Brad Lauster .com

It’s interesting how you can search for something for months, then all of a sudden it just falls in your lap!

Today Chad pointed me to Paul Dourish’s new book: “Where the Action Is.”

Terry Winograd is quoted as saying this about the book, “This is the first book to provide a broad view of how our interaction with computers is intertwined with our physical world.” Dourish refers to it as “embodied interaction.”

I added it to my Amazon wishlist. Pretty shameless, huh?

Funny, I’ve never heard of this before: Interaction Design Institute Ivrea

Next Tuesday at BayCHI-East, Bill Verplank is giving a talk entitled, “Physical Interaction Design.”

I wrote to Elan about this today:

Elan:
physical interaction design…. sounds like Industrial Design and Interaction Design combined, no?

Me:
Exactly! This talk is such an odd coincidence for me because for the past few months I’ve been struggling with whether I want to apply to an HCI program or the Product Design Program here at Stanford.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to combine the two, but haven’t been able to find much written on the subject.

This sounds like exactly what I want to be doing!
I’m so excited this guy is at Stanford. I can’t wait to talk to him!

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Choosing HCI Appropriate Research Methods, created by Ben Shneiderman’s students at the University of Maryland contains six handy-dandy articles:

• The Role of Theory in HCI
• Development Methods: User Needs Assessments & Task Analyses
• Ethnographic Methods
• Survey Methods: Surveys & Questionnaires
• Controlled Experiments
• Logging & Automated Metrics

There is a difference between content and functionality that some people don’t seem to understand when it comes to designing interactive systems.

It’s important to be able to access content in many different ways. Peoples’ minds work differently. People remember different attributes about different information and to be able to find that information in the quickest manner possible, Information Architects need to present many ways to access it.

Functionaly is completely different. Providing many different ways to complete the same funtion in an interactive system is BAD. It breaks mental models because users aren’t sure, for example, what button they should use if they’re both labeled the same. In addition to breaking mental models, providing more than one way to complete a function decreases the effeciency of your interface because your users have to decide which method they’re going to use to complete the function before they actually go and do it.

I found this post hidden away this morning. I think I wrote it because I was upset that SO many people on the sigIA-l mailing list think they are Information Architects, when in fact, they are Interaction Designers. The people on that list confuse content with functionality ALL the time. Grrrr.

So, what do you think about the difference between content and functionality? Am I right or wrong?

As you can see I made some tweaks to bradlauster.com. Please post a comment if you find anything that’s broken!

A discussion on the Technology Review article, “The Next Computer Interface” (one of my favorite subjects) is forming over at Elegant Hack.

Come on…throw your thoughts into the mix!

As featured on the Simpsons this evening:
What Badgers Eat.com

I’m such an HCI geek.

Today I got all excited when Jan Borchers, who wrote, “A Pattern Approach to Interaction Design” sent an email to the Stanford Webmail support list.

Well, Intel finally broke $30 again. If only it would have done that back in September, I could have done something with my options!

Oh well, I’m still smiling about getting PAID me to quit! Man, was that ever a sweet deal!