Cómo pintar tus tablas

Consejos de diseño para tablas de información.

http://designshack.co.uk/articles/css/15-tips-for-designing-terrific-tables

TABADA! use cases

Some use cases for the TABADA! semantic information system.

- TABADA! Multiselect + TABADA! Multiedit: Add an ordering number to all the images taken at the Mexico pyramids.

- TABADA! Dataflow + TABADA! InfoPanels: Show on the desktop all the technology news from the three main online newspapers.

- TABADA! Action!: Publish all items tagged with "keep" to my Facebook account.

UX design explained to teenagers

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2010/03/12/explaining-user-experience-design-to-high-schoolers-and-other-new-audiences/

"My goal was to prepare them for that project by communicating two key things:

1. Make things for people.
2. Those people aren’t you.

Before the class, Ben warned me about the attention span of his students, and boy was he right. The thing about high school kids is they won’t pretend to be interested if you’ve lost them. Adults at a conference will gaze forward in your general direction, but high school kids will just put their head on the table and go to sleep. If you ever want to get a real gauge of how interesting a speaker you are (or how well you’re really communicating), I highly recommend it, humbling as it is. "

Features or not features

Diseño sencillo vs diseño con muchas funcionalidades.

"Features are good. They set Firefox apart from others, and attract users. What bothers users is features that don’t have a mature user interface. The solution should be to fix the interface, not drop the feature."

http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2005/09/04/features-vs-usability/
http://i.bnet.com/pdf/174974-Defeating_Feature_Fatigue_.pdf
http://berkeleymath.com/Documents/Defeating%20Feature%20Fatigue.pdf

Software interesante

http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/

http://www.bisigi-project.org/?lang=en
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/05/trauma-team-review-melodrama-and-medicine-on-the-wii.ars
http://www.yofrankie.org/download/

HCI implicito

http://reflaction.info/?p=59

Non-gesture interaction, where the computer directly analyzes user behavior:

“Implicit human-computer interaction is an action, performed by the user that is not primarily aimed to interact with a computerized system but which such a system understands as input.” [5]. This is opposed to explicit HCI, where “the user tells the computer at a certain level of abstraction (e.g., by command-line, direct manipulation using a GUI, gesture, or speech input) what she expects the computer to do.” [5]. An example of explicit HCI is using a direct-manipulation graphical user interface (GUI) to drag a file from one folder to another, in order to have the file become located in the target folder. Implicit HCI, on the other hand, requires computers to observe and interpret what the user is doing, via sensors, which may be implemented as physical sensors (e.g., GPS) or digital sensors (e.g., file usage monitor)."

Ejemplo: GNOME busqueda contextual de ficheros

Un buscador asociativo de ficheros usando Gnome zeitgeist. Tiene algoritmos de detección de ficheros relacionados (working sets).

http://seilo.geekyogre.com/2010/03/reviving-gimmie-using-zeitgeist-meet-sezen/

http://vimeo.com/10678237

Open source usability

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/04/22/dont-talk-about-users/

How can we convert current developers in open source projects to have a skill set equivalent to what academia or a corporation would consider to be formally trained user experience professional? The approach we propose consists of embedding HCI concepts and practices directly into the tools that control an open source community’s work flow.

Lista de palabras clave (keywords) sobre usabilidad que se van a añadir a Bugzilla en el proyecto de Firefox:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tJxF8zTuLdEj9pUcxnLAemA&output=html

¿Cómo se llenó mi disco duro?

Space Sniffer es un pequeño programa para mostrar el uso del disco duro por carpetas. Es la mejor aplicación de este tipo que he probado, y he probado bastantes.

Cuando el espacio de disco escasea, merece la pena abrir Space Sniffer para ver qué ficheros inecesarios están ocupando la mayor cantidad de espacio, para recuperar el hueco rápidamente.

Microsoft KIN: MS's iPhone contender

Microsoft provides with it's KIN phones a good exercise in goal-oriented design. Its two proto-smartphone versions (KIN ONE and TWO) include three features targeted at the most common use case for a hand-held, cloud-connected communication device:

- The Loop is the always-on feed reader. In a twist w.r.t. other phones, they make it the default view so that the user always can review the latest feeds from their primary social connections. These can be grouped in several priority layers, which is a nice touch not provided by Facebook.

- The Spot can be a killer feature. It provides a 21st-century clipboard, a place where the various web clips, bookmarks and half-written musings can be collected until the user's ready to compose them into a published article. This provides a predefined and better workflow for this task that doesn't force the user to keep track in short-term memory of all relevant information pieces while composing a post.

- KIN Studio is a lightweight application that works as a end-user repository for captured data, with specialized tools to create metadata and categorize content according to content type, subject, people, geomapping, timestamp.

Each feature on its own provides a nice touch to enhance the blogging/feedback/social network experience. The three of them together can create a tightly focused environment for creating and sharing. I'd like to have it in my hands for 2 hours and feel how they work.

Revisión bibliográfica HOWTO

Eusebio Reyero explica paso a paso cómo realizar una revisión bibliográfica para localizar la documentación relevante dentro de un área de conocimiento.

"La revisión bibliografía permite que centremos nuestra investigación mediante la consideración de trabajos anteriores. Para ello, lo primero que debemos hacer es identificar los términos o “keywords” que van a guiar nuestra investigación, estas palabras clave son las que nos permitan localizar los trabajos previos.

Es importante identificar los trabajos previos publicados para poder focalizar, definir, contrastar o aprovechar la información obtenida, y por que así ayudas a que crezca el cuerpo teórico del HCI."

Sistemas de recomendación comerciales

¿Te has preguntado alguna vez cómo funcionan esos enlaces en las tiendas online que te sugieren otros productos que "también te pueden gustar..."? Los motores de búsqueda y aprendizaje especializados en detectar ese tipo de sugerencias personalizadas a tus gustos se llaman sistemas de recomendación. Estos sistemas funcionan observando qué decisiones ha tomado cada usuario (tú mismo incluido) y conectándote con otros usuarios con un comportamiento parecido al tuyo.

Por ejemplo, FilmAffinity (en español) te permite comentar tus películas preferidas, y te crea una lista de recomendaciones de películas que no has visto y te podrían gustar. También te pone en contacto con otros usuarios con gustos similares y te deja ver cómo valoraron cada película.

En DirectedEdge han creado una demostración de su sistema que permite navegar por Wikipedia (en inglés) y te busca artículos relacionados con el que estás leyendo.

Aquí hay una lista de recommender systems comerciales. Si alguna vez construyes un servicio web y quieres añadirle un sistema de recomendación: busca, compara y contrata al mejor.

Pie menus and other menu systems

http://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects/menu

Part of the Novel Input & Output Project

A menu system often serves as the core interaction workhorse of an application. We have researched and productized a few solutions that enhance the user’s experience. Most notably is the marking-menu which allows a user to perform a menu selection by either popping-up a radial menu or by quickly making a straight mark in the direction of the desired menu without popping-up the menu. Other investigations have focused on providing efficient access to a large number of menu-items (the HotBox), menus for pen computers (tracking menus), for rapid tool switching (pieCursor) and multitouch environments (multitouch marking menus).

Card sorting tools

Online and offline applications for the card sorting technique for usability and information architecture.

http://www.measuringuserexperience.com/CardSorting/index.htm
http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/blog/card_sorting_software_tools/
http://websort.net/
http://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort.htm
http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/blog/card_sort_analysis_spreadsheet/
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/cardsorting.html
http://rashmisinha.com/2005/02/24/card-sorting-analysis-one-size-fits-all-approach/ (comments alternate analysis methods)

Some of them are free for small online samples.

Texto granular en páginas web

Purple es una pequeña herramienta para crear enlaces a un párrafo de una página web, para crear referencias.

Si te instalas este "bookmarklet en la barra de favoritos, en la página actual aparecerá un enlace delante de cada párrafo. La dirección de dicho enlace te permite navegar desde cualquier parte de internet a ese parrafo concreto. Por ejemplo, este enlace (139) te lleva directamente a la parte de este artículo donde compara la informática con la magia de los cuentos de hadas.

Nielsen Alertbox - diseño paralelo

Estudio de Nielsen sobre diseño por varios equipos en paralelo para crear la primera versión de un prototipo de interfaz. Si la segunda versión se crea como mezcla de las mejores ideas desarrolladas en paralelo, el resultado final tiene significativamente mejor usabilidad.

http://www.useit.com/papers/parallel_design/

Usability howto

Step-by-step guide for usability processes
Guía paso a paso del proceso de usabilidad

http://usability.gov/methods/process.html


Definition of Usability at usability.gov

• Ease of learning - How fast can a user who has never seen the user interface before learn it sufficiently well to accomplish basic tasks?
• Efficiency of use - Once an experienced user has learned to use the system, how fast can he or she accomplish tasks?
• Memorability - If a user has used the system before, can he or she remember enough to use it effectively the next time or does the user have to start over again learning everything?
• Error frequency and severity - How often do users make errors while using the system, how serious are these errors, and how do users recover from these errors?
• Subjective satisfaction - How much does the user like using the system?

Un clásico: nuevas reglas de la real academia de la lengua

Nuevas reglas de la real academia de la lengua

"Nunka asetaremo ke potensia etranjera token kabeyo de letra eñe.
Eñe rrepresenta balore ma elebado de tradision ispanika y primero kaeremo mueto ante ke asetar bejasione a simbolo ke a sio korason bibifikante de istoria kastisa epañola unibersa."

La tabla periódica de visualización

Esta tabla periódica no muestra elementos, sino distintos tipos de gráficos. Repasar si queremos hacer una presentación con el esquema más adecuado, y estamos aburridos del PowerPoint.


http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

Hierarchical State Machines for GUIs

Event-driven programming is widely used in [[graphical user interfaces] because it has been adopted by most commercial widget toolkits as the model for interaction. The design of those toolkits has been criticized for promoting an over-simplified model of event-action, leading programmers to create error prone, difficult to extend and excessively complex application code:

Such an approach is fertile ground for bugs for at least three reasons:

1. It always leads to convoluted conditional logic.

2. Each branching point requires evaluation of a complex expression.

3. Switching between different modes requires modifying many variables, which all can easily lead to inconsistencies.

Instead of a low level action-reaction, Miro Samek proposes a better approach using finite State Machines to control the interaction logic necessary to define the state changes to incoming events. Hierarchical State Machines have also been proposed as a high-level model for reactive programs. The UML language in particular provides a complete specification to represent state machines.

Some alternate implementations:

http://accu.org/index.php/journals/252

http://www.eventhelix.com/RealtimeMantra/HierarchicalStateMachine.htm

El Parlamento Europeo y tú

Existe un formulario por el que cualquier ciudadano de Europa puede realizar peticiones directas al parlamento europeo. Es una página oficial de dicho organismo, con burócratas oficiales al otro lado para revisar y responder a la petición.

En ocasiones anteriores, los parlamentarios han dado muestra de tomar en consideración los argumentos por iniciativa popular respaldados por un gran número de peticiones.

Por tanto, si tienes alguna queja política y eres ciudadano europeo, ya no tienes excusa para quedarte de brazos cruzados.