The Impact of Aesthetics on Attitudes Towards Websites

A user’s perception of a Web site can evoke a wide range of emotions and attitudes.  These emotions and perceptions impact the user’s attitude towards the Web site’s content, advertised products, company, credibility and site usability.

The design and presentation of a Web site is strongly visual and users are known to make aesthetic judgments of a site very quickly. As the Web site likeability and credibility increases so does the likelihood of purchasing from the site. Since the site’s aesthetics can influence brand perception and credibility, the importance of design and color treatments must be considered.

Organizing Content on Websites

As many of you well know, designing a Web site can be very difficult. Part of that difficulty is in creating an information architecture that represents your content and labeling the links to make that content easy to find.

Big Thinkers: James Paul Gee on Grading with Games

An Arizona State University professor sees a bright future for video games in the learning process — in and out of school.

Preview Mouse 2.0: Multi-Touch Meets the Mouse

Lynn Marentette has just reported, hot off the press from Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group at UIST 2009.

MS presents novel input devices that combine the standard capabilities of a computer mouse with multi-touch sensing. The goal is to make multi-touch interaction more widely available and applicable to the desktop environment. To chart the design space, they present five different multi-touch mouse implementations. Each explores a different touch sensing strategy, which leads to differing form-factors and hence interactive possibilities.

The following video is courtesy of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group:

15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch – little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Video Game User-Experience Research: New Situated Research Game Brochure

Matthew Sharritt, President of Situated Research, recently created a brochure giving an overview of our video game user-experience research:

brochure Video Game User Experience Research: New Situated Research Game Brochure
Situated Research: Video Game User-Experience Analysis (PDF)

Please feel free to download, view, print, and redistribute this brochure to others! We have a unique talent to help game developers create better games, and we need your help getting the message out there so people know about us.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage

A group of students in China produced the image montage software, and had the following to say about it:

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet.