If you would like to review the new Safari 3 public beta Internet browser for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Then you can download it here.

External References

• Apple.com
• OSX Leopard
• Safari 3 public beta

What software or service do you use for reviewing your design or requirements?

To test the changes of the user interface we have used a free Photoshop plug-in called VisCheck. This plug-in can convert an image to different kind and levels of color discrimination. It’s also possible to run VisCheck by a web interface. VisCheck is a great software and really helpful when testing the user interface changes.

External References

• VisCheck
• VisCheck web interface
• Color Blindness Simulator
• ColorVision
• Test for Color Blindness (Thanks to Nabeel for sharing the link)

The EOL website has been launched this week and will go live next year. Avenue A-Razorfish provided, by a pro bono job, the visualisation and design of EOL website and Ray Ratelis owned eol.org, a valuable web address which he freely contributed to the project. The website currently contains a great introduction video, explaining the purpose and vision behind the Encyclopedia, and screen shots of some demonstration pages.

Looking at the demonstration page you can see samples of the upcoming content. You can move the mouse cursor over the website image and a description of the presentation idea is shown. I really like the vision of EOL website and their extraordinary way to present and structure the information to particular species!

External Links

• Encyclopedia of Life
• TED Talk: E.O. Wilson: Help build the Encyclopedia of Life
• Scientists plan 300 million page website on all life on Earth

The following screen shot displays the Dashboard of Google Analytics V2.

Here are some improvements as mentioned by the Google Analytics Blog.

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

The following links present detailed information about Google Analytics V2:

• New Version of Google Analytics!published by by Google Analytics Blog
• What I’ve been working on: The New Google Analytics published by by Jeff Veen
• Google Analytics Is Re-Launched: Do These Five Things First In V2 published by Avinash Kaushik

“In this tutorial, I describe various common graphic design elements in modern web (”2.0″) design style. I then attempt to explain why they work (i.e. why they have become common), as well as how, when and where you might use each element in your designs.”

Additionally he presented the Current style in web design article which is interesting to read, too.

“This is where I try to sum up the current state-of-the-art in graphic design for web pages, and identify the distinctive features that make a web page look fresh, appealing and easy to use.”

External Links

• Web 2.0 how-to-design guide
• Current style in web design

External Links

• A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
• Thanks to Christina Wodtke for posting the link.

I think that the User Interface Guidelines Preview is interesting to read and that it is full of new ui ideas, approaches and guidelines. I wonder about how much of this will be used by the user interface of new released Microsoft software.

External Links:

• 2007 Microsoft Office System User Interface Licensing web site
• User Interface Guidelines Preview (A short excerpt of the actual guidelines)
• How to misuse the Office 2007 Ribbon
• Being a responsible open source developer

The Eclipse community has also done a great job getting SWT on Vista. The latest Eclipse release 3.3 M5 milestone contains SWT updates to ensure it can runs well on the new Vista user interface.

External Links

The Eclipse community had published the User Interface Guidelines. These Guidelines are based on Eclipse 2.1 and is now partly obsolete. Articles with updated content are pubished at http://www.eclipse.org/articles/.

I found these posts really interesting and a great explanation of the term User-Experience and the differences to Usability.

User-experience is not like usability - it is about feelings. The aim here is to create happiness. You want people to feel happy before, during and after they have used your product. To do that you need to take all kinds of things into consideration. Things like: Environment, Colors moods, Smell… etc.

This is much much much harder to achieve. None of these things can be accurately analyzed. It is a touchy feeling kind of thing.

Why, for instance, does a Audi S6 give you a much better user-experience than a Ford Focus? I mean, in terms of usability they are pretty much the same.

There is the legendary 1984 ad:

Now there are the new Macintosh ads. They’re really great.

Viruses

Restarting

Better

iLife

Network

WSJ

Mission

The Usability Body of Knowledge project is dedicated to creating a living reference that represents the collective knowledge of the usability profession. Such a collection of knowledge for the usability profession will necessarily be broad and inclusive in scope, because our profession is inherently multidisciplinary and draws on a wide range of other practices.

We recognize that the BoK should be derived from published literature, conference proceedings, and the experiences of practitioners accumulated over many years. It is not possible or desirable for this project to duplicate all of the existing resources. Rather, the outcome will be a guide that contains core material supplemented by pointers to existing resources, and continues to evolve as the practice of usability evolves .

Defining such a guide is an important step in our development as a profession because it represents a broad consensus regarding the profession itself and the range of knowledge, skills, and methods that should be mastered by practitioners in the field.

Goals

The guide to the Usability Body of Knowledge will:

• Define the knowledge underlying the usability profession.
• Describe and provide pointers to methods, knowledge, and skills that are important for usability professionals.
• Promote the advancement, understanding, and recognition of the usability profession among those who interact with the usability community.
• Facilitate professional development for usability practitioners at any stage in their careers, as well as people who come to usability from other backgrounds/disciplines.
• Provide the basis for future curriculum development.
• Provide support for professional development and any future certification schemes.
• Promote integration and connections with related disciplines.

For more information have a look at Usability Body of Knowledge web site. They also invite everybody for taking an online survey to shape the content of the BoK.

If you look at this office, there isn’t much paper in it. On my desk I have three screens, synchronized to form a single desktop. I can drag items from one screen to the next. Once you have that large display area, you’ll never go back, because it has a direct impact on productivity.

The screen on the left has my list of e-mails. On the center screen is usually the specific e-mail I’m reading and responding to. And my browser is on the right-hand screen. This setup gives me the ability to glance and see what new has come in while I’m working on something, and to bring up a link that’s related to an e-mail and look at it while the e-mail is still in front of me.

At Microsoft, e-mail is the medium of choice, more than phone calls, documents, blogs, bulletin boards, or even meetings (voicemails and faxes are actually integrated into our e-mail in-boxes).

I get about 100 e-mails a day. We apply filtering to keep it to that level—e-mail comes straight to me from anyone I’ve ever corresponded with, anyone from Microsoft, Intel, HP, and all the other partner companies, and anyone I know. And I always see a write-up from my assistant of any other e-mail, from companies that aren’t on my permission list or individuals I don’t know. That way I know what people are praising us for, what they are complaining about, and what they are asking.

…

Right now, I’m getting ready for Think Week. In May, I’ll go off for a week and read 100 or more papers from Microsoft employees that examine issues related to the company and the future of technology. I’ve been doing this for over 12 years. It used to be an all-paper process in which I was the only one doing the reading and commenting. Today the whole process is digital and open to the entire company.

There are even more information available.

Now I am wondering what approach you have to organize your work. What kind of tools or features do you use to organize your work?

I really like the new site design and the enhanced multimedia content.

External Links:

• New York Times