Interesting, Seducible, Teachable, Engaging Moments James Govenor [http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001153.html] pointed out a connection between my blog about Interesting Moments [storyboarding-interesting-moments] and Kathy Sierra's blog on Is it Interesting? [http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/12/but_is_it_inter.html] (see also her discussion [http:
Distracting or Narrowing: Looking a Little More At Live Search Ajax opened the door to immediate actions. One of the first types of problems that immediate action was applied to was in the area of search. Here are a few examples. Google Suggest Google Suggest [http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en] was an early demonstration of
Storyboarding Interesting Moments In a previous post, I discussed the idea of an Interaction Matrix [interaction-matrix]. I described its purpose as documenting the event states that occur within drag and drop, inline editing and other types of interactions. However, the term event states is a rather dry and sterile way to think about
Visio Wireframe Toolkit for Download UPDATE: I still see people download and use this from time to time. But I make no guarantees on how well the wireframe kit works with the latest versions of Visio. Note: Jan 2014. In an earlier post [interactive-wireframes-documenting-rias] I mentioned a wireframe toolkit I wrote for Visio to make
Y! Trip Planner & Web 2.0 Content Objects A couple of weeks back, Yahoo! announced [http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000203.html] Trip Planner [http://travel.yahoo.com/trip] If you haven't had a chance to use it, I strongly encourage you to get your hands on it. In a nutshell, you can plan day trips,
Animating Interactions With Photoshop CS2 Sometime in the next month my article for boxesandarrows.com will finally appear. It discusses using Microsoft Visio for animating rich interactions. I discuss this briefly in a prior blog [interactive-wireframes-documenting-rias]. Photoshop CS and CS2 introduced some new features that make it easy to simulate complex interactions including animated transitions.
Interaction Matrix Recently, I have been exploring drag and drop and inline editing for the web. At Yahoo! I am fortunate to work with some incredibly bright folks. We get together for brainstorming sessions to discuss interactions like these that have application all across the Yahoo! network. When I started capturing our
Popups With a Twist If you lived through the desktop UI boom of the 80's and 90's, you will recall the history of popup windows. You will recall the rise and fall of their popularity. And now with the web we are seeing popups growing in popularity. Are we headed
Musings on Mouse Hover I've been thinking a lot lately about mouse hovers. Yeh, I know I really should get out more often ;-) A mouse hover is a really simple event. When you get a mouseover event you do someting. When you get a mouseout event you usually restore things to
Rich Accessibility Confession Ok, I'll start with a confession. I think accessibility issues have always been an abstract concept to me. It usually was an afterthought, something that the usability folks dinged us for. You know the text wasn't dark enough or the font was too small. It
Flock: On Ramp for Web 2.0? Lots of buzz [http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68823,00.html?tw=wn_story_top5] around Flock [http://www.flock.com/home/]. The new social browser scheduled for an October release. Oh no, you say. Not another browser! No, its not really a new browser. Flock brilliantly
New Yahoo! Mail Goes Beta Tomorrow Finally going to be in limited beta release. Ok, first disclaimer. I work for Yahoo. And Darren James, fellow Rico-man & former teammate at Sabre now works for the Y!Mail team. But, before joining he & I were avid gmail lovers. I got in very early in the gmail
Rich Data = Open Data James Governor has done an excellent job on expanding my definition of richness to more clearly include open information. We are witnessing many tipping points. The Richness in the data dimension is not just about opening the page, it is about opening up the web as a platform. Check out
Richness: The Web in 3D What is Richness? Richness in terms of a user interface means that the application provides a rich interaction model, a rich visual model and richness in the data and logic it provides. This is in fact a good way to think about richness—in three dimensions: the visual dimension, the
Cell Phone Usability: Too Much Feedback Growing up, my family had one of those boat-anchor black Ma-bell telephones that had the metallic bell. There was no voice mail back then. And generally it could ring 25 or 30 times before the circuit was released. Back then the phone was in another room. You needed the ring
The Come To Me Web Tonight I attended the BayCHI event, Are You Ready for Web 2.0? [http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20050809/] The panelist were David Sifry, Technorati [http://technorati.com/]; Stewart Butterfield, Flickr [http://flickr.com/]/Yahoo [http://yahoo.com/]!; Paul Rademacher, HousingMaps [http://housingmaps.com/]; Thomas Vander Wal, PersonalInfoCloud.com [http:
PIAs vs RIAs Ok, so I have been struggling with what to call the non-rich internet application approach. You know the web that we have known and loved for all these years. In writing about and discussing it I have noticed what a pain it is to succintly point out the differences between
Changing Jobs - New Challenges Well it is with a mixture of sadness and excitement that I had my last day at Sabre this past Friday. Sadness, because I leave behind many friends and colleagues that I greatly respect. Excitement because of the opportunities ahead. As I told those at my farewell party, I have
Thin Ajax Clients - Model-View-Controller Ok, I normally try to post just on the design side of things. But as you can tell I wear two hats: Technology and Design. This blog is on the technology side of things. With the introduction of the LiveGrid [death-to-paging-rico-livegrid-released] behavior on our openrico.org site I have received
Why is Sabre Supporting Rico as OpenSource? I've been asked this question on numerous occassions. Here is my take on why it has happened. 1) Sabre Airline Solutions invested significantly in a set of standard core technology platforms built on open source technology (Java Swing, JSP/Struts, JDO, Hibernate, Spring, J2EE technologies, etc.). This rich
Death to Paging! - Rico LiveGrid Released Ok, How About a Revolution?Aren't you tired of getting a chunk of search results from Google, Yahoo, A9, product listings, real estate pages, etc.? And then having to scroll to the bottom and hit the "next page?". In the words of Andy Rooney, "I
Mind Mapping Design Patterns I have long been fascinated with design patterns. My first real encounter was in the field of software design when the classic book, Design Patterns [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201633612/102-3096595-3156129?v=glance] by the so called Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph
Interactive Wireframes: Documenting RIAs Background I started designing (and developing) user interfaces professionally 20 years ago. My first experience was writing GATO, a submarine simulation, for the then newly minted Macintosh. I moved through a myriad of business domains from there. These included designing interfaces in the areas of: * wargaming * airline forecasting * software reverse
Very Rich Mail Clients Mail over the web has always sucked. That is why when gmail came out I signed up as quick as I could get a friend's friend that worked at Google to invite me. gmail set a new standard for the masses on what a mail tool could be
Ajax Applets: Rich DHTML Clients Via Light-Weight Plug-Ins Several years back I was reviewing some marketing material that presented what one of my technology teams would be creating for the company I worked for. The team was chartered with building common components for web applications. One of the line items claimed we would deliver 'a rich set