#32978
The Importance of Documentation
Computer documentation is shoddy, or more often absent. Missing information amplifies usability problems, leaving users stuck calling unfriendly technical support lines. In this installment of The cranky user, Peter Seebach explains what's missing in the documentation effort and why it is gone.
Seebach, Peter. IBM (2003). Articles>Documentation>Usability
#33004
Delivering Expected Value to Users and Stakeholders with User Engineering 
The success of a product or service depends on how well it is received by its intended audience. Usually success results from a systematic design process that involves the intended users. The user experience consists of how a product or service is perceived by users, and the goal is to make the experience consistent and supportive. User Engineering (UE) is an evolving discipline that focuses on designing the total user experience, from initial awareness and acquisition of a product or service—the “offering”—to first use, then day-to-day use, onward through the life cycle of the offering.
Berry, D., C. Hungate and T. Temple. IBM (2003). Articles>User Centered Design
#33012
Learn From Your Customers for Usable Web Applications
Usability consultant Paul Englefield takes you on a journey to demonstrate that listening to your customers is the only way to provide the ultimate usability when designing an e-commerce site or Web-based applications. Through examples, the article weaves user-centered design techniques into the steps of designing an effective business site, focusing on gathering data about your customers' (and their customers') usage behaviors, offers two design models, and demonstrates how to integrate customers' input into the testing and evaluation process.
Englefield, Paul. IBM (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce
#33095
How can an organization empower its employees, reduce costs and improve data quality? Implementing employee self-service tools is one direction that a number of leading companies are turning to as they look to build win-win propositions with their most important assets: their people.
Di Ferdinando, Bridgette, Eric Lesser and Tomer Amit. IBM (2004). Articles>Web Design>Knowledge Management>Intranets
#33161
Building Ease of Use Into the IBM User Experience
This paper provides an overview of the process and organizational transformation that IBM has gone through in improving the user experience with our offerings.
Vredenburg, K. IBM (2003). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Case Studies
#33164
User-Centered Design for Different Project Types, Part 2
Today's software applications need to be both useful and usable, supporting simple and efficient completion of tasks by the intended user audience. Part 1 of this two-part series on user-centered design defined the essential activities of useful and usable software. Here in part 2, Lynn Percival and Jack Scanlon describe the applicability of these core activities across a range of development project types -- selection and possible customization of a vendor application, evolution and rewrite of an existing application, and creation of a new application.
Percival, Lynn and Jack Scanlon. IBM (2002). Articles>User Centered Design
#33165
User-Centered Design for Different Project Types, Part 1
Today's software applications need to be both useful and usable, supporting simple and efficient completion of tasks by the intended user audience. Much has been written about methodologies for designing software that meets user needs. But little emphasis has been placed on what types of activities are truly essential in achieving these goals. Here in part 1 of this two-part article, the authors tap into their 30+ years of combined experience in applying such techniques to boil the design of useful and usable software down to its essential activities.
Percival, Lynn and Jack Scanlon. IBM (2002). Articles>User Centered Design
#33224
When your Web pages load, you can't afford to let people be bored by a blank page at the outset. This article gives some tips on how to avoid common page loading problems and give users that valuable information they want even as more downloading takes place.
Logvinov, Eugene. IBM (2002). Articles>Web Design>User Centered Design
#33445
Personalizing the User Experience on ibm.com
In this paper, we describe the results of an effort to first understand the value of personalising a website, as perceived by the visitors to the site as well as by the stakeholder organisation that owns it, and then to develop a strategy for introducing personalisation to the ibm.com website.
Karat, C.M., C. Brodie, J. Karat, J. Vergo and S.R. Alpert. IBM (2003). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Personalization
#33447
Hardware and Usability, Part 1
Usability studies tend to focus entirely on software, ignoring the impact of hardware design and features on a system's usability. In this first installment of a two-part miniseries, Peter takes a look at the interactions between hardware and usability.
Seebach, Peter. IBM (2004). Articles>Usability>Technology
#33468
Could You Repeat That in English?
Frequently, error messages are totally uninformative -- or, worse, just plain wrong. Here, we look at how meaningful error messages can make it easier for users to correct problems without having to rely on technical support, and how poorly chosen messages can turn users into ex-users.
Seebach, Peter. IBM (2002). Articles>User Interface>Online>Help
#33728
Frequently Asked Questions about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA)
DITA supports the proper construction of specialized DTDs from any higher-level DTD or schema. The base DTD is ditabase DTD, which contains an archetype topic structure and three additional peer topics that are typed specializations from the basic topic: concept, task, and reftopic. The principles of specialization and inheritance resemble the principle of variation in species proposed by Charles Darwin. So the name reminds us of the key extensibility mechanism inherent in the architecture.
Day, Don, Michael Priestley and Gretchen Hargis. IBM (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA
#33921
Cloud Computing Versus Grid Computing
Want to know more about cloud and grid computing? Learn how you can use Infrastructure as a Service to get a full computer infrastructure using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). See the similarities, differences, and issues to consider in grid and cloud computing. Explore some of the security issues and choices for Web development in the cloud, and see how you can be environmentally friendly using cloud computing.
Myerson, Judith. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Programming>Collaboration
#34124
Hone Your Regexp (Regular Expression) Pattern-Building Skills
Add to your bag of tricks several handy techniques for crafting real-world regular expressions (regexps). Building regexps is a part of the daily life of any administrator. Learning to think in terms of pattern matching, in order to construct successful regexps that return the desired criteria, is a skill that takes both time and practice.
Stutz, Michael. IBM (2006). Articles>Content Management>Programming
#34125
Do you want faster-loading Web pages? Learn how you can make the browsing experience better for dial-up users by reducing loading times by as much as 80 percent, in some cases.
Kotrotsos, Marco. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Minimalism
#34213
Speaking UNIX, Part 1: Command the Power of the Command Line
Learn the basics of the UNIX shell and discover how you can use the command line to combine the finite set of UNIX utilities into innumerable data transforms.
Streicher, Martin. IBM (2006). Articles>Software>Operating Systems>UNIX
#34214
Speaking UNIX, Part 9: Regular Expressions
Virtually all non-trivial problems require you to filter good data from bad. Discover the many UNIX command line utilities that use regular expressions to discern the relevant from the irrelevant.
Streicher, Martin. IBM (2007). Articles>Editing>Regular Expressions>UNIX
#34220
Combine JSONP and jQuery to Quickly Build Powerful Mashups
With the number of publicly offered Web service APIs, it's now much easier to get content from different Web sources and to build mashups—if you have access to the right APIs and tools. Discover how you can combine an obscure cross-domain call technique (JSONP) and a flexible JavaScript library (jQuery) to build powerful mashups surprisingly quickly.
Özses, Seda and Salih Ergül. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>JavaScript
#34221
Building Mashups with JSONP, jQuery, and Yahoo! Query Language
In the previous article of this series, we introduced JSONP (JSON with Padding) as a way to overcome browser same-origin policy limitations while combining and presenting data from third-party sources. This article continues this process and shows you how to use Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), a JSONP service from Yahoo!, to build a mashup Web page using jQuery.
Özses, Seda and Salih Ergül. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>E Commerce>JavaScript
#34264
If you're new to XML, this article introduces the basic construction of XML documents as well as the rules that you must follow to create well-formed XML, including naming conventions, proper tag nesting, attribute guidelines, declarations, and entities. You'll also gain an understanding of validation in terms of both DTD and schema usage.
Whatley, Kay. IBM (2009). Articles>Information Design>XML
#34973
Developing web-based applications can be done using a variety of tools and languages. However, the Java™ programming language and Java servlets are the ideal choice because of a number of attractive features, namely, portability, efficiency, safety, extensibility, and flexibility. Few viable alternatives exist that can be considered equally powerful. Over the past few years, I have developed an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand framework based on Java servlets to facilitate the development of web-based applications. The framework (called Hamlets) is the result of a radical simplification effort. In this article I show you step by step how to write your first web-based application in Java using Hamlets.
Pawlitzek, Rene. IBM (2009). Articles>Web Design>Programming
#35016
Design Patterns for Information Architecture with DITA Map Domains
The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides maps for assembling topics into deliverables. By specializing the map elements, you can define a formal information architecture for your deliverables. This architecture provides guidance to authors on how to organize topics and lets processes recognize your organizing principles, resulting in a consistent, clear experience for your users.
Hennum, Erik, Don Day, John Hunt and Dave Schell. IBM (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA
#35017
Producing Documentation and Reusing Information in XML, Part 1: Document Publishing Using XML
XML provides a way to identify data items and subcomponents within any structured data set, but has its roots in documentation development and production. Robust, open standards for XML document markup and a rich set of freely available tools for XML document parsing and format conversion make it easy to install and configure a complete documentation development and formatting environment on any UNIX® or Linux® system.
von Hagen, William. IBM (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>DocBook
#35018
Discover simple solutions to reuse information in XML documentation, such as how to use XInclude to include other documents at a given point in a document and how to use XPointer to include small document fragments from other documents or a similar pool of information in XML format. Also, get tips for structuring XML documentation to simplify information reuse, and learn how to maintain stand-alone documents that you can incorporate into larger documents.
von Hagen, William. IBM (2009). Articles>Content Management>Documentation>DocBook
#35019
Producing Documentation and Reusing Information in XML, Part 3: Creating Multi-Target XML Documents
XML is an optimal format for writing documentation that you can use with many different documentation software packages and production environments. In this third article in the series, discover how to create single-source documents that can produce output in a variety of different output formats.
von Hagen, William. IBM (2009). Articles>Documentation>XML>DocBook
