Glasgow Information Architecture

In the hope that this will get picked up by any search engine robots crawling these pages: is there anybody out there? I'm trying to set up irregular meetings for information architects, web-based information designers, usability / human factors types and anyone else interested in the general concepts of useful, user-focused design who lives or works in the vicinity of Glasgow. That's Glasgow, Scotland in case there's another Glasgow out there in Canada or Patagonia. Cheers.

Paper prototyping

Via Vanderwal, Blackbelt Jones post on paper prototyping and UX issues. The Marc Rettig stuff looks interesting at a first glance.

Update

Silly me - I've read most of the Rettig stuff before. I'd love to use some of the wall-based communication methods at my place of work, but I don't think we've broken into collaborative working wholly yet.

Accessible forms

I've not tested this yet, but I managed to put some of the background reading I have done on accessibility issues into action today. Accessible forms appear to me to be one of the easiest things going - forms are already logically structured, so the use of fieldsets and legends makes sense, a little attention to writing, order, information design and user experience means an online form can look the same, but be many times more compliant with the needs of your user base.

Attractive Things Work Better

Can't remember where I found it, but have been reading a sample chapter of a Don Norman book called "Emotional Design". Most of the chapter called Attractive Things Work Better is interesting, if relatively obvious background stuff. I was, however, enchanted to read the following:

"The psychologist Alice Isen and her colleagues have shown that being happy broadens the thought processes and facilitates creative thinking. Isen discovered that when people were asked to solve difficult problems, ones that required unusual 'out of the box' thinking, they did much better when they had just been givena small gift..."

That's me handing out lollipops at the next meeting or training session I host!

How consumers trust

Haven't read this in its entirety yet, but it looks interesting. From the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, How Do People Evaluate a Website's Credibility?. Happy New Year!