Visual Design in User Interfaces

The Robin Good article below is packed with good ideas for using visual elements in a functional way in user interface design. Lots of illustrations!

Interface Design: Usability And Visual Innovation Key Future Success Factors. Increasing numbers of websites are developing new types of user interface design, taking advantage of users' increasing levels of Internet-sophistication and faster connections. These new interfaces often allow users to view and manipulate large quantities of data. The Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus interface, one of the earliest and most innovative user interfaces online This article will have a look at some of the more interesting user interface design ideas we've come across recently: Slider-based filtering Fisheye menus Treemaps Drag-and-drop The point of this article is not to promote any of these user interface designs, but rather to offer them for the purposes of interest and inspiration. Although we have yet to run any large-scale usability testing on them, we consider each... [Robin Good's Latest News]

Why Document Processes?

Have you ever said to yourself, “We’re too busy, there’s no time to document processes? We have REAL work to do.” If so, I’d like to suggest that one of the reasons you are so busy is that you lack documented processes.

Documenting existing processes:

• Prevents re-inventing the wheel for each project
• Assures continuity of process and, therefore, the continuity of quality that the process represents
• Makes training new employees and contractors easier; it gets them to productivity faster.
• Makes possible a conscious examination of the processes to improve them. Makes it possible for an organization to learn from the past
• Preserves the intellectual property of the organization. When it comes time to sell or merge, the existence of documented procedures facilitates the process, increases the value of the company.

“Yeah, but we still don’t have time, and we can’t afford to pay someone from outside to document them.” No one gets benefits without paying a price, but it might be easier than you think:

• Don’t seek perfection. The greatest enemy of the good is the perfect.
• Give everyone a Word template for recording procedures for their job so everybody’s stuff looks sort of the same.
• Get people to list the tasks in their jobs and send them to one person who will collect all the tasks as they are documented.
• Ask people to record one or two tasks a week and submit them to the collecting person.
• Send a gentle reminder if someone skips a week.

Pretty soon, you’ll have quite a collection and be on the way to enjoying the benefits of having documented procedures. You will also be surprised at how people get into the task and begin to ask questions that ought to be asked about better ways to do things. David Orr

Helping Others See Beyond The Surface, Makes Blogs True Digital Weapons Of Mind Change. Changing other people's minds, launching small and large Calls To Action, influencing and persuading others, providing insightful tools and pointers to facilitate self-discovery and personal understanding: these are the most powerful applications that individuals, small online publishers and passionate researchers can make of blogs today. Helping others see reality from new and unconventional viewpoints. Photo credit: Elen Well beyond making money (which may become a positive and profitable consequence of the above) blogs are indeed the most powerful mind-changing and influencing technology available today. Blogs are the true digital weapons of a bloodless battle for liberating our children from the omnipresent numbing, propaganda-based, uninformative news delivered daily by the pervasive, suffocating presence of traditional mass media. (See also: The Power... [Robin Good's Latest News]