links for 2 February 2006

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)

• Google Transit public transport mapping/trip planner/directions via google. Yes, I have a bit of a thing for maps at the moment…. its this project I’m working on…(tags: googlemaps tripplanner directions)

• Mortierbrigade – Confuse & Conquer beautifully designed, i particularly like the way that they have integrated rich media into a textual description (see the Work section) (tags: design, inspiration, advertising, flash, richmedia, video)
• Annie Lennox nice clean simple interaction with elegant integration of rich media (and lots of Annie Lennox tunes) (tags: music design flash inspiration richmedia)
• Salt, a village life by the sea I was looking for something that captured the Australia Experience online. This is a pretty good effort. Interestingly, its the work of a great Belgium firm! (tags: design flash inspiration webdesign video vignette)
• group94 / webdesign from belgium And here they are – these guys are responsible for the three sites above. They have some seriously sexy work in their portfolio. (tags: agency design inspiration belgium)
• OurType. Fine Type from Europe yes, its another group94 site. Today I’m stalking them. This one has beautiful typography (which I thought might be a helpful resource as well as another gorgeous site) (tags: typography inspiration flash design fonts)
• HotMaps: City map of Melbourne – City map with street guide and zoom function yep, its another map. But its not a not-google-or-yahoo interactive map(tags: maps)