Usability Friction » Misc

Free eBook from Flashbulb Interaction

Ash Towers — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:10:06 +0000

Earlier this week Jake Burghardt at Flashbulb Interaction emailed to tell me about his new eBook entitled: ”Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work”.

I’ve not had chance to read it all yet, but what I have read so far is very good, so I saw no point in delaying sharing it with you all!

Working through Screens is a reference for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.

It is available in 3 formats:

Online html
A 143 page pdf
A highly summarised ‘Idea Cards Edition’

I love the ‘Idea Cards Edition’ idea – so much valuable information is lost when it’s bound up in a book that people haven’t the time to read!

He’s generously released it under the creative commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) so if you enjoy it you can share it with your friends!

Grab yourself a copy from the Working Through Screens mini site

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Site News: Links page updated!

Ash Towers — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 11:45:51 +0000

It has been a long time coming, but this morning brought about the correct alignment of the planets and I’ve finally got around to writing my links page! It’s not an exhaustive list of all the usability sites out there – just the ones I subscribe to. But, if you think I’m missing out on a site that should be on my list then let me know and I’ll get them added!

The list is mainly usability/UX pages, but there’s also a few links to other pages I enjoy that might be of interest to you.

On a related note, I’m now posting on Twitter, so if you like you can follow me here!

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Site News: Usability Friction Amazon Store

Ash Towers — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:00:48 +0000

I’ve added an Amazon store to the site today. There’s not a vast quantity of stuff in there, I could have just added to the store by Amazon category, but I’ve hand picked everything on there myself. Everything in there I’ve either read (or am in the process of reading!), so if you are interested in usability or design these books represent a great starting point.

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Site News: Post Titles

Ash Towers — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:18:26 +0000

I had a bit of an epiphany today about the way I title my posts to this blog. I think most of them are the wrong way up. I have been titling them based on the example – rather than the lesson that can be learnt from it. So unless anyone objects strongly (not sure why you would!) I think I’ll start doing it the other way up. I’ll probably change the structure of the posts themselves to reflect this too – introduce a design principle, explore it and then give a real world example. Here’s a couple that I would rename:

Thinking about how I’d rename these posts has made me realise if I rewrote them now I’d write them very differently and that they would probably be much more useful! This also reflects the direction I’d like this blog to head in; to be a resource for people who are interested in design and usability factors rather than a list of my grumbles!

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading so far – I hope that this change will make the blog better for you!

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Welcome

Ash Towers — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:11:58 +0000

It’s taken a while; I’ve had this blog in my head for years now and have never got round to it. I blame work, I blame university, I blame laziness. I did make a start at it once; but then work, university and laziness ganged up and put a stop to it.

This time, I put my hand in my pocket and bought some hosting in the hopes that having a lighter wallet would motivate me into sticking at it. That and the help of Upstart blogger’s 30 day blogging programme.

So, welcome to usabilityfriction.com! This is a blog about the usability of things. Unfortunately, a lot of things are bad to use. Some make grown men cry. On the other hand some are fantastic. I’m going to use this blog to show examples of both and investigate why the bad things are bad and why the good things are good.

You might consider that your job has nothing to do with usability; but, for example, that form you just created for customers to fill in could be a nightmare to understand if you’ve designed it badly. Usability affects everything that we interact with – products, web sites, processes, software and even down to the cupboard you put your mugs in. So its well worth learning about for almost everything you do. It isn’t hard and doesn’t need to cost anything; most of it is just common sense. But when used well it reduces mistakes, saves time, saves money and makes people happy.

I hope you enjoy this blog, I hope it will make you think. If you agree with what I write, or better still disagree, please use the comments. I’d love to hear your feedback!

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