Arguably, most of the ten mistakes he lists are not so hard and dry. For instance, it is not too hard to imagine situations in which opening a new browser window (mistake #2) is not a clear cut screw-up. And some of the mistakes are less serious than the others, e.g. #8, “jumping at the latest internet buzzword.”

But there is one holiest of holies that you just don’t mess with: breaking the “back” button. The back button is the second most used browser action, right after clicking a link to follow it. Breaking the back button is a clear signal that you haven’t thought, or don’t care, about your users.

So why does Fido.ca’s Phones & Accessories store think they’re above this? It’s aesthetically pleasing, but trying to compare phones on their website was easily the most frustrating web browsing experience I’ve had in a long time. While I usually think it’s not very helpful or informative to be so flippant, in this case I call: user experience FAIL.

What presenters Fowler and Scott Shaw, Director of Services for ThoughtWorks Australia, were talking about was essentially the inefficiencies and poor communication fostered by traditional IT-business relationships, and how we should, in the words of Fowler, “get rid of IT” — a trend he says is already underway. The way to thrive in such an atmosphere, says Fowler, is to move IT closer to the business people.

Key messages:

• Over time, IT projects have become more predictable and a greater percentage finish on time (according to Standish reports) but they are consequently slower to get to market, and slower to respond to feedback.
• Bloatware has been on the increase: software products increase greatly in size, but not so greatly in useful features (about 65% of features are rarely or never used, according to figures they cited–possibly also from a Standish report).
• The talent wars have become more prevalent — not as many people want to work in IT, which they see as stifling and uncreative — “IT workers are the new accountants”.
• Programming is a craft, a form of design. And like other crafts, apprenticeship and learning relationships are crucial.
• Bring user experience into the iterative design process. Too often, people operate on a model of “Bring in the UX people, have them do their stuff, maybe some user research and interviews, then pass the findings off to the development team, who never actually gets to interact with real users or be engaged in user experience research.”

Fowler and Shaw also had some interesting things to say about domain-driven design (a concept I gather Fowler has some expertise with) and domain-specific languages, in which terminology and conceptual models are built directly into software code; in other words, the outside (product interaction, user experience) is reflected on the inside.

Really interesting stuff. I wanted to ask Fowler about how he saw RDF playing into this, but didn’t have the time.

Rather than try to explain it, here’s part one of the video (link rather than embed because Vimeo’s embed code isn’t valid XHTML).

What I like most about it is how it clearly demonstrates the power of the semantic web. Data tables, event listings and so on are all (presumably) marked up to be computer- and human-readable and Aurora is able combine them with data from other user-defined and automatically-generated relevant data sources.

The visual effects are undoubtedly sweet, but it’s the interaction design choices that really make the video interesting.

Some unorganized thoughts in no particular order:

The wheel at the bottom seems only to show a subset of the objects to which the user is actively connected, and IIRC in one scene the user scrolls through the list to find another object that is off-screen. To me, this mirrors the way tabs are setup in Firefox 2 and the problems that some people have raised with them, namely that past a certain point, they disappear from the user’s view, and you have to scroll to find them. Opera handles this differently, making them progressively smaller (which in a way just introduces another interaction difficulty in that you can no longer see the titles of the tabs), and it would be interesting to see from an IXD perspective which ways are better and for what reasons.

I have to wonder the same thing about the decision to hide the toolbar when browsing. Of course, if the team hadn’t made decisions like this there would have been nothing new to discuss and explore, so kudos for taking a bold step. Maybe what seems like a steep learning curve would pay off significantly in improved speed and simplicity of navigation.

The “spatial view” organizes “people, places, and things on the web” in a 3D environment in which the z-axis (depth) represents distance from the current point in time, in an OSX Leopard-esque fashion. While it looks cool, and may in fact be extremely powerful, from the first glance it just seems confusing. Maybe that’s because objects appear so small at the low video size/resolution, but it leaves me wondering how, e.g., my grandpa and people who may not have great eyesight and also may not have the most steady hand-eye coordination would be able to navigate the environment.

One thing that strikes me as a real strength of the interface is the balance it strikes between smooth and rough user experience, or in the language of Mark Weiser, to have a user experience with “beautiful seams” (I came across this term in an insightful piece by Adam Greenfield called On the ground running: Lessons from experience design). An entirely smooth or seamless user experience isn’t really desirable, because it’s the edges and seams onto which people insert their own functionality or bricolage (can that be a verb? bricolate?) and that are crucial to most good interactions. From the Aurora video, it seems like they’re definitely going in the right direction, with a wealth of well-informed machine-made decisions that are leverage and customized by the user.

Three images, drawn from research by Elaine Toms (citation in PDF above, all images taken from PDF above) comparing the “recognizability” of three different version of the same document, which in this case is a Chinese restaurant menu. The first two versions were recognized most often by study participants

two presentations of Chinese restaurant menu items, one with original formatting

However, the third, while recognized less often, was recognized twice as fast by participants.

third presentation of menu content, using original formatting but with non-meaningful information

In another experiment by Toms that Lombardi touches on, content from one genre (e.g. content from a menu genre) was formatted in a fashion typical for a different genre (in Lombardi’s example, as glossary entries).

When participants were asked to identify the genre they selected the genre of the format, not the content. So in this case they would have said this is a page from a glossary. This again reinforces the impact that form has on our understanding of a document.

restaurant menu content formatted as glossary entries

The take-away for web design is that when the information you’re presenting has a “native shape” — one that users will be familiar from the real world — don’t overlook it as a powerful and intuitive way of conveying meaning.

Which is why I was glad to come across two visualizations recently that help make it easier to explain IA and UX.

The first is from an old article by Peter Morville, IA expert, from his now-defunct column, Strange Connections.

Drawing an analogy with a similar chart in Geoffrey Moore’s book, Living on the Fault Line, Morville characterizes IA as a deep, layered field with the holy trinity of “Users, Content, Context” at the bottom (something readers of his Information Architecture for the World Wide Web will recall), and the more tangible deliverables like wireframes at the top.

The other visualization, from Peter Boersma’s blog, is even more compelling (for me) because it clearly and somewhat contentiously demonstrates the difference between UX and IA, without drawing an artificially rigid boundary between the two.

This revised T-model lead to the coining of two new terms: “armpit IA” (for someone who works at the intersection between shallow IA and UX) and “shoulder IA” (for someone who bridges UX and business IA).

As you go deeper in the IA column, you get into really technical, nerdy things like controlled vocabularies (how do you define when “pool” refers to a swimming pool or a game played in a bar?), while a bit higher you have the kind of IA that every decent web designer engages in (coming up with link labels and content organization schemes). If I had to place myself somewhere on this chart, it would probably be in the armpit. Being in the armpit is more glamorous than it sounds (but only slightly).