All posts from
April 2011

Bill Moggridge: Prototyping Services With Storytelling

Added on 13 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The storytelling supports the exploration of the service idea. Through the use of simple workds, the teller will illustrate the solution as it is a story. This allows the communication of the idea inside a group but also the preparation of the first sketches for the storyboard. The storytelling leaves some blanks to be fill in by the suggestions of other stakeholders and users.” (think + design + change)

Content/Communication

Added on 12 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The way we talk about our content has significant impact on the way we treat it within our organizations… and, therefore, the quality of the content we produce. How can we make the shift from treating content as a commodity to valuing it as a business asset? With a little storytelling and the help of a few powerful metaphors, you can begin to turn the tides.” (Kristina Halvorson ~ Webstock 11 videos)

Making the right products in the right way: a consistent product lifecycle

Added on 11 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Creating a world class BBC Online depends on teams from diverse backgrounds working together, and this demands clear and consistent terminology, processes, and governance structures across all products in the BBC Online portfolio. The Product Lifecycle Management provides a framework for collaboration between technical and editorial disciplines.” (BBC)

The Elements Of Player Experience

Added on 8 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Video games are breaking out of the roles they’ve traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important.” (John Ferrara ~ UX Magazine)

Idea Collider: From a Theory of Knowledge Organization to a Theory of Knowledge Interaction PDF Logo

Added on 8 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A new and novel addition to core concepts of information science and technology is the Idea Collider, adapting the conceptual basis of the particle accelerator. The Idea Collider is presented as a theory of information and an information retrieval tool that deconstructs text to the underlying elements – the concepts, ideas, knowledge entities, taxons and knowledge bases – and then reconstitutes groupings of data. The authors champion the idea of a ‘multiverse of knowledge’, in contrast to the ‘universe of knowledge’ that is an important metaphor in traditional classification theory. A historical review of outstanding theoretical landmarks in classification theory explores the universe of knowledge metaphor, faceted classification theory and the universe of concepts, moving from a holistic view of existing knowledge to an elemental deconstruction that can account for all knowledge, past and future. The Idea Collider is proposed as a theoretical approach to identifying the essential parts of knowledge, dissociating those elements from culture- and time-bound dimensions and making them available for a bottom-up reassembly process.” (Richard P. Smiraglia and Charles van den Heuvel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin)

Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?

Added on 7 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the construction and framing of Design Thinking itself has become a key issue. Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business–which is defined by a culture of process efficiency–a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.” (Bruce Nussbaum ~ Co.Design)

Five lessons from an Information Architecture career

Added on 7 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Today I delivered the opening keynote address at the Polish IA Summit in Warsaw, entitled ‘Come as you are’. It is the story of how I’ve come to spend 13 years building digital products, and how I’ve observed and been part of the changes and development in the UX and IA disciplines over that time. It finishes with what I consider to be the five key lessons about computers and people from my career as an IA practitioner.” (Martin Belam)

There Should Be Limits to Usability

Added on 6 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“People generally regard improving the usability of products or systems as a major part of our role as UX designers. While there are tradeoffs in all aspects of design, our assumption has generally been that products and systems that are easier to use are preferable to those that are harder to use. However, despite what seemed to be a common understanding, a number of articles have recently reported on research that suggests increased ease of use can be detrimental.” (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Progressive Disclosure in User Interfaces

Added on 5 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“As designers, we’re always trying to get the most out of our interfaces and maximize whatever space is made available to us. While many solutions have been devised over the years, one above all others has consistently influenced the way visitors access the content they seek. From simple techniques, such as tooltips and drop-down menus, to complex single-page websites powered by Ajax, progressive disclosure has become a formidable force. This article explores the methodology of progressive disclosure and its impact on our interface design work.” (Alexander Dawson ~ Six Revisions)

Karen McGrane: CS Forum podcast episode 4

Added on 5 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“People love the recent history of things like Xerox PARC and Apple Computer. And I might set the history of content strategy almost on like a separate track, an alternate timeline. A lot of the history of principles that apply to content strategy come out of very old traditions in rhetoric and technical communication. (…) And that’s one of the things that’s so exciting to me about content strategy is, it’s bringing a lot of these principles that have been discussed for decades into this new space of the web and digital media.” (Randall Snare ~ CS Forum ’11)

How Design Thinking Can Help Prevent Another Mortgage Bubble

Added on 5 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Here was a chance to remake a tool that plays a vital role in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But what happened that day turned out to be much more than streamlining a critical form in the home-buying process. Even much more than the redesign of a vital ‘touch point’ within the larger ‘user experience’. What happened was that the symposium’s attendees discovered just how radical a solution Design Thinking could offer; not only to the problem of a broken mortgage process, but to public policy at its highest levels.” (Monica Bueno ~ Co.Design)

The Five Models Of Content Curation

Added on 4 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Content Curation is a term that describes the act of finding, grouping, organizing or sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue. It is such a powerful idea because curation does NOT focus on adding more content/noise to the chaotic information overload of social media, and instead focuses on helping any one of us to make sense of this information by bringing together what is most important.” (Rohit Bhargava ~ IMB)

The fall and rise of user experience

Added on 4 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
Closing plenary of the IA Summit 2011 ~ “Although there’s still a substantial gap between aspiration and execution, business leaders are at least now talking about the right things: experience, prototyping, design strategy, and innovation. (…) User experience converts are typically drawn to the glamour of interaction design on shiny technology, and the amateur psychology that helps them sound authoritative about their approaches. Most lack knowledge of basic information architecture, design theory and elementary programming skills.” (Cennydd Bowles)

John Maeda from the Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Added on 3 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“In the first part, John gives a wonderfully succinct summary of the developments in technology in the last 40 years, showing how the content migrates from text to movies in each successive platform. Next is a summary of his own personal progress as a graphic artist and designer in the digital realm, leading into an illustrated story of development of digital media, identifying key contributors and designs.” (Bill Moggridge)

Are SEO practitioners the digital equivalent of bankers?

Added on 1 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“When I think about the banking industry, I’m reminded of the world of Search Engine Marketing. They too are trying to find weaknesses in a set of rules designed to level the playing field, in order to create a competitive advantage for their clients. It’s just that rather than these rules being laid down by central government, they have been developed in the labs at Google.” (Andy Budd ~ Blogography)