About Cone Trees

Cone Trees is a website about user experience with a focus on usability engineering and human centered design. You should hopefully find it useful if you are a usability engineer, user researcher, interaction designer or an information architect.

Cone Trees is featured at the AllTop User Interface section, along with other authoritative resources on interaction design. Cone Trees has also been featured and recognized at these places for its content and visual design.

About Me

Cone Trees is designed and maintained by me, Abhay Rautela. I work as Senior Human Factors Engineer at a leading internet services company in India looking after user research and usability testing across projects.

I am a member of the The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) and was a student member of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA).

In the past I have worked in information architecture, web standards driven front end development, web accessibility and visual design for clients such as Microsoft, XBOX 360, Motorola, Harvard, Western Union, Janus, Cisco and Vodafone, to name a few.

I live in New Delhi, the capital of India and a fantastic place to be. India is a country with a superbly rich and diverse culture, amazing heritage and inspiring natural beauty- a place you can spend a lifetime exploring and still want to come back for more.

You can get in touch with me at hello at conetrees dot com or simply use the contact form.

You can also catch me on Twitter and Flickr.

What else am I behind?

I am the creator and lead coordinator of the New Delhi UX Book Club. If you’re a User Experience practitioner in and around New Delhi, consider joining it.

I also run the SlideShare Web Accessibility group.

In the past I was also the manager for Flash Move, Singapore, that’s the worlds oldest Flash Special User Group (FSUG).

Here are a few projects of mine you should check out:

  • UX Quotes- a collection of useful quotes on user experience- you’ll find quotes on creativity, simplicity, typography, design, user research, interaction design, usability, the list goes on
  • The UX Bookmark- a resource for those working in User Experience, especially in usability engineering, interaction design and information architecture
  • And if appreciating art and design is your thing, head over to Nice Maal

What’s under the hood?

Cone Trees uses WordPress, which has been customized to work as a CMS according to my needs by using various plugins and hacks.

The visual design aims to be clean and elegant and make effective use of whitespace so the reader can focus on content and at the same time enjoy a pleasing structure that encases it. I built the theme using Sandbox.

I’ve seen this somewhere

Cone Trees is featured at the AllTop User Interface section alongside other fantastic blogs on user experience.

This website has been featured at We Love WP, CSS Container, CMS ShowCase , CSS Snap, CSS Star, CSS Design Yorkshire and CSS Design, RGB Garden, Web Upvan, CSS Blaze, QNT, One CSS, CSS Season, Design Snack, Konigi, Graphic Orgasm Ultimate Webportal, CSS Bag, Best CSS Designs, Ajax Finder and Siiimple.

If you’ve seen Cone Trees featured anywhere else, I’d appreciate you letting me know about it through the contact form.

I had some feedback

Feedback is always appreciated. If you have any feedback regarding the website for me, please use the contact form.

Why the name Cone Trees?

I am often asked this question and here is the answer. I think Cone Trees would be a great way to depict relative strengths of relationships between items in place of dendrograms during card sorting data analysis. Besides I like the name.

What are Cone Trees? They are a form of information visualization suitable for hierarchical information structures. You could call it a three dimensional representation of a tree map. If you draw a tree, and form a cone making the parent node its vertex and the child nodes the base on the cone, you get a cone tree. Cone Trees were invented by George Robertson, Jock Mackinlay and Stuart Card at PARC.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the present or past companies I have worked with.