Index of blog posts

// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

User and Social Experience Design

Organised approach to emotional response testing

Suggested approaches to categorising feeling words including the Product Reaction Cards and developing a reduced or custom set of cards.

Staff collaboration: Social is not a dirty word!

Organisations should recognise the "social" aspect of social networking technologies deployed to facilitate staff collaboration and allow people to interact as real people.

A higher order of specification

While terms used by UX designers are often regarded as vague I believe that they should be considered a higher order of specification that collates and expands upon lower-level requirements.

Sketching

Much of the work of user interaction designers is behind the scenes and doesn't end up in user interface specifications.

ABC/XYZ testing

The important thing about A/B testing is that there is a single variable that changes across the test samples. Not a dozen.

Johnny Holland - New Flickr groups

JH has just started five groups on Flickr for the collection and sharing of examples of UX patterns, errors and examples.

Fastest isn't always good

An example of a real-world physical system where a deliberate delay could provide a better user experience.

Transient feedback

It can be an efficient way of providing unobtrusive feedback and make an interface feel cleaner and smarter but doesn't work in every situation.

Our designer came up with this, now I want you to implement it

User experience and interaction designers, usability and accessibility specialists and information architects often get given a back seat in the design process. Don't accept it.

Online conversations: Limitations and opportunities

Be mindful of artificial boundaries that limit and guide social interactions on websites.

Open source software: Designer-developer collaboration

How can front-end user interaction and user experience designers get more involved in open source development projects?

Survey results: Websites that keep users logged in

An analysis of the responses to the survey I conducted earlier this week on websites that "remember" users with some interesting perspectives provided on personal information security.

Remember me?

Should websites that require you to log in be focussed on convenience or personal information privacy and security?

Consistency: You're just being obsessive-compulsive

All this talk of UI and interaction patterns, style guides, Gestalt psychology, pixel accuracy and visual defects ... is it really important?

Style guides and UI implementation: Part 2

A sequel to my previous article on style guides with some principles, checklists and examples of how to write a good style guide to ensure implementation of a higher-quality user interface.

Artificial user-system feedback loops

Artificial feedback loops are ones closed with assumptions and not real system feedback upon the completion of a process such as saving information in a database.

User Experience Freelancers network

A new network for self-employed UX professionals, plus other events for freelancers and entrepreneurs in Canberra.

Interactive Sketching Notation

An under-development notation system for user interaction interaction design documentation.

User interface and interaction design patterns

A list of web IxD/UI design pattern resources assembled by the UX Exchange community.

Data visualisation in user experience design

Whilst a technique that requires significant graphic design and sometimes mathematical talent to implement, data visualisation can significantly increase data accessibility and comprehensibility.

Web, Technology, Social Innovation and Events

Canberra Coworking is finally here!

We've been trying for over 2 years to establish an affordable and casual shared office for freelancers in Canberra and now we're very excited to announce we finally have secured a space in Mitchell.

UX Australia 2010

Next year's UX Australia event has been announced to take place in Melbourne in August 2010.

Canberra Freelancers and Entrepreneurs Coffee

Come and meet like-minded, passionate creators and innovators on Monday 23 November at CREAM Cafe in Civic, Canberra.

BarCampCanberra 2010 preparations are underway

BarCamp is a community conference with free attendance where anyone can come along and present an interesting idea or problem, or something they've built or developed. Our third local BarCamp is scheduled for mid-February 2010.

Canberra ASIX solution design and architecture evening

Ahead of the main ASIX social innovation SICamp event taking place next year in 2010 we are starting to looking at progressing some of the proposed ideas to the next level and we'd like you to be involved.

Edge of the Web 2009

The Edge of the Web conference is an annual web industry event held in Perth, Western Australia.

Local ambassador for UXnet in Canberra

Local professional and social events in Canberra, the web and tech community and professional network and what it's like working in Canberra.

Social Innovation Meetup Canberra

A fun evening of smart people workshopping some interesting ideas around social innovation and change to benefit the community, hosted by the Australian Social Innovation Exchange, Pia Waugh and Senator Kate Lundy.

Melbourne's first OpenAustralia hackfest

Following on from OpenAustralia's first and highly successful hackfest in Sydney, the next hackfest will be held in Melbourne on 26 September.

UX Australia - Day Two and wrap up

My thoughts and notes on the second and last day of the UX Australia conference. Fantastic presentations by Will Evans, Aynne Valencia and Guillermo Torres, Ash Donaldson and Stephen Cox.

UX Australia - Day One

My summary of the first day of the inaugural UX Australia conference in Canberra and thoughts on the presentations of Alex Wright, Darren Menachemson, Ben Kraal, Lachlan Hardy, Penny Hagen and Michelle Gilmore, and Shane Morris and Matt Morphett.