Exploring the Facebook Experience: A New Approach to Usability

There were a study made at the end of last year to understand Facebook success and popularity using traditional usability methods and user experiences. The study was performed by Jennefer Hart, Charlene Ridley, Faisal Taher, Corina Sas and Alan Dixand consisted on carrying  out  a Heuristic Evaluation  to assess how well Facebook complies with usability [...]

3D SPACE: Using Depth and Movement for Selection Tasks

This paper is the result of a research made by Dr. Dale Patterson on how users utilize and interact with content in a 3D space. More specifically he presents two new three dimensional interface components (The Flow and Circulatory system) that use the depth provided by 3D computer graphics to present complex information in a [...]

Skeletal Animation for the Exploration of Graphs

This paper is the result of a research made by Damian Merrick and Tim Dwyer on the use of skeletal animation for the exploration of three-dimensional visualizations of graphs. This paper explores the possibility of a physical metaphor for navigation with a graph visualization. For that, they formulated and implemented three algorithms for performing skeletal animation [...]

Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface

This paper is in the vein of the last one I’ve presented here in the site, talking about principles of cartoon animation but this one show how they can be used in the design of user interfaces. Some of the principles present in the paper written by Lasseter are explained here and then given an [...]

Principles of traditional animation applied to 3D computer animation

As the title of this post reveals, I’m going to present a paper about principles of animation that should be applied to 3D computer animation and that are useful in the design of 3D interfaces. The paper was written by John Lasseter, the Chief Creative Officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, and can [...]

A Graphics Toolkit Based on Differential Constraints

This paper is in the vein of the last one I posted, talking about a graphical toolkit called Bramble that also uses constraints. The author of the paper is Michael Gleicher and he outlines the main characteristics of Bramble, showing also what set it apart from other existing graphic toolkits of that time.  Being the [...]

A User Interface Toolkit Based on Graphical Objects and Constraints

This is a paper from Pedro A. Szekely and Brad A. Myers that describes a user interface toolkit called Coral (Constraint-based Object-oriented Relations And Language). Coral uses constraints to manage the relationships between the graphical objects on the screen and the application data structures that they represent. The input from the mouse and keyboard is [...]

3D Information Visualisation: An Historical Perspective

This paper gives an overview over the use of 3D Visualisation of digital information and the historic background of perspective in that field. It was written by Theodor G Wyeld and it was presented in the Ninth International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV’05). The paper can be obtained through the following links: ACM: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1084450 IEEE [...]

Motives and Uses of Facebook

This paper is about an investigation done by Adam N. Joinson on the uses of the Facebook and the gratifications users derive from those uses. The paper can be obtained through the following link: http://people.bath.ac.uk/aj266/pubs_pdf/p1027-joinson.pdf