All posts from
February 2009

Future Practice Interview: Bill Scott

“How do you get team members to start speaking the same language? Constant communication between the teams. What also works is adopting a common language to describe interactions. The use of design patterns is a powerful way to disseminate common thinking and approaches to common problems. I have been pleasantly surprised when language that design and engineering use to describe certain bad approaches (anti-patterns) gets in-grained even in our product managers vocabulary as well.” – (Louis RosenfeldRosenfeld Media)

Each One, Teach One

Kim Goodwin’s IxDA ’09 keynote – “(…) it discusses the future direction of interaction design as a profession. We’ve seen demand for our services increase dramatically over the past few years, and, in order to continue to respond to this demand, we need to make more of us. Part of the solution involves creating academic programs to provide the foundation for learning the craft of interaction design; another part is to create a culture of mentorship. This means that all of us need to learn to teach what we do.” – (Cooper Journal)

Touchpoint: The Service Design Journal

“Finally! – We can now herald the outcome of the new Service Design Journal, Touchpoint, for March 2009. In cooperation with Continuum, we took some more time in order to make Touchpoint a really professional, entertaining and gainful magazine for all readers. The journal aims at creating a forum for discussion and debate amongst service organizations, professionals, students and educators of service design.” – (Service Design Network)

Is Good Design Replicable?

“The implicit assumption is that if you perform some particular UX method then you’ll produce consistently better design: the right process = the right product. So, the obvious question to ask is: Is there evidence that someone following a certain process produces great design every time?” – (Joshua Porter – Bokardo)

Thriving in a Difficult Economy: A Tale of Ugly Babies and Sacred Cows

“The brutal fact is—we’re in a difficult economy. Every day, we hear about another company that’s laying off employees. Just yesterday, an article on Yahoo! News reported “Mass layoffs involving 50 or more workers increased sharply last year, and large cuts appear to be accelerating in 2009 at a furious pace. In fact, there were layoffs at Yahoo! itself in December. Letting people go is traumatic for everyone involved. It’s traumatic for the employees who are laid off, whose relationships to their livelihoods—not to mention their friends and colleagues—are abruptly severed. It’s painful to the remaining employees, whose friends and colleagues were so abruptly removed. Sometimes companies must make deep budget cuts to succeed, but it’s painful, and those of us who have been through layoffs before agree that it seems to get harder every time we do it.” – (Jim NietersUXmatters)

Apple’s Flatland Aesthetic I: How a Simple Idea is Causing Complexity

“Apple needs to take a fresh look at all of their products across the board, specifically looking for where old decisions favoring new users are now dragging those same users down. Of course it’s a good idea to avoid complexity, including hierarchies, where possible, but some tasks are inherently complex. Go for visual and behavioral simplicity where it works, but be prepared to back off.” – (Bruce Tognazzini) courtesy of johngruber

How Crafty Word Order Can Instantly Improve Your Writing

“Written communication has increased with email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, and numerous other Internet services. As readers we struggle constantly to understand these communications despite enormous pressures on our time and attention. Phil Yaffe has been offering Ubiquity readers simple principles that have helped make these written communications significantly more effective. A while ago he told us about ten general principles, more recently about three acid tests, and now a single principle for good sentences.” – (Philip Yaffe – ACM Ubiquity)

Live at Interaction09: Day 1-4

“Today one of the best UX events in the world started; interaction09 in Vancouver. For four days more than 400 interaction designers huddle together in order to get inspired on the field of interaction design. Of course we sacrificed ourselves and traveled to Vancouver just to give you a ‘live’ report. For the next four days you can read our thoughts and observations.” – (Jeroen van Geel – Johnny Holland)

Service Thinking

“In the private sector and in the public sector there is enormous opportunity to increase the competitiveness and improve the effectiveness of services. The answer lies in Service Design and Service Thinking. (…) Our thinking is often a product of the past. This is compounded in a world where that past is all about product thinking. The future demands fresh perspectives. Service Thinking provides just that.” – (Ben Reason, Chris Downs and Lavrans Lovlie – live|work) – courtesy of risd

IA Growing Roots – Concerning the Journal of IA

“(…) we definitely do have a phenomenological definition of IA: IA is what has been going on in the self-identified IA community of practice (and related academic oases) in the last 10 years or more. (…) the upcoming peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Information Architecture, due in Spring 2009. For the discipline to mature, the community needs a corpus, a defining body of knowledge, not a definition.” – A big applause for this initiative. Keep up the good work! (Andres Resmini, Katriina Byström and Dorte Madsen – ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2009)

UX Patterns Explorer

“User Experience Patterns are great, because proven and repeatable solutions help to get a head start on UI Design. Infragistics makes its new UX patterns explorer “Quince” available for free. Quince, which launched today, is an online repository of the world’s most useful and usable UX patterns. Free and open, anybody can contribute to Quince and grow the UX pattern body of knowledge.” – Silverlight required (Infragistics)

TagPipe: Interaction 09 OPML Logo

This TagPipe covers all found and uploaded user-generated content regarding the conference IxDA Interaction 09 (Feb. 5-8, 2009 – Vancouver CAN) and tagged as ‘Interaction09‘ on Google BlogSearch (blogposts), Flickr (pictures), Technorati (links), Del.icio.us (pages), Twitter (tweets) and SlideShare (presentations). Just download the OPML-file and import the file into your offline or online RSS Reader. Enjoy! – courtesy of robinkuit

EG: The Entertainment Gathering

Making Information Entertaining and Entertainment Informative – “How do you explain EG? It’s a bit like music. But talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Music taps feelings so deep and so special that we don’t have words for them. Music names them for us. You can’t explain music in words.” (Richard Saul Wurman)