Peter Merholz president of Adaptive
Path. Peter and Jerod discuss a method to map out the evolution of a product into three stages and the importance of planning this at the beginning to continually give the user a good experience while you add features and grow your product. I learned not to deploy a feature just because it's ready, but to plan the releases so you add features together that make sense without confusing your users while always keeping the business value in the plan. Peter explains a corollary of the release of the ipod in stages.
SpoolCast: Ajax Then and Now with Jeremy Keith June 16th,
2008
Jeremy Keith is the technical lead at Clearleft, a leading design consultancy in the
UK. Jerod and Jeremy discuss Ajax and how it's use in web pages can be useful and where it can hurt.
SpoolCast: What Makes a Great IA with Donna (Maurer)
Spencer June 9th,
2008
Donna (Maurer) Spencer, an information architect and owner of the freelance agency MaadMob. Donna and Jerod discuss what an Information Architect is and what makes a great Information Architect. They talk of the challenge of architecting the content and the web site navigation so that it makes sense to the end-user and not necessarily model the way the business is organized. Many clients expect this and each department wants to "tell the world what we do" instead of "make information available in the way people want to read it"
The following two are some basics principles of UI design that are still broken all of the time even though they are difficult for users to use.
Usability Tools Podcast: Applying Fitts’ Law February 28th,
2008
"A button is a button right? Move the mouse over it. Click. Not much to it,
eh?"
Usability Tools Podcast: Mouseovers in Navigation December 17th,
2007
"It’s tempting to spend a ton of time creating slick flyout, dropdown, or
pop-up navigation on our site, but is it worth the effort? "
Usability is so important and there is so much research out there about what works and what does not that there is no excuse for developers and designers to continue creating interfaces that are difficult for users to learn and navigate. I hope more people will take advantage of these podcasts and apply the findings to their design.
maggie++