User Interface Blog

IBM launched an e-business patterns website. Patterns for e-business are a group of reusable assets that can help speed the process of developing Web-based applications. This site breaks down these reusable assets into the following elements: business, integration, composite, custom designs, application and runtime patterns.

I have done some design changes on my main page. I also added a PICS label to my blog using the ICRA label generator. You can test the PICS label with the ICRA label tester.

Stanley Ho posted a blog about new security dialogs available in the upcoming Java release (J2SE 1.5 Update 6) and Mustang. Following are new security dialogs for Java deployment process:

Signed application with valid certificate (Source: Stanley Ho )


Dialog displaying more information for valid certificates. (Source: Stanley Ho )

Java applications can be deployed via Java Web Start and Java Plug-in. These new security dialogs has been introduced for improving the deployment user experience of Java applications.

Reading the comments on Stanley’s blog it seems to be that a beautiful screen design of the dialogs is important. I really like the design of the new security dialogs. Will these new security dialogs really improve the overall user experience of the deployment process?

Jakob Nielsen’s current Alertbox is about Weblog Usability.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

I think it’s a great article for every blogger.

The current issue of DMReview features the winners of the 2005 data visualization competition. Participants were given the opportunity to showcase their data visualizations in the final event of the competition.

These are the only instructions for the participants: This scenario is not prescribed. You may present any real-world data and message that can be addressed through a data visualization. It may be a graph, a dashboard, or any other visual presentation of quantitative data. This is your opportunity to showcase a data visualization of which you are particularly proud.

The winning solution was presented by Jock Mackinlay - director of interface design - of Tableau Software. The data visualization was designed to help a video game company analyze its competitors’ advertising strategies.

Jock’s description: What are the advertising strategies of my competitors? A company required a competitive analysis comparing the weekend TV advertising strategies of different companies in the video game industry. The companies have similar overall strategies with more ads running Sunday evening than Saturday evening. However, EA Sports stands out as having an unusual advertising strategy: running a lot of low cost, 15-second cable TV spots throughout the weekend with several high cost, 30-second network TV spots Sunday afternoon. The motivation was immediately clear: live Sunday sports broadcasts are an ideal advertising venue for sports video games.

The following quote is the conclusion of the final event results:

As long as business intelligence software vendors continue to market flash and dazzle and spend their time adding features that are seldom useful rather than developing software that works seamlessly as an extension of human perception and intelligence, most BI users will continue to waste much of their time on window dressing rather than squeezing valuable insights out of their data. Most - but not all. You can choose to be an exception.

I totally agree with the conclusion. Most important for a good data visualization application is not a good window dressing but rather a valuable insight view of the data to be analyzed.

I have changed the domain for User Interface Blog. Please update your bookmarks to http://www.user-interface.org
and your feeds to
http://www.user-interface.org/feed/.

Google started to provide a free full featured online RSS news reader. Google Reader is currently released as beta version.