Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

Grok Headline matches for Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

Review - The Elements of User
Experience: User-Centered Design for the
Web

Review - The Elements of User
Experience: User-Centered Design for the
Web 12/08/2002 10:04 PM
WebmasterBase Dec 8 2002 8:41PM ET

User-Centered URL Design

User-Centered URL Design 09/26/2002 04:23 AM

User-Centered Design

User-Centered Design 03/11/2003 09:43 AM
Dec 14. An Integrated Approach. 2001

Formal Definitions of User-Centered
Design

Formal Definitions of User-Centered
Design 07/01/2002 03:39 PM
"When rigorously applied, a UCD approach meets both user needs and the business objectives of the sponsoring organization." (Charles L. Mauro - TaskZ)

INUSE 6.2: Handbook of User-Centered
Design

INUSE 6.2: Handbook of User-Centered
Design 11/01/2002 07:40 AM

Improving Business Through User-Centered
Design

Improving Business Through User-Centered
Design 08/13/2002 02:06 PM

User-Centered Design for Large
Government Portals

User-Centered Design for Large
Government Portals 01/23/2003 05:55 AM

12-March-2003 -- Notes: The Future:
User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream

12-March-2003 -- Notes: The Future:
User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream 03/13/2003 12:21 AM
Notes: The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream -- "These are the notes I took, it’s a cross between transcription, commentary,...

An Interview with Peter Merholz and
Nathan Shedroff on User-Centered Design

An Interview with Peter Merholz and
Nathan Shedroff on User-Centered Design 10/09/2002 03:40 AM

Reducing user input during the Sysprep
process

Reducing user input during the Sysprep
process 04/29/2004 10:46 AM

London bus ticket machine, plus bus and
bus user (to help explain the whole
arcane process) [Flickr]

London bus ticket machine, plus bus and
bus user (to help explain the whole
arcane process) [Flickr] 09/26/2004 06:36 PM

Busy Process Engineers Invited to
No-Cost Technical WebCast Seminars on
Semiconductor Manufacturing Process–
Series Is Presented by Speedline
Technologies –

Busy Process Engineers Invited to
No-Cost Technical WebCast Seminars on
Semiconductor Manufacturing Process–
Series Is Presented by Speedline
Technologies – 07/01/2004 02:15 AM
Busy process engineers are invited to gain in-depth information and how-to insight about the semiconductor manufacturing process in a series of no-cost technical webcast seminars, starting July 22 and running monthly through December. The free seminars are being presented by Speedline Technologies, Inc. (www.speedlinetech.com), the world leader for single-source process solutions for the PCB assembly and semiconductor packaging industries. [PRWEB Jul 1, 2004]

Free Semiconductor Manufacturing Process
Seminar Webcast, “Lead Free Process
Overview,”: Thursday, July 22, 2004

Free Semiconductor Manufacturing Process
Seminar Webcast, “Lead Free Process
Overview,”: Thursday, July 22, 2004 07/07/2004 02:38 AM
Free Semiconductor Manufacturing Process Seminar Webcast, “Lead Free Process Overview,” Thursday, July 22, 2004, 11 AM to Noon & 2 PM to 3 PM, Eastern Time.Presented by Speedline Technologies. [PRWEB Jul 7, 2004]

Due Process, or No Process: Rule of Law
at Stake

Due Process, or No Process: Rule of Law
at Stake 04/20/2004 09:57 AM
Our government insists that it can kidnap a foreign national overseas and hold him forever in a Guantanamo jail, or put him through a military trial and even execute him. Oh, the government has made a few cosmetic concessions to law in its plans for military tribunals. But note that these are unilateral changes and can be withdrawn at any time. Our government also insists that U.S. citizens can be declared enemy combatants and tossed into jail forever, or tried by military tribunals (and maybe executed), without access to a lawyer or the courts. If the court endorses this, it's endorsing despotism.

Designing customer-centered
organizations

Designing customer-centered
organizations 11/11/2003 04:46 AM

BlogHer: Woman-centered bl0gger con, Sta
Clara, Jul 30

BlogHer: Woman-centered bl0gger con, Sta
Clara, Jul 30 04/13/2005 03:52 AM
Cory Doctorow: The BlogHer conference is a woman-centric conference on blogging to be held on July 30 in Santa Clara, CA:

BlogHer Conference '05 will provide an open, inclusive forum to:

1. Discuss the role of women within the larger blog community
2. Examine the developing (and debatable) code of blogging ethics
3. Discover how blogging is shrinking the world and amplifying the voices of women worldwide

Link (Thanks, Suzy!)

New version of Microsoft Office for Mac
is well-Centered (USATODAY.com)

New version of Microsoft Office for Mac
is well-Centered (USATODAY.com) 05/19/2004 05:52 AM
USATODAY.com - Office 2004 for Mac, which goes on sale today in Standard and Student/Teacher editions, is Microsoft's best effort yet to let everyone from Mac-centric corporate suits to students create documents, crunch numbers and design presentations that can be exchanged with folks in the Windows world. Beyond that, Office 2004 includes powerful new collaboration features that let teams work more productively – if they're all using Macs.

Centered Communication: Webl0gs and
Aggregation in the Organization

Centered Communication: Webl0gs and
Aggregation in the Organization 04/06/2005 06:45 AM


Centered Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organization
http://incsub.org/blog/?p=336

James Farmer has posted a draft version as well as a summary of his Centered Communication: Weblogs and Aggregation in the Organization. A very interesting read and well worth a visit. Blogs are now being felt worldwide and business as well as the non for profit service sectors are beginning to feel the affects generated by this communication medium and what displacements will be happening as it takes off! This will be mentioned in my Bots, Blogs and News Aggregators presentation.

Pope denounces ``self-centered demands''
for abortion and same-sex unions

Pope denounces ``self-centered demands''
for abortion and same-sex unions 06/05/2004 04:33 AM
POPE BLASTS 'SELF-CENTERED' AMERICAN SOCIETY ANEW .. bottom of that question .. The Pope has spoken .. railing

sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/a/2004/06/04/inter national1058EDT0538.DTL&type=printable
track this site | 5 links

Business-Centered Design: The Fusion of
Usability and Marketing

Business-Centered Design: The Fusion of
Usability and Marketing 01/03/2003 06:52 AM

Creating patient-centered healthcare
through ambient experience design

Creating patient-centered healthcare
through ambient experience design 12/12/2003 05:37 AM

Implementing CSS (Part 1)

Implementing CSS (Part 1) 06/05/2005 11:17 PM

One of the most interesting problems (to me at least) in browser layout engines is how to implement a style system that can determine the style information for elements on a page efficiently. I worked on this extensively in the Gecko layout engine during my time at AOL and I've also done a lot of work on it for WebCore at Apple. My ideal implementation would actually be a hybrid of the two systems, since some of the optimizations I've done exist only in one engine or the other.

When dealing with style information like font size or text color, you have both the concept of back end information, what was specified in the style rule, and the concept of front end information, the computed result that you'll actually use when rendering. The interesting problem is how to compute this front end information for a given element efficiently.

Back end information can be specified in two different ways. It can either be specified using CSS syntax, whether in a stylesheet or in an inline style attribute on the element itself, or it is implicitly present because another attribute on the element specified presentational information. An example of such an attribute would be the color attribute on the font tag. Both WebCore and Gecko use the term mapped attribute to describe an attribute whose value (or even mere presence) maps to some implicit style declaration.

A rule in CSS consists of two pieces. There is the selector, that bit of information that says under what conditions the rule should match a given element, and there is the declaration, a list of property/value pairs that should be applied to the element should the selector be matched.

All back end information can ultimately be thought of as supplying a declaration. A normal rule in a stylesheet that is matched has the declaration specified as part of the rule. An inline style attribute on an element has no selector and is simply a declaration that always applies to that element. Similarly each individual mapped attribute (like the color and face attributes on the font tag) can be thought of as supplying a declaration as well.

Therefore the process of computing the style information for an element can be broken down into two phases. The first phase is to determine what set of declarations apply to an element. Once that back end information has been determined, the second phase is to take that back end information and quickly determine the information that should be used when rendering.

WebCore (in upcoming Safari releases) has a really cool optimization that I came up with to avoid even having to compute the set of declarations that apply to an element. This optimization in practice results in not even having to match style for about 60% of the elements on your page.

The idea behind the optimization is to recognize when two elements in a page are going to have the same style through DOM (and other state) inspection and to simply share the front end style information between those two elements whenever possible.

There are a number of conditions that must be met in order for this sharing to be possible:
(1) The elements must be in the same mouse state (e.g., one can't be in :hover while the other isn't)
(2) Neither element should have an id
(3) The tag names should match
(4) The class attributes should match
(5) The set of mapped attributes must be identical
(6) The link states must match
(7) The focus states must match
(8) Neither element should be affected by attribute selectors, where affected is defined as having any selector match that uses an attribute selector in any position within the selector at all
(9) There must be no inline style attribute on the elements
(10) There must be no sibling selectors in use at all. WebCore simply throws a global switch when any sibling selector is encountered and disables style sharing for the entire document when they are present. This includes the + selector and selectors like :first-child and :last-child.

The algorithm to locate a shared style then goes something like this. You walk through your previous siblings and for each one see if the above 10 conditions are met. If you find a match, then simply share your style information with the other element. Such a system obviously assumes a reference counting model for your front end style information.

Where this optimization kicks into high gear, however, is that it doesn't have to give up if no siblings can be located. Because the detection of identical style contexts is essentially O(1), nothing more than a straight pointer comparison, you can easily look for cousins of your element and still share style with those elements.

The way this works is that if you can't locate a sibling, you can go up to a parent element and attempt to find a sibling or cousin of the parent element that has the same style pointer. If you find such an element, you can then drill back down into its children and attempt to find a match.

This means that for HTML like the following:

<table>
<tr class='row'>
<td class='cell' width=300 nowrap>Cell One</td>
</tr>
<tr class='row'>
<td class='cell' width=300 nowrap>Cell Two</td>
</tr>

In the above example, not only do the two rows share the same style information, but the two cells do as well. This optimization works extremely well for both old-school HTML (in which many deprecated presentational tags are used) and newer HTML (in which class attributes might figure more prominently).

Once the engine determines that a style can't be shared, i.e., that no pre-existing front end style pointer is available, then it's time to figure out the set of declarations that match a given element. It is obvious that for inline style attributes and mapped attributes that you can find the corresponding declaration quickly. The inline style declaration can be owned by the element, and the mapped attributes can be kept in a document-level hash. WebCore has a bit of an edge over Gecko here in that it treats each individual mapped attribute on an element as a separate declaration, whereas Gecko hashes all of the mapped attributes on an element as a single "rule." This means that Gecko will not be able to share the mapped attribute declaration for the following two elements:

<img width=300 border=0>
<img width=500 border=0>

WebCore creates three unique declarations and hashes them, one for a width of 300, one for a width of 500, and one for a border of 0. Gecko creates two different "rules," one for (width=300,border=0) and another for (width=500,border=0). As you can see in such a system, you will frequently not be able to treat the identical border attributes as the same.

Aside from this difference in mapped attribute handling, the two engines employ a similar optimization for quickly determining matching stylesheet rules called rule filtering. All rules that are potentially matchable by any element (i.e., that have the correct media type) are hashed based on the contents of the rightmost simple selector in the rule.

A selector in CSS can be either simple (meaning that all of the contents of that selector apply only to a single element) or compound (meaning that you may examine multiple elements like parents or siblings of that element). A compound selector is essentially a chain of simple selectors, so the following rule:

tr > td { color: blue }

has two simple selectors, tr and td. The rightmost simple selector in the rule is the one that we will use for the rule filtering optimization.

The rightmost simple selector falls into four categories.

(1) The selector uses an ID. (Example: #foo)
(2) The selector doesn't have an ID but uses a class. (Example: .foo)
(3) The selector has no class or ID but specifies a tag name. (Example: div)
(4) The selector specifies none of these things. (Example: *[disabled])

The rule is placed into one of four hashtables depending on which category it falls into. The idea behind these categorizations is to always filter out more specific information first. For example, if an element has a specific ID, then obviously any rules whose rightmost selector uses a different ID cannot match. Technically the last category can just be a list and not a hashtable, since those rules must always be examined by all elements.

Each hashtable, therefore, consists of a mapping from a given atomic string to a set of rules that match. The class attribute is exceptional in that you must put the rule into the hashtable multiple times if multiple class attributes are used.

When determining the set of rules that match a given element, you only examine rules that correspond to the correct hash entry based off your ID, classes and tag name. This optimization basically eliminates 95+% of the rules up front so that they need not even be considered during the matching process.

Each rule is then examined in detail, with all selectors being checked, to determine if it is a match, and the set of matches is collected. The set of matches can then be sorted by priority and specificity such that all the declarations are in the proper application order.

This brings us to the final phase of the style computation, which is taking the set of matches and quickly computing the appropriate front end style information. It is here that Gecko really shines. What I implemented in Gecko was a data structure called the rule tree for efficient storing of cached style information that can be shared *even when* two elements are not necessarily the same.

The idea behind the rule tree is as follows. You can think of the universe of possible rules in your document as an alphabet and the set of rules that are matched by an element as a given input word. For example, imagine that you had 26 rules in a stylesheet and you labeled them A-Z. One element might match three rules in the sheet, thus forming the input word "C-A-T" or another might form the input word "D-O-G."

There are several important observations one can make once you formulate the problem this way. The first is that words that are prefixes of a larger word will end up applying the same set of rules. All additional letters in the word do is result in the application of more declarations. Thus the rule tree is effectively a lexicographic tree of nodes, with each node in a tree being created lazily as you walk the tree spelling out a given word.

This system allows you to cache style information at each node in the tree. This means that once you've looked up the word "C-A-T-E-R-W-A-U-L", and cached information at all of the nodes, then looking up the word "C-A-T" becomes more efficient.

In order to make the caching efficient, properties can be grouped into categories, with the primary criterion for categorization being whether the property inherits by default. It's also important to group properties together that would logically be specified together, so that when a fault occurs and you have to make a copy of a given struct, you do so knowing that the other values in the struct were probably going to be different anyway.

Once you have the properties grouped into categories like the border struct or the background struct, then you can either store these structs in the rule tree or as part of a style tree that more or less matches the structure of the document. Inheritance has to apply down the style tree and tends to force a fault, whereas non-inherited properties can usually be cached in the rule tree for easy access.

WebCore doesn't contain a rule tree, but it is smart enough to refcount the structs and share them as long as no properties have been set in the struct. In practice this works pretty well but is not as ideal as the rule tree solution.

Implementing XHTML 2.0

Implementing XHTML 2.0 07/27/2004 08:02 PM
Well, I slept off most of my desire to blog about XHTML 2.0, but here's a post anyway. The thing is, I don't think implementing elements using behaviors is really a good idea, although I feel bad saying it while the W3C is linking to my test implementation. ?

Implementing Flood Control

Implementing Flood Control 12/19/2004 03:27 PM
If the load of application relies on incoming events, you may eventually face the happy curse of popularity: too much work to do with your available resources. If you set a limit on how many events you can process within a time period, you can avoid the flood. Vladi Belperchinov-Shabanski explains the algorithm and demonstrates working code.

Implementing filesystems in Python

Implementing filesystems in Python 12/10/2003 06:35 PM

LUFS-Python provides a relatively simple API for implementing new Linux filesystems in pure Python. You install the package, write a class implementing methods for handling filesystem operations such as creating a directory, opening/reading/writing/closing a file, creating symlinks etc and finally mount your new filesystem with some special arguments to the mount command.

At first glance, this is a bit of a gimmick - why would you want to write your own filesystem in the first place? We've been talking about this at work and came up with a few ideas. How about a filesystem where HTML files saved in a certain directory were instantly run through HTMLTidy and converted in to valid XHTML ? Or a custom network filesystem that saves files on a remote server using GnuPG to encrypt them before transfer? How about a read-only filesystem that lets you browse the contents of a MySQL database? Just imagine being able to use tools such as grep and find to search your database. A module that maps someone elses public web server to your own filesystem, making mirroring as easy as running a recursive cp command. A filesystem that updates a swish-e full-text index every time a file is saved to it - years before Microsoft release Longhorn. The possibilities are endless.

Here's a really fun idea: a filesystem that implements a dynamic website. Instead of using tools like mod_python to dynamically create pages, implement a filesystem that dynamically creates HTML files as they are requested and set up a stock Apache install with the dynamic filesystem as the document root. Then point ProFTPD at it so you can log in via FTP and mess with your content dynamically. We're thinking about bulding an FTP interface to our new database driven CMS, but we could just build a filesystem interface and point our FTP server straight at it.

I'm sure there are performance and stability issues that make most of the above more trouble than it's worth, but I think you'll agree it's a pretty exciting technology.

Implementing An ADO Data Control With
VB6

Implementing An ADO Data Control With
VB6 06/18/2002 10:19 AM
The ADO data control can save Visual Basic developers hours of time. In this article Susan shows us exactly how to go about implementing an ADO control. 5 Free Bonuses!!! "Attention All Web Developers" Now includes 5 FREE eBooks to help you promote your ConMan website! "This is one of the best pieces of software that we have ever used. It's quick, streamlined, and allowed us to have a fully working site packed with articles in just 3 hours" Ever wanted to run your own content driven web site? Well now you can with ConMan: the fast, flexible and secure web site + admin suite. Try it for free!Click here. Get notified when we post new content: New Forum Threads 1. How do i do this? 2. C# editor of your choice? 3. Article Added Date 4. ASP Developer Seeking Employment 5. Hlp pls. - 1 record per page, refresh through records problem 6. your site was down :( 7. Can't get html editor to work properly 8. New website & advice 9. mysql tables 10. Article Type More Forum Threads... Other Recent Articles An Introduction To The Bulk Copy Utility // by Mitchell Harper - 12th Jun 2002

"Code snippets for implementing tags
with SQL"

"Code snippets for implementing tags
with SQL" 04/11/2005 11:43 PM

Implementing a relational database using
MySQL

Implementing a relational database using
MySQL 04/06/2005 12:17 PM
When properly implemented, a relational database can greatly enhance the availability of data and information for an enterprise's decision makers. However, deploying a relational database on almost any scale requires a thorough understanding of the fundamental concepts and rules that govern their behavior.

ICANN To Begin Implementing IPv6

ICANN To Begin Implementing IPv6 07/22/2004 02:58 PM
WebProNews Jul 22 2004 6:18PM GMT

Gov't could raise P20B by implementing
IP law

Gov't could raise P20B by implementing
IP law 09/14/2004 04:18 PM
Sun Star Network Sep 14 2004 7:26PM GMT

Hands On: Implementing OS X 10.3
(Panther) Server

Hands On: Implementing OS X 10.3
(Panther) Server 02/10/2004 02:43 AM
I can tell you now that everything Apple promised is indeed in there -- and it works! By Yuval Kossovsky (Computerworld via MyAppleMenu)

Implementing client-side code for SSL in
JDK 1.3

Implementing client-side code for SSL in
JDK 1.3 01/23/2003 02:47 AM
CNET Jan 23 2003 1:24AM ET

Implementing XPath for Wireless Devices

Implementing XPath for Wireless Devices 06/06/2002 05:37 PM
In the first of a two-part series, we explore the implementation of XPath on wireless devices using the WAP family of standards.

Implementing Linux emulation on NetBSD

Implementing Linux emulation on NetBSD 05/13/2004 03:28 AM
NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK.

Poll Position: Implementing Identity

Poll Position: Implementing Identity 04/04/2005 06:03 AM
Q: How do you best build a brand?

Implementing XPath for wireless devices
(XML.org)

Implementing XPath for wireless devices
(XML.org) 06/07/2002 08:34 AM

HotFix Watch: Programs that are
advertised to a user run when another
user logs on to an SMS 2.0 client
computer

HotFix Watch: Programs that are
advertised to a user run when another
user logs on to an SMS 2.0 client
computer 08/30/2004 05:24 PM

Revenge of the User: Lessons from
Creator/User Battles ETCON talk notes

Revenge of the User: Lessons from
Creator/User Battles ETCON talk notes 02/11/2004 04:31 PM
Here're my running notes from danah boyd's Re venge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

The response is an attempt to "configure the users" -- constrain behavior to acceptable behavior with messaaging, kicking people off, etc.

This won't work: you can't tell a hacker not to hack. These kids are social hackers. You can stop some bad behavior, but you chase off your best users, too.

Dating doesn't happen because you're in a dating context. Dating arises out of real contexts.

Taking away fakesters didn't make Frienster more real. Friendster is unreal because people never remove their friends, even if they never see them (the exception is when you break up, ironic, because ex-lovers are strong ties!).

Link

How to deal with packages where user
specific data configuration has to be
user portable

How to deal with packages where user
specific data configuration has to be
user portable 09/11/2004 11:26 PM

Grok Description matches for Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process
GrokA matches for Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

Being User-Centered When Implementing a UCD Process

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: