There’s a short case study over on Marketing mag about news.com.au – increasing user engagement and website traffic through redesign. Here’s a snippet:

The factors that determined news.com.au’s re-design came as a result of extensive prelaunch user and industry research; requirements from a wide range of stakeholders; exhaustive testing and a study of new technological solutions.

Yet another accolade for the News redesign team, including USiT’s own Chris Khalil!

(See our own post on the redesign)

The Courier Mail reports that Police avoid arrests due to time-consuming QPRIME computer system, a rare case of usability making an appearance in mainstream media. Here’s an extract:

Frustrated Queensland police are turning a blind eye to crime to avoid time-consuming data entry on the force’s new $100 million computer system…the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange…”They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,”…jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.

What I find most annoying is that a Queensland Police Service spokesperson said “…the benefits of the QPRIME system into the future far outweigh short-term disaffection by some officers…” which misses the point. It’s not officers’ disaffection that is the problem, it’s the larger impact on their ability to perform their duties!

I hear this all the time; “it’s not a big deal, users will get used to it”. But it’s the cumulative effect of all these “minor issues” that will affect usability, efficiency and in the case of police officers, the safety of our community.

Meanwhile, a similar story in the Washington Post describes how…

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects…partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.

[Thanks to Dorian Taylor for the tip off regarding the Washington Post article via the IA Institute mailing list]

The USiT team has had a running conversation of late about prototyping techniques and tools. We have been debating the value of sketching, both in terms of quickly producing and documenting ideas as well as for prototyping (where low fidelity can be a useful attribute when putting designs in front of a user).

Some of this was exposed through the comments on a recent blog post regarding wireframes, in particular Chris’ comment on a sketchy wireframe stencil. So we’ve collectively been thinking about documenting and prototyping and how important “sketchiness” is.

To further fuel the discussion, I want to refer to Russell Wilson’s review of 16 user interface prototyping tools. I like how he categorises his “picks” into “Low fidelity mockups for idea exploration and communication”, “Interactive prototypes to test and communicate interactions” and “High fidelity drawing tool”. This is much more useful than saying one uses Axure (for instance) to prototype, like any one tool or technique could ever fit all situations. There are some interesting comments on Russell’s post too.

Also on this topic, Todd Warfel is running a survey on prototyping tools for his upcoming book. Be sure to check it out and have your say, this is adding some clarity around the various characteristics and pros and cons of prototyping techniques that will be of use to the entire community.

And it will help answer the question raised in the title of this post :)

Vicky Teinaki has written an interesting article about Phenomenology over at JohnnyHolland. It provides a very brief overview of what phenomenology is and how this philosophical basis can help inform the work of a designer.

While I tend to take a more symbolic view of the world (semiotics) particularly when doing design research, phenomenology does open up a different way of thinking about interaction design.

I probably should have kept this post for Friday, but this is a pretty interesting post on the semiotics (the construction of meaning and understanding through symbols) of toilet signs.

It’s semi nsfw, but provides a fascinating overview of how important (cross culturally) it seems to be that micturation and defecation are seperated out into gender specific areas.

The first comment post on the site also points to a flickr group which examines gender signage around the world.

Will Evans has written a piece entitled Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device, on the role of wireframes in the UX design process (for an upcoming book on UX design by Russ Unger).

The whole post is interesting, but I like this bit in particular:

I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.

I like this; “problem setting” rather than “problem solving”.

The whole piece can be found on Will’s blog, along with wireframe examples he has created for the book.

(This may just prompt me to finish a long-running draft on “the truth about wireframes” which I have been working on for some time. I guess wireframes—or more accurately how they are abused—are a pet hate of mine :)

Are there equivalents of bangle-ism in design for the web?