The Eclipse IDE provides an application framework for Java applications. Software applications based on Eclipse can be developed as Eclipse plug-ins or can use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform to provide a custom user interface.
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/.
Today I read Jesper Rønn-Jensen latest blog entry Definition of User Experience Revisited and The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience by Thomas Baekdal.
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.
This is totally off topic for Usability, but I need to ran about the new Mac advertisings…
There is the legendary 1984 ad:
Now there are the new Macintosh ads. They’re really great.
The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) has initiated a long-term project to collate a comprehensive Body of Knowledge (BoK) for the usability profession, which will provide an authoritative source of reference and define the scope of the usability profession.
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.
The guide to the Usability Body of Knowledge will:
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.
Bill Gates describes his desktop:
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.
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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?
New York Times has redesigned their site. They have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors and improved the navigation throughout the site. In addition they extended multimedia content within the web site. The new design now looks like a newspaper.
I really like the new site design and the enhanced multimedia content.
Today I read a great article on zooie’s blog about the future of tagging.
Vik Singh wrote about two ways for improving tagging:
He also wrote about a possible machine learning algorithm for hierarchical multi-labeling tags.
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