~magazine

Review: The Elements of User Experience

The Elements of User Experience is not just the first book to list all of the related skills and disciplines involved in the creation of web sites, but to create a complete model of the way those practices combine to create and affect a user's experience on the web. This structure, based on the seminal diagram of the Elements, is accessible enough to be useful for high-level decision makers who need to learn about the processes involved, but still relevant enough to inform the hands-on people charged with contructing the site. The clarity with which Elements describes these processes makes this book not just a useful tool for a team building a site, but an important reference for anyone interested in web user experiences.

Introducing the Microcontent Client

Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client.

Microsoft's Weblog Software

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It's browser-accessible from any 4.0 or higher web browser and doesn't require Windows on the client. It leverages their strengths by integrating with Office, and there's no per-user client access fee. Then imagine if this weblogging tool were deployed to millions of users, all before anyone in the weblog community took notice.

That scenario is real.

Apple's Missed Hardware Opportunities

Apple is committing a grave folly in not taking advantage of their tight OS/hardware integration. People forget just how much one can do with well-integrated hardware and software, but if you consider how much we do right now with peripherals that are barely aware of each other's presence, the potential is awesome.

Stories and Tools

The current World Wide Web consists almost entirely of pages that are either stories or tools. A few ambitious sites combine these two types of pages in varying ratios, with results that range from unsatisfying to disastrous. But the next stage of the web is going to come from the native form that evolves from, and incorporates elements of, these two existing structures. Even after this form emerges, however, the web will still be populated with plenty of stories and tools, of course, just as television retained the idiom of an anchor at a desk authoritatively reading us the news, even after the invention of the situation comedy and the game show.