service takes the time to add support for
it.

Hotwire: Python-powered command line

Una línea de comandos en Python, con mejoras de usabilidad equivalentes a una aplicación GUI.


freshmeat.net: Project details for Hotwire

Hotwire is intended to replace the interactive command execution portion of a typical Unix shell. It includes much of the functionality found in the combination of a terminal emulator, a shell, and core utilities like ls and grep. Most of the commands are named the same, and do basically the same thing. Where it makes sense, Hotwire improves the commands to have better defaults and makes things nicer by using the mouse, and so on.

Portátil ultrapequeño tamaño libro Asus EEE

Del tamaño de un libro, este es el primer modelo que Asus ha mostrado de una nueva línea de portátiles ultraportables y baratos

Eee PC

Eee Pc especificaciones

Pantalla:7" CPU & Chipstet :Intel mobile

CPU & chipset OS: Linux/ Microsoft Windows XP compatible

Comunicaciones: 10/100 Mbps Ethernet; 56K modem

WLAN: WiFi 802.11b/g

Tarjeta Gráfica: Intel UMA

Memoria: 512MB, DDR2-400

Almacenamiento: 4/ 8/ 16GB Flash

Webcam: 300K píxel vídeo cámara

Audio: Hi-Definition Audio CODEC; con altavoces estéreo ; con micrófono

Vida de la batería: 3hrs (4 cells: 5200mAh, 2S2P)

Dimensiones y Peso: 22.5 x 16.5 x 2.1~3.5cm, 0.89kg

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Redes sociales abiertas

Por fin alguien influyente se da cuenta y habla claro: los "sitios sociales" de la web deben ser de libre acceso y con información exportable, no sólo disponibles para usuarios registrados.

Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up

When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.

Filtrado inteligente de noticias RSS

Una lista de lectores de fuentes rss, que permiten filtrado inteligente por relevancia (igual que AideRSS).


FeedHub Launches - Individualized RSS Feeds

Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub
and it creates an "individualized RSS feed" that aims to filter
relevant posts from a set of feed sources. Like similar products we've
profiled before on Read/WriteWeb - e.g. FeedBlendr, FeedRinse and BlastFeed
- the result of the Feedhub process is a single RSS feed that you then
add to your RSS Reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines) or Start Page.Personalization startup mSpoke is launching a new product to mashup and personalize RSS feeds today at DEMO [disclosure: Read/WriteTalk host Sean Ammirati works for mSpoke]. The product is called FeedHub and it creates an "individualized RSS feed" that aims to filter relevant posts from a set of feed sources. Like similar products we've profiled before on Read/WriteWeb - e.g. FeedBlendr, FeedRinse and BlastFeed - the result of the Feedhub process is a single RSS feed that you then add to your RSS Reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines) or Start Page.