From the “So ERGOnomical, it hurts” dept

“UI Goodness” is an affectionate term for good User Interface Design that my former co-worker, Mike, would often say. I admire Mike; he’s an artist and a geek. Unfortunately, I can only emulate the latter.

On the topic of UI goodness, I saw a few things on the “INTERWEB” that might be of interest to those, “in-the-know”.

I know that this has been posted everywhere, but I finally took the time to read DesignInteract.com’s developmental case study of the Herman Miller RED e-campaign. It’s a good look at how a website should be designed, while showing the benefits that an interaction architect/designer/specialist can give.

The funniest thing about that article is that Herman Miller has an online magazine called “brightRED” — a place for owners of HM RED to ruminate and predicate on how nice there furniture is, I guess. The colour of the e-zine, you ask? Green. Now, the only reason that I can think of this is that Green is the complementary colour for RED.

I just think it is an interesting juxtaposition.

Unlike Jen, I am not fortunate enough to have an office furnished in Herman Miller RED, but I can always dream. However, in one work-term I did have a BED where I used to take naps—so I’m not complaining. Right now my room is furnished with a lot of IKEA furniture (bed, table, a chair, and shelving), and one lone Walmart dresser. Actually, that’s about all the furniture that I own. My room is pretty spartan.

From the “Jargon = Exclusion = Poor Usability” Dept.

BoxesandArrows.com is site dedicated to ““bringing architecture and design to the digital landscape”.

It’s a brand new site with lots of great IA-related content. The one article that I found interesting is
<href=”http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/002565.php” target=”_blank”>Speaking in Tongues</> by C. Wodtke. It is a rather high-level overview about jargon and some of its consequences. By jargon, I mean “when we replace perfectly accessible English with slang, [euphamisms,] acronyms and other mangled phraseology.”

Now as a Usability Specialist, I use jargon all the time. Words like: meta-data, meta-navigation, salience, “UI goodness”, were used all the time at Critical Path. It must be baffling to some people.

BoxesandArrows is a nice site. One of its objectives is to eliminate jargon where ever possible. It also has a clean design. If you look carefully, you’ll find that the site’s colour scheme uses blue with orange high-lights. Blue and orange? Those are complimentary colours!

Coincidence? I think not.

Cheers,

Tai