jakob's web studio - Human-Computer Interaction

Web Design or the Art and Science of Solving Problems (Part 1)

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 04:57:41 -0500

I sometimes refer to myself as a web designer, a term that to many people I meet means "someone who makes websites pretty". This is a rather narrow definition and one I'd like to extend and widen and put in context with what us web professionals actually do. This blog post, the first in a series about building websites (or solving problems the way I look at it), covers some of my own thoughts regarding the trade of building websites and how a web professional or web designer thinks compared to print designers.

"The Legend of Kyrandia I" in terms of flow and pleasure

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 08:42:59 -0500

I occasionally indulge in computer games. It is not something I do regularly, but I'm always on the lookout for new titles that seem promising and spend my money on those instead of buying what's popular. I love the games that do not get as much attention as they deserve, but are brilliant and in many ways better than the big selling titles. Sometimes I play old games, often adventure games, just to marvel at the graphics or at what the game creators achieved with the limited hardware they had in those days. One of my all time favorite classic titles is the first of the Kyrandia games from Westwood Studios.

Drupal for Solid Lifeforms

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 13:32:28 -0500

A beginner’s FAQ and guide to one of the most formidable content management systems on planet Earth

Some of you who frequent my site may have noticed that I work a lot with Drupal and now offer Drupal-related services such as customization and design. If you’re curious about what Drupal is and what it can do for you, how you can build a better site - a site that’s easier to maintain using a state of the art CMS, this guide is for you.

The problem with CSS and why designers think with tables

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:51:16 -0500

So called web standards-compliant coding using XHTML and CSS is being touted as the way of the future for web design and more and more people adopt the new methods and practices by the day. However CSS introduces a less than intuitive way to think about page layout which makes it hard to adopt and is also why web designers still use tables for layout. In this article I will cover some recent web design history, discuss why designers think with tables and why the CSS formatting model is not as intuitive as it should be.

In the war on spam, usability is the first casualty

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 10:50:12 -0500

I've been posting earlier about spam, and the measures taken to stop it, as well as the counter-measures taken by spammers. It's a war that has civilian casualties just like any other war, and in this case the users are the civilians. The measures to prevent spam introduce captchas and other methods which are making websites less and less usable and accessible, methods that make using many sites become a challenge for many.

Don't let your computer bully you

Sat, 20 May 2006 18:19:47 -0500

Usability is interesting, not just because you learn a lot about how people think and feel but because you don't let bad application designers get away with it. People who work with usability are probably the hardest to satisfy, they will not accept a solution that is hard to use. Regular users on the other hand, often let their applications bully them into submission. In fact it's a sound conclusion to say that if more users had less respect for their applications people would generally feel less stressed at work.

The WWW and its future as a hyper-application system

Thu, 18 May 2006 07:23:18 -0500

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".

Some thoughts about design - it's mostly about ideas

Tue, 16 May 2006 20:56:34 -0500

A lot of people have asked me how I come up with ideas for new designs. While I can't offer a generic recipe for getting ideas and turning them into design solutions, in this article I've tried to express my own thoughts about working creatively. Interaction design research today is very focused on developing methods for establishing and creating so called design spaces that support the creation of good design solutions. I approach web design in a similar fashion however not necessarily in such a theory-based manner.

The quest for the usable wiki

Sat, 06 May 2006 08:28:14 -0500

A wiki is a wonderful idea, in essence it's a website that anyone can edit and view. I've used wikis in several projects related to my studies in order to have a common site for storing documents and notes related to our work, and that has worked well and our teachers have appreciated it. So far I've used, tried and looked at four or five wikis, and despite the simple idea behind the wiki, none of them is easy to install, use or customize. Why does it have to be so complicated? I don't know, but I have some ideas on how to make a more usable wiki.

Instant Messaging, neither written nor verbal, and why that can be a problem

Mon, 01 May 2006 13:58:08 -0500

I am composing a paper about instant messaging (IM) and chat, two modes of communication that are becoming more and more popular today. Unfortunately I have caught a cold so things have been delayed, and I've been required to stay indoors, rest and drink tea, I hope to make a speedy recovery and get it done. Regardless, it's a very interesting and relevant topic, I don't know many people who don't have an IM account and use it daily so I was hoping maybe you, my dear blog readers might share your views and bring some more insight.

Sketching and typing, the benefits of a notepad like input format

Sun, 30 Apr 2006 06:19:25 -0500

The primary way to store information on computers and digital media today is in text form and the reasons for this are traditional, it's easy to search and store text and it takes up little space. Stepping outside the traditional and limited sign systems of the digital era, allowing users to introduce their own signs, drawings and diagrams, seamlessly with typed text, will emulate the properties of traditional paper based media and add semantic richness to digital content.