Service Design / Customer Experience Design
“(…) the term ‘service design’ has succeeded in the UK and Europe because there have been government-sponsored public sector service design projects which have demonstrated its value.” (PeterMe)
All posts from
June 2009
A Scientific Approach to Infographics
“If you’ve been reading this blog regularly for awhile, you know that I occasionally bemoan the sad state of most information graphics. Most of the folks who produce infographics lack guidelines based on solid research. In their attempt to inform, describe, or instruct, most of the infographics that I’ve seen fail-many miserably. I’m thrilled to announce, however, that a new book is now available that takes a great step toward providing the guidelines that are needed for the production of effective infographics.” (Stephen Few – Visual Business Intelligence)
Usability Engineers vs Designers: The Process Problem
“A Designer works on a conceptual design with the customer. Then he works out a detailed design into a prototype that can be tested. So far so good. But what goes wrong is that the Usability Engineer is often disconnected to either the design concept or the detailed design. The usability engineer ends up suggesting new designs that totally contradict the conceptual design. The designer is gone. The engineering team implements the changes and the result is a Frankenstein’s monster that despite the best UX resources, fails in the marketplace.” (Jonathan Arnowitz – User Experience in Arnoland)
CMU/Mayo Clinic Podcast on Service Design
“The Lab A6 series from College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University presents a podcast on service design featuring Shelley Evenson from the School of Design and CMU alum Maggie Breslin from the Mayo Clinic. The podcast covers some familiar ‘what is service design’ ground but also delves into the service design course at CMU and the Advanced Medical Home project that Mayo and Continuum sponsored last year at the university.” (Jeff Howard – Design for Service)
Building Better User Interfaces
“A great user experience starts with the user interface. In this talk, we will explore best practices in user interface design in a learn-by-example approach of the good, bad and the ugly in user interface design. From web sites to rich client, you will learn how areas such as navigation, layout, typography, controls and dialogs can make or break the usefulness of an application. At the end of this talk, you will have the tools and tips you need to bring great user experience through best practices in user interface design.” (Microsoft NL DevDays 2009) – courtesy of all2gether
Service Design
“Service design, while often talked about in academia, is getting more and more attention from design companies and service providers, as the impact of experience design has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and brand perception.” (Jennifer Bove – Creativity Online)
UI Pattern Documentation Review
“User interface (UI) patterns have the potential to make software development more efficient. The prospect of such efficiency gains has led to interest in user interface (UI) patterns by individuals and organizations looking for ways to increase quality while at the same time reducing the costs associated with software development.” (Patrick Stapleton – Boxes and Arrows)
Preso: Reiss On e-Service (UX London)
“Service is 100% about user experience, although user experience is not 100% about service. But as UX designers, we can learn a lot from the service-management gurus of the 1980s, who (lucky for us) don’t understand digital media.” (Presos tagged ‘UXLondon’)
A practical definition of content
“Simply put, content is contextualized data.” (Intentional Design)
Redefining content strategy
“When we talk about content strategy, then, my contention is that the type of content we include in the definition needs to broaden beyond Web content, as does the recognition that the content, even if just for the Web, includes not only persuasive content, but instructive/informative, user-generated, and even entertainment content.” (Intentional Design)
Movie review: Objectified
“Sadly, the film is simply not worth seeing.” (PeterMe)
How to Generate Reader Interest in What You Write
“Who has not discovered to their dismay that no one wants to read their most carefully crafted, meritorious, compelling, and passionate writings? Think of all the proposals you have written that no one is interested in. Or the web pages, the blog posts, or the company brochures. Chances are, your failures are linked to an inability to connect with what your readers would be interested in reading.” (Phil Yaffe – ACM Ubiquity)
A conversation with Ed Niehaus, new CEO of Cooper
“Working with Steve can be brutal, but you get a chance to see firsthand his tremendous eye for detail and the clarity of his vision. Nobody can judge work like Steve can — design, advertising, engineering — you name it, Steve knows, and look out because he’ll tell you. He has got a hierarchy of judgment that’s really pretty simple: at the top is ‘Insanely great’, which is the best in category that you’ll see in your lifetime. Then there’s ‘really, really, really great’, – and he says it packed with emotion – that’s the best that you’ll see this year or maybe this decade. And, there’s ‘shit’, and that’s the entire hierarchy.” (Cooper Journal)
Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word
“Crafting a set of experience principles has become standard for our projects, from web site redesigns to mapping multi-channel customer experiences. When done well, these statements have remarkable power in guiding teams to deliver coherent, cohesive, and appropriate experiences for their customers.” (Peter Merholz – Harvard Business Review)
Maps as service design: The Incidental
“From the early brainstorms we came up with idea of a system for collecting the thoughts, recommendations, pirate maps and sketches of the attendees to republish and redistribute the next day in a printed, pocketable pamphlet, which, would build up over the four days of the event to be a unique palimpsest of the place and people’s interactions with it, in it.” (dark)
Stop Password Masking
“Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
The Forces of User Experience
“It always bothered me a little that Jesse’s ‘planes’ diagram could be interpreted to mean that only adjacent planes influenced each other. So here is my version, with some thoughts about the additional ‘forces’ acting from the strategy plane.” (Richard Dalton – mauvyrussel) – thnx hansk
The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media
“The emergence and rise of social media [1] have been nothing less than phenomenal. In the perennial battle between patterns of intellect and patterns of society, the rapidly spreading influence of social media has initiated the most significant shift toward dominance of intellect [2] in recent times. A groundswell [3] has unmistakably occurred. Social media’s rise has induced a paradigm shift and changed the way the common man perceives the Internet immensely. Social networking is now the number one reason people get online. [4] Getting the world out of the socioeconomic rut it was in required something of this magnitude to come along.” (Junaid Asad – UXmatters)
Reusing the User Experience
“Developers often report a sense of déjà vu when creating software—a sense they’ve already designed or coded a function. Of course, the feeling that he or she is doing unnecessary work is particularly frustrating when a developer is under pressure! The reuse of software components can help to address this problem. Components are proven, reusable units of design and code that meet a specific need. As such, they enable a developer to think about solving problems at a higher level of abstraction, making the development process more efficient. For example, rather than writing a function to print a file, a developer can find and reuse a pre-existing component that meets the requirement.” (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)
Innovation Workshops: Facilitating Product Innovation
“As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design. Often, though, UX designers and researchers get stuck with incrementalism—designing minor new features for which another functional group has provided the requirements, expecting UX to design them—regardless of whether the UX team agrees with the product direction. Perhaps we find ourselves immersed in organizations or work routines that do not provide space to think differently. This column reveals some tools that can help your team to innovate.” (Jim Nieters – UXmatters)
