XenoAbe Design

For anyone interested in some of the true theory behind HCI principles (we don’t just say stuff is better because we think it is) then this post is for you. We’ll explain what Fitt’s Law is, the basic idea behind it, and how that information can be applied practically to your applications and designs.

These design’s are giving me Fitt’s!

Fitt’s law is a mathematical formula that can calculate the difficulty it is to use two UI elements given the size and distance and of those elements. The formula is written as:

MT = a + b log₂(1+D/W)

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As you can see, this is a series we’ll start here on XenoAbe Design. We’ll take a look at specific types of websites and a few usability issues as they relate to those websites.

News sites are some of the most visited websites on the internet today. They are where people go to find out about what’s going on in the world around them. Therefore, news sites store incredible amounts of information. This information needs to be well organized so that visitors can quickly access the particular bit of news they may be looking for. Actually, news sites need to follow similar rules to other sites, but there are some particular aspects of UX that are extraordinarily poignant for news sites. Let’s take a look at these and figure out what we can learn from them.

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Remember those Lincoln Logs you had when you were a kid? They came in all different sizes and sometimes they gave you a splinter, but most of the time they gave you a nice little log home for your G.I. Joes or Ninja Turtles. Now, it probably took you 15-20 minutes to get the log home just the way you wanted. How bad would it have been if you had to actually carve out blocks of wood yourself to create that little log home? It would have taken a long time and, frankly, would have caused a lot of frustration.

So, why would a designer always create everything from scratch? It’s only going to take more time and cause more frustration. Frustration is when we start to not think straight, make mistakes, and leave out details. We should stick to our equivalent of Lincoln Logs.

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I’ve seen so many awful restaurant sites when trying to find a place to go eat. Even scouring through the many sites of restaurants featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives I had a hard time finding just a handful of well-designed sites. I’m not sure who is putting these sites together but they fall victim to several follies and mistakes. So I figured that we need to take a look at what is important about a restaurant site that’s a little bit different from other sites.
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Well, it’s taken a while, but the redesign is finally up. What do you think? Leave your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

Now that the site design is up I hope to have posts more frequently. In fact, there’s one that should be up either tonight or tomorrow.

I took an Intellectual Property class my last semester of graduate school at Georgia Tech and, while the class was taught on a surface level, I learned a lot about trademarks and their legality from writing a paper on the use of collegiate trademarks by college sports fans. Something else also came out of that paper that was a bit unexpected. That is the idea that we can learn something from Intellectual Property and its governing when designing social media.
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First of all, I apologize for such a long layoff. The Master’s Project ended up eating all of my time for the past few months.

Anyway, what are these adaptive websites you speak of? A lot of people are using web statistics to change and adapt their websites. Google statistics has become virtually ubiqitous in today’s information superhighway. My Master’s project is on machine learning and my independent study is about using statistics to help Flash games adapt to players. These got me thinking about using statistics not just as a redesign tool for designers or developers, but to have the website itself adapt to the users.
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This %$#&*$ article is going to teach you a thing about talking #$@% around other people. Well, not really, but it might make you think about how to handle offensive content (of the text variety). A lot of designs don’t have to worry about this, but there’s two specific elements that when combined need to explore the idea of being able to gracefully handle offensive content. The amalgamation I’m speaking of is text entry and a social aspect. When these things combine it provides a method of a sharing of text with (possibly) large numbers of people. Normally, this is fine. But what if someone starts throwing out a slew of curse words and other highly offensive content and it is showing up on your feed or your page?

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XenoAbe Design is starting a mini-series of design challenges. This series will focus on the kitchen and what ways we can make it more efficient, stylish, and useful. Each part in the mini-series we will focus on an aspect within the kitchen and think of ways that we can redesign it. This mini-series serves three purposes here at XenoAbe Design: (a) it provides a way to challenge myself to design things outside of my academic requirements, (b) this particular mini-series forces me to stray into a realm of usability not associated with the web, and (c) bounce ideas off of my Interior Design degree-totin’ wife.

Let’s kick this thing off looking at the spice rack.

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Over the past few years technology has been caught up in a broadcast phenomenon. Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, XBox Live, and the list goes on. We like to tell people about us, what we are doing, and the things we like. Apparently, it seems like people care. These services have become enormously popular and, frankly, have become life-changing for many. They completely change how we often go about our day.

So that begs the question, what’s next? These services require some sort of input. Users have to actually log in and then type in the information that is subsequently broadcast. In its basic form, it is instant, short-form citizen journalism. Sure, these can be kind of fun and they allow us to be selective in the information we disseminate, but it just seems like so much of this can be automated. We are not talking about the uses of these services for sharing interesting sites and articles, but rather the integration of these services into other programs and the automation of status broadcasting.

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