A bit of a mixed bag today!

• Les Arts Saut amazingly beautiful trapeze act we saw on Friday night. Any trapeze act that features a musical ensemble with 2 cellos is going to get my attention, but this act is beautiful in so many ways. If you get a chance to go see Les Arts Saut, do it. I’ll post a few blurry photos to Flickr shortly ;) (tags: trapeze) Also, I have a couple of photos here.

• User Centred Design Methodology and Tools You can never have too many reference for User Centred Design Methodology. If only to make sure that you’re keeping the user at front of mind all the time you’re designing. Having a sound methodology also helps to get the confidence of clients who, when the rubber hits the road, are often very inclined to ditch the user’s interest over their own. (tags: UCD usability)

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More thinking about tagging.

• WordWorks » Folksonomy recapitulates Ontology discusses the pros and cons of tagging (suggests that tagging will remain the bastion of early adopters) (tags: del.icio.us folksonomy tag tagging web2.0)

a bit of a mixed bunch today… reflects my day in the office I suppose.

• adaptive path » get out of your lab, and into their lives unsurprisingly states that usability testing should not rely on usability labs, but that we need to test users in their real environment/context. Particularly true for mobile applications. Nothing really new here but its worth being regularly reminded. (tags: usability testing)
• Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times Part of the reason that you need to test applications in context is that people don’t get to spend an hour or so uninteruptted with your application, as they might in a one on one session in a usability lab. This article discusses research recently completed in which each employee studied spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading etc. (tags: design usability informationoverload, attentionscarcity HCI)

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Lots of linkage today – our creative team are working on a design review for the project I’m working on now and we needed some sites to review and potentially use as benchmarks. That meant that I got to play with some pretty gorgeous sites.

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