Extra! Extra!

Steve Mulder recently announced to the IA Institute and IxDA mailing list that his book on user research and personas,
The User Is Always Right, is now available:

If you attended the IA Summit in Vancouver, you might have heard me give a preview of some of the book’s content on adding more science to persona creation. The book is a hands-on guide to creating personas (with advice on getting the most out of a variety of user research methodologies, generating persona segmentation, and making personas real) and using personas for everything from overall business strategy to IA, content, and design.

Mulder also blogs at PracticalPersonas.com, where recent posts question whether quantitative methods are required for creating personas (he says “not always“), and whether it’s wise to include a grump among your personas.

There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.

CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents.

Our sense is that we are still in a transitional time so, at least on one major project, we are taking a hybrid approach. In fact, we are still working out the details: We may redirect mobile users to a version of the primary site optimized for their converged devices, or we may simply encourage them to use the mobile-optimized version of the site while still enabling them to satisfy their curiosity by visiting the web-basic version of the site.

In the latter case, we’ll use a smart enough stylesheet and user-agent sniffing regime so that they can have a satisfactory experience even if not visiting the mobile-specific site. Either way, we want to build both “flavors” of the site from the same content and image database, flagging some content as web-only and optimizing versions of the images for the mobile interface.

A key thing to remember is that even though a single site can be carefully crafted to be adequate in both interfaces, the use cases are not necessarily the same. We don’t expect people to read reams of paragraphs on their phones. More likely they will seek answers, help with problems, contact information, shortcuts. They will save their research and studying time for the full computer / laptop experience.

Of course in time this may change and things continue to converge, but it’s important to build for today with an eye on tomorrow and not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Dan sent me this link to an article on project management at the Ektron website. I especially like the idea of a project blog (or project log, as I prefer to think of it), since to me it seems like the natural way to post updates and circulate information - infinitely preferable to an endless stack of email messages.

On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely change the way that Extractable builds wireframes, prototypes and functional specs.

Download a free trial of Axure RP Pro.

Dan, I’m still waiting for the review copy of your book, Brown, published an excerpt from his just released Communicating Design in Digital Web Magazine, called Competitive Analysis, discussing different ways to compare competing sites and present your findings. Some interesting visual thinking there.

Can’t wait for the book, hint, hint.

I did like Lost in Translation, but I agree with I think about six of the Eight Things I’m Supposed to Love But Don’t from The Bivings Report (especially the bit about preferring Ze Frank’s The Show to Rocketboom).

David Smith is the director of marketing for HTC America, whose site we are redesigning. (We recently relaunched the site with an interim design but we’ve got great things in the works for later this year.) HTC makes incredible smartphone and pocketpc “converged devices” and generated a lot of buzz on enthusiast blogs and websites. This morning we heard about this Mobility Today podcast interview with David Smith. We’re excited about the ongoing interest in HTC and its products and we’re pleased to be part of David’s marketing team.

This article in the Guardian UK, Dump your iPod, the mobile’s taking over suggests that mobile devices are going to supplant dedicated MP3 players as the pocket music player of choice.

I do think the idea of carrying a PDA, an MP3 player, a phone, and a text messaging device (crackberry) is unsustainable. Only the nerdiest of ubergeeks are willing to sling so many pocket devices from their belt clips.

The downside of convergence is that you can end up with a device that is optimized for no use case and is only adequate for all of them, but these problems are being solved. For example, there’s no way I would carry a PDA and a phone now. My HTC smartphone is great for both and even my dad uses a Palm Treo now.

It’s an interesting market to keep an eye on.

Looks like the Internet Explorer 7 team has been working hard addressing css bugs from the previous beta release (IEBlog : Details on our CSS changes for IE7, via Todd).