Oskar Karlin had a really great idea while attempting to redesign the map of the London Underground as a final project in college. Instead of focusing on distance in the map's redesign, he would focus on what's most important to travellers: time. The map illustrates how long it will take (on average) to get from point A to point B. The result is an excellent example of a little user-centered thought can send you in a completely new direction than where you started, and produce something that transcends the norm to become more personal, smart, and useful.

This map is focused entirely on the people using it. And that, of course, is exactly where a map should be focused.

Get the details on the map redesign here.

The other day I heard about a meeting for a group called "Refresh Phoenix", and I just want to take a moment to describe it - some of you may be interested in forming similar groups in your own hometown.

Refresh Phoenix is similar to a users group, but it has no official structure or form (no manager, no presenter, and no particular focus). It's more of a networking opportunity for people looking to learn more about different technologies, hire contractors, get contracts, hire employees, be hired, talk shop, and generally meet other people interested in things you are interested in. The only real focus is that they're all Internet professionals in one way or another.

For example, there was a guy who was really into the Ruby programming language. He was looking to ban together with some other people interested in Ruby and maybe form a little sub-group that could meet up and learn from each other. Another guy was looking to meet contractors with PHP skill to help out on some web applications he wants to develop. Another guy was interested in hiring for his web design company. And yet another guy was trying to further develop a generalized Macromedia (Adobe) users group and was not having much success. (There were designers, developers, graphic artists, and all sorts of other people there - these were just the few I met and talked to.) Other people were just interested in the community aspect - having a face-to-face version of an online forum. Apparently, in certain other cites, web geeks meet up and run into each other in coffee shops all the time, and it's extremely common to simply bump into an impromptu design and development session or think-tank. The idea behind Refresh Phoenix is to make this more possible and likely within Phoenix.

I believe the group meets once a month, but I'm not positive. The site is at www.RefreshPhoenix.org. If you're interested in attending or forming your own group, you can learn more about it there.

One of the people submitting feedback about my "Flash User Experience Best Practices" course for Lynda.com had this to say about it:

"I'd like to complain about this title. It's completely ruined my day. I had a load of things planned, but instead I've been glued watching this title and dumped everything else aside.

Thank you for making this available. It's why I subscribe to lynda.com. A huge thank you to Robert Hoekman, too."

That's pretty dern flattering. That made my day.

Another topic discussed in my course for Lynda.com, titled "Flash User Experience Best Practices", is how to design effective Flash forms. The tutorials demonstrate how to save reusable user information (such as name and email address) to a SharedObject, set focus to the first empty input control so the user can immediately start entering new information, set the tab index so users can tab through fields like they would with HTML-based forms, and provide quality feedback to the user throughout the process.

Check out "Flash User Experience Best Practices" to get all the juicy details.

Remember Robert Penner's wonderful example of how to get the Back button working in your Flash applications? Well, it's an excellent solution, and it's certainly helped a lot of people out, but I recently revisited the solution and found there's a better way.

Taking Penner's lead, I wanted to maintain a working Back button for my eReader application, but the eReader was designed to handle an undetermined number of "pages", and Penner's example required using a separate HTML page for each history event. This meant I'd have to know how many pages I was planning to show and make sure I had an HTML file in place for each one. The solution wasn't going to work for my eReader, so I had to knuckle-down and come up with a better solution. So I cracked open Mr. Penner's code and created one.

Wanna know more? Well, you'll have to see my course for Lynda.com, titled "Flash User Experience Best Practices". (If I gave it away, what would be the point of doing the course?)

Of course, you could always try to figure it out yourself by reverse-engineering the eReader page, but the Lynda.com course explains it in detail and has the added benefit of discussing a whole lot of other user experience best practices.

My movie-based training course, Flash User Experience Best Practices (Lynda.com), has gone live!

From the course description:

"Flash User Experience Best Practices defines common user experience issues that face Flash designers and developers every day when using Flash and explains why having solutions to these issues is vital to the success of an application. The training then shows you how to solve many of these issues, including how to make the browser Back button work with the Flash Player, how to handle state management, implement effective Flash detection with useful alternate content, improve "scan-ability" and workflow in your applications, and help users maintain context while working with your applications. Throughout the training videos, Robert Hoekman, Jr. shows you real-world examples and shows you techniques to improve the experiences you create by learning from the examples of others. Exercise files accompany the training videos, allowing you to follow along and learn at your own pace."

Go check it out. You can watch the first few movies for free, but you have to have a membership to see the rest. Totally worth it, if you ask me - Lynda.com is chock full of great courses on Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and many other tools.