Monthly Archives: October 2003

Weekly listserv journal – Cross-cultural user interface design

October 28, 2003Blogcross-cultural design, listserv, mailing list, Online News, user interface designJason Morrison

A poster mentioned that they want to concentrate on cross-cultural user interface design in school, but hadn’t seen much about it. No one seemed to think that there was enough research/work done on the issue, and I don’t think I’ve really seen anything about it. There are some obvious things like language but the real problem is how different cultures assign different meaning to signs and symbols.

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

Information visualizations and spatial maps on the web – Usability concerns

October 23, 2003Academic Papers, Usability, WritingAcademic Papers, information design, Information visualizations, learnability, recommendation, site-navigation, spatial maps, tag clouds, Usability, usability testing, user interface design, WritingJason Morrison

Visualizing the web

Although web technologies are constantly changing, most users still browse the web the same way they did back in 1995–typing keywords into search boxes, clicking from home page, to section, to subsection on a navigation bar, or following link, to link, to link. The fact that it is called a “web” suggests that there should be other ways of navigating websites, and there are a number of projects attempting to employ information visualizations and spatial maps to do so.

All web pages organize information visually, but “information visualization centers around helping people explore or explain data that is not inherently spatial, such as that from the domains of bioinformatics, data mining and databases, finance and commerce, telecommunications and networking, information retrieval from large text corpora, software, and computer-supported cooperative work.” (“InfoVis 2003 Symposium”) Spatial metaphors are used to communicate different levels of information. A simple, static example would be a personal homepage built to look like the designers home, with links to favorite movies in the living room and recipes in the kitchen. A more advanced example would be a customer relationship management system for a large company which instead of presenting a list of technical support problems and solutions, displays an interactive map of problems, with more common problems in a larger font size, and recent problems in red. In both cases, users get an immediate grasp of complex information.

Such visualizations are intended to help solve two current web usability problems: the lack of a wide view to web structure, and the lack of query refinement based on relationships of retrieved pages (Ohwada 548). But they must do so without creating additional usability barriers. This paper will describe three current information visualization projects and describe some of the usability issues these sorts of projects face.

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Weekly listserv journal – Pop-up ads and ad revenue

October 21, 2003Blogadvertising, listserv, mailing list, Online News, pop-up blockersJason Morrison

There was a really interesting thread this week about pop-up blockers. Basically the idea is that journalists should not go around praising and recommending pop-up blockers when so many news sites rely on them for advertising revenue. I hadn’t really thought of it that way before, but I’m not sure how big a problem this is. People who want to block pop-ups are likely to be those who don’t click on them anyway. So I doubt this will change click-through rates. Some people questioned whether pop ups work at all, since X10 (they sold those mini-cameras) went out of business recently.