Sunday, January 03, 2010 2:02 PM
When I began to write this blog, I decided to write down only posts about something interesting, not only comments and link to other post.
Twitter helps me to do it.
In the last year, my free time to write consistently decreased: I spent at work more time than in my past freelance activity and when I was out, I spent all my time for family, friends and my beautiful mountains.
I presented to some
conference and
camps, talking about
UIX. I like it very much.
But, I miss writing posts. For the new year I'll try to change something in my working life to find the write balance and to spend more time in writing :)
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 1:14 AM
I'm very happy of attending a
UX Camp last Saturday.
Even though I preferred speeches about suggestions and problems then others about UI methodologies, I listened to some very interesting ideas and I met nice people to talk to.
I talked together with
Cristiano about Interfaces for elder users.
A very big part of our society is now excluded from Internet because the interfaces that we are using every day, are too difficult for them. There is more attention on accessibility for people with disabilities, than there is for elder people. But they WANT to understand and use our technological tools, because they know that they are important for them as they are for us.
We have elder people in all our family, so Cristiano and I thought about some ideas for bringing Web Tools to our elder family.
You can find our presentation (it is only in Italian, sorry!) here:
www.slideshare.net/tso_da/senior-20
Thank you all, people there and organizers
Friday, September 18, 2009 7:59 PM
I'm sitting in front of my mac, searching for an idea on how to make a multiple choice usable. I'm in hurry and I've a very short time to do it.
Sadly, but it's every day's story.
I write something on the google seach bar, hoping to find something that can help me.
So, I found Patterns library sites.
Design pattern history
The concept of using a library of examples to find standard solutions to solve common problems was developed by
Christopher Alexander in 1977 in a architectural book.
"The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project. It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe, and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs."
This concept is widely used in software architecture to organize and to design software, but is a relatively a new concept in UI design.
How patterns could be useful for UI design
In the user interface design using a framework based on "pattern" began with the library of XHTML+CSS modules. Everyone of us knows very well the importance of these libraries and we usually use them to build our code architecture.
The same value has the UI pattern: they immediately give to us an idea of a possible solution to study and solve our personal scenario.Having some elements to begin to work, some answers to basic problems, puts our mind in the condition to think how to improve user experience and consistency related to whole application.
It is not only copy&paste, Patterns give us a different and rational way of approaching a problem, in a context that has very few rational things: design and user experience are not simple to categorize.
There are many examples of UI pattern on the web.
I used three, but I discover every days one new :)
http://quince.infragistics.com/
Is the first UI pattern site that I used. Here it is possible to find some solution organized by type of user tasks.
http://patterntap.com/
This one is a library of samples, not all are real "pattern", but a collection of inspirationl graphic element, organized by kind of problem.
http://www.welie.com/patterns/index.php
This is a collection of pattern for interaction design, that explains what you can use for UI problems and how.
Monday, July 13, 2009 11:57 PM
A few weeks ago I held a talk at the Italian ALT.NET Conference and my talk was about how to design the User Experience of an application, but soon it turned into a hot discussion about how to adopt the approach I was explaining, building the prototype of the UX first, when using an Agile development methodology.
From the objections I received I understood that Agile developers think that UI prototyping is against incremental process, but this is not true.
When it come to prototyping the UX of an application, it doesn't mean you have to prototype the whole application in the finest details. I think that is possible to prototype the concept of an application, with the macro functionalities, the graphics and usability behavior and give the imprinting to the client. Then when the project enters in the development phase, you can use prototyping to design and define the UX in a more detailed way and so develop the single feature in a vertical way.
You can design the functionalitis with the schematics, static graphic and functional mockup and put every single functionality on the client approval process and then implement it. It isn't a closed process, there are a continuous dialog between designers, developers and clients.
Talking with a more precise Agile terminology, you can see the prototypes are a better way to define use cases: a way that shows the customer what he wants, not only from a functional standpoint, but also from a usability one (this is an interesting thought by Simone Chiaretta ). And since this use case is more similar to the final implementation than a bunch of sentences, the customer can understand earlier in the process that what he told you want not what he meant, or that he wants it in a slightly different way. And since this brings earlier in the process something that without prototyping would have been discovered only after the first iteration of the given feature, this save both you and the client time and money.
Obviously, since you are building something concrete (still a kind of sketch, but more concrete than just text) refactoring of the main plan is necessary. Since there are always continuing changes during a project, the process without a global view is too dangerous as it might lead to inconsistencies in the overall design and user experience of the application.
My grandmother says: the truth lies in the middle. Don't think in absolute way, and don't think without a global and elastic mindset. Approaching this you have to adopt the approach that works best with your team: every single project, like every single team, has a particularity that makes it unique.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009 12:10 AM
Finally our paper "
Role of thesauri in a scientific organization" is published.
It is about the project for the
JRC of Ispra where I worked till June 2008. It talks about association of indexes and how we can use them to organize a document. The article was split in three part:
- the first called "Networks of people" which analizes the history of tge JRC center
- the second one called "Networks of term and people", that talks about the relation between the terms of controlled vocabulary and people that used them
- the last one called "Networks of terms" that analizes a specific thesaurus used by researchers of JRC.
All this work is around the new information retrieval system for the JRC based on the new thesaurus. This system is called SIRS, Scientific Information Retrieval System .
This is the only publicly accessible information about the work I did during the 2 years I worked for the European Commission at the JRC in Ispra.