Chris Hanrath

LinkedIn has added a new feature that allows users to add applications to their profiles and networks.

LinkedIn Applications enable you to enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective. Applications are added to your homepage and profile enabling you to control who gets access to what information.

I experimented this morning with the WordPress Blog feature, that is supposed to show your recent blog posts on your Profile page. From the Application gallery I was taken to the WordPress App Page, where i can choose to display it on my profile and LinkedIn Homepage.

This is where it stopped working for me… I went back to the WordPress App page and found a button to “update settings”, but the following page does not open. I will have to come back when it’s fixed …

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Tom Allen from Yahoo! Membership posted an article on the Yahoo! Developer Blog about the “OpenID: One Key, Many Doors” usability study that was conducted to uncover usability issues associated with enabling OpenID on 3rd party sites and using it for subsequent logins.

[ Found via 25hoursaday.com ]

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On October 7th Katie and I went to Chicago to attend the IDEA conference for two days. It was a great opportunity to meet and network with professionals from the User Experience domain. Most speakers were very interesting, thought provoking and inspired some great ideas for possible projects. I was very impressed by the talks of Dave Gray from XPLANE and Aradhana Goel from IDEO.

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The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

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Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

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Part of my current Job at Yahoo is to work on the redesign of the Pattern Library. This is a great resource for designers and web developers where interaction design patterns are illustrated that exist on the web. Looking beyond just our library there are other libraries on the web that attempt to build similar collections. It seems there are two categories of libraries emerging: Galleries and Libraries.

Galleries provide a broad overview using visual examples for patterns on the web.

• Pattern Tap
• Design_Elements
• Flickr Pattern Collection
• Konigi

Libraries go further and try to describe the interaction and suggest solutions.

• Yahoo! Design Patterns
• Welie Patterns in Interaction
• UI-Patterns
• UC Berkley Web Patterns
• Information Visualization Patterns
• Tidwell: Designing Interfaces
• ui pattern factory

In addition there are Collections that identify implementation patterns

• Ajax patterns
• Mobile Design Patterns

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