"This time each year, technophiles are asked to part the curtains and peek into the coming year. While last year brought unprecedented growth in RIA adoption — especially by Fortune 500 companies — RIA adoption in 2008 brings a new onslaught of risks, rewards, challenges and opportunities for companies of all sizes."

Anthony discusses the risks and rewards of RIAs.

"Kevin Cheng is a senior interaction designer with Yahoo! Maps and Yahoo! Local, and is an expert in using comics as a technique to communicate the key concepts behind a design's intended user experience. UIE's Ashley McKee recently had the opportunity to talk with Kevin about the increasing popularity of using comics in the design process, the five inherent properties of successful comics, the skills needed to create comics, and the best way to deliver comics to key stakeholders. Here is what Kevin had to say about his experiences with comics."

Kevin's presentation from IA Summit 2007 can be found at this link and other resources can be found here.

In the latest issue of the STC Newsletter, David Dick reviews Jeff Johnson's latest book - GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design DON'Ts and DO's.

David provides an in-depth review of the second version of Jeff's blooper book:

GUI Bloopers 2.0 describes common user-interface mistakes found in today's software products and services, and provides design rules and guidelines to avoid them. Johnson describes the design decisions that lead to misuse of controls, poor navigation, prose-riddled labels, bad design and layout, faulty interaction, and poor responsiveness. GUI Bloopers 2.0 is well illustrated with hundreds of examples from real products and online services, and stories from his own experience. To compare and contrast good and bad design, Johnson gives a "thumbs up" for good design and a "thumbs down" for a blooper.

David gives GUI Bloopers a "two thumbs up" rating and recommends it for anyone developing software or web applications.

GUI Bloopers 2.0 is supplemented by a Web site, www.gui-bloopers.com, which includes:

• GUI Bloopers checklist: a check list of all of the types of bloopers in the book to facilitate checking software before release.
• Web Appendix: Color Bloopers: two bloopers about poor use of color that could not be included in the book because the book is not printed in color.
• More bloopers: additional bloopers not included in the book, starting with bloopers that did not make the "final cut".

If you rely too much on color differences, you may be not conveying the information as well as you thought.  Color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. According to the medical studies, eight to ten percent of male population suffers from some kind of color blindness (figure for female population is much lower).

In this whitepaper presented at the CHI 2007 conference, Microsoft researcher Edward Cutrell and University of Washington professor Zhiwei Guan review the results of their study on eye-tracking for information usage in web search.

"Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for better presentation of search results."

They conclude that "the future of Web search interfaces probably will be very different from what we see today. Studies such as those we have outlined here can help to inform what those interfaces will look like. In addition, we would like to perform similar studies in other search domains to see whether our findings apply outside of Web search (e.g., search in corporate intranets, medical databases, personal desktop indices, etc.)."