The London underground map has long been held as a classic of information design, eschewing unnecessary details of distance and geography in favour of a symbolic connection between stations.
Max Roberts delves in to the way that the modern incarnation of this classic is becoming progressively overwhelmed by “information pollution”, arguably reducing its effectiveness.
Information Pollution on the Underground Map
I have seen many software products fall into the same trap. With each new version or upgrade a few (individually small and potentially valuable) new features are added, and the original clear, expressive and usable design is compromised. After relatively few such iterations the software has the appearance of being complex and bloated, with no clear indication why.
An object lesson for all HCI and usability designers in evolving systems.
An example of poor usability on what should be a transparently simple device.
Meme Agora: Remote Usability
A stunning presentation, even when viewed on-line. A deep, enjoyable, yet very practical coverage of key issues in usability which shines a light on a whole selection of problems and offers a way of looking at usability which can help solve them.
It’s nearly an hour long, but if you do any work at all with user interfaces, you really should watch this, and you should probably take notes, too.
This should be recommended viewing for any course on usability, such as the Open University module I took recently.
InfoQ: Meeting the Usability Challenge
In my training and experience as a teacher, it was often emphasized that the presentation of subject matter should adapt to suit the learning styles of students. Now here’s a bunch of researchers from MIT looking at how to apply this to adapting the presentation of web sites.
As with any other form of personalization, it’s guaranteed to make things tougher for support staff, though 
Technology Review: Adapting Websites to Users
I guess everyone finds time to think now and then. Greg “Gigu” was obviously in a contemplative mood when he observed a some problems in a toilet cubicle, and correlated them with common issues in user-interface design.
Gigu’s blog » Blog Archive » Bad interFACE design based on a TOILET example
A thoughtful article about the failings of on-line advertising and some consideration of how to address these problems.
Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail On The Web
(via gsiemens)
Many times when designing or implementing tabular user interfaces I have been through the loop of adding “zebra striping” to distinguish elements of a sequence. An example of my implementations can be seen on the Manx Telecom “Modo” content portal. I have done this so often that my web framework Mojasef provides tools to assist in generating such stripes.
Jessica Enders has done a small study and written an article about the perceived effectiveness of this technique: A List Apart: Articles: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?
I find that one of the saddest things about taking an Open University course is that all the work and thought that people put into discussions in the course forums are just thrown away at the end of the course. This seems particularly poor from a learning perspective, as some of the best sources of aid and information for new students would be students who have successfully progressed through the course.
Why think of this now? I happened on an interesting little web article related to a course (M873), but have no obvious way of sharing that information with tutors and future students on this course. This just seems a shame.
Oh well, maybe someone might make the connection if I post the link here
UX eye for the BA guy.