Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox no longer rebelling against past excesses
"For 18 years, Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column was published on his useit.com website. ...
This was a good run, but it's now time to unify this content with the main Nielsen Norman Group website. Thus, the old Alertbox columns have now been moved from useit.com to nngroup.com and future columns will be published directly on nngroup.com. ...
Even after the dot-com bubble burst, there was a long period where the barebones useit.com design stood out and elevated the site above many latecomer UX websites. Cutting through the clutter is an important value on the web, which has so much more information than anybody needs.
However, eventually it makes less sense to rebel against the excesses of the past. Also, with almost 500 Alertbox columns published, it became clear that more navigational apparatus was needed. One solution could have been to redesign useit.com to make it more like other sites. But why bother? If a big change was needed anyway, it was better to use the opportunity to integrate the articles with the company information and host all the material on the same website with a single navigation structure and a single search. So that's what we did: no more microsite for the Alertbox."
(The Nielsen Norman Group, 31 December 2012)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Rocksmith: guitar game for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3
"Introducing the next stage in the evolution of the guitar game. Rocksmith™, the first and only game where you can plug ANY real guitar into your PC/MAC, Xbox 360® or PlayStation®3 system, and actually learn while you play.
When we say any guitar we mean any guitar. Whether it's the guitar sitting in your attic, your cherished faithful steed, or the guitar you have yet to buy..."
(Ubisoft Entertainment)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Emerging Trends in LMS / Ed Tech Market
"For the past decade, the LMS market has evolved from providing tools that were purchased at the departmental level to enterprise-class systems purchased at the institutional or even system-wide level. However, since about 2004 the market has been fairly consistent, dominated by Blackboard corporate strategy.
Blackboard went public in 2004, signaling a real market worth of investors' attention. In 2005 – 2006, the market was dominated by Blackboard's acquisition of WebCT, the number 2 player in LMS, resulting in a somewhat extended Department of Justice approval cycle. Starting in 2006, Blackboard was awarded the infamous '138 patent and subsequently filed suit against Desire2Learn, the new number 2 player in LMS. About this same time, open source started to become a viable alternative to proprietary systems in general, and Blackboard in particular, in the form of Moodle and Sakai. From 2006 – 2009, open source became fully established for campus-wide or system-wide LMS deployments. In late 2009, Desire2Learn successfully fended off Blackboard patent lawsuits, ultimately resulting in all 38 claims being ruled invalid by a US Court of Appeals. On the heels of these efforts in 2009, Blackboard purchased Angel, taking another competitor out of the market."
(Phil Hill, 4 August 2011, e-Literatee-Literate)
Fig.1 "LMS Market Share", [http://www.deltainitiative.com/higher-education/lms-strategy]
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Interaction-Design.org: Making research accessible since 2002
"The Interaction-Design.org Foundation is a labour of love founded by Mads Soegaard in 2002, and in 2010, his wife, Rikke Dam, joined the project. Apart from Rikke and Mads, hundreds of people have helped out and continue to do so.
We're on a mission to make free and open educational materials: There are so many great minds in the Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design community and we want to empower these authors to reach all their interested readers around the world. We believe these authors have the minds to change the world and deserve a publishing venue truly designed for the author and the reader, not the publisher and the profit."
(Mads Soegaard and Rikke Dam)
fig.1 Interview with Dag Svanaes by Mads Soegaard and Rikke Dam (2011). Video: "Philosophy of Interaction Video 2 - Guiding Principles of Interaction Design derived from Heidegger". Retrieved 15 June 2012 from http://www.interaction-design.org/tv/Philosophy_of_Interaction_Video2_Guiding_Principles_of_Interaction_Design_derived_from_Heidegger.html
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Luke Wroblewski on: Multi-device Layout Patterns
"Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts."
(Luke Wroblewski, 14 March 2012, via Christopher Allwood)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
