June 2009

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)

Posted by PJB on June 30, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 30, 2009 | Classification: InfoViz - Information graphics | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 30, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 30, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

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

Posted by PJB on June 30, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2009 | Classification: Patterns | Permalink

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')

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

A practical definition of content

"Simply put, content is contextualized data." (Intentional Design)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 29, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Movie review: Objectified

"Sadly, the film is simply not worth seeing." (PeterMe)

Posted by PJB on June 26, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 25, 2009 | Classification: Writing | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 24, 2009 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

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

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: Social Web - User experience | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

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)

Posted by PJB on June 23, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Content First

"Kristina Halvorson quotes the origin of the phrase information architecture. Then Tufte came along. Designers took it upon themselves to craft information that was understandable and digestable. Then the web came along. To begin with, it was treated as a visual medium. Jesse James Garrett changed the emphasis to user experience. But where is content in Jesse's diagram? It's on the second level. Then it disappears. We were approaching content on the same level as functional specs; a feature than can be ticked off a list. But content is a living, breathing thing that evolves over time. Once you put it online, you are required to feed it and take care of it." (Jeremy Keith - Adactio)

Posted by PJB on June 22, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy - Information architecture | Permalink

IDEA2009: The Speakers

"IDEA2009 brings together the world's foremost thinkers and practitioners: sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society." (IDEA) - thnx to jjursa

Posted by PJB on June 22, 2009 | Classification: Events - Information architecture | Permalink

The Service Designers

"While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we’ve entered a service economy. It's not only products that are designable experiences; services are creating new challenges for designers and are increasingly demanding attention. As the line between products and services blurs (if it ever was there before), the emergence of service design has risen to demand a need for new ways of working to make for more meaningful services—whether those services are tangible, intangible, or a combination. Four designers engage in 10-minute discussions about the service sector and its different design challenges." (The UX Workshop)

Posted by PJB on June 19, 2009 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Passion at work: Blogging practices of knowledge workers

"From the beginning of my PhD research, I was interested in explaining the complexities of knowledge work that could not be simplified to 'creating, sharing and applying knowledge', and in exploring interplays between an organisational authority and personal passions at one's workplace." (Lilia Efimova - Mathemagenic)

Posted by PJB on June 18, 2009 | Classification: Weblogs | Permalink

Creating Economic Value by Design

"This paper examines the influence of major economic theories in shaping views of what constitutes value as created by design." (John Heskett - Int'l Journal of Design 3.1)

Posted by PJB on June 16, 2009 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Blind Search

"(...) the search engine taste test. Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query. The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results? - I work for Microsoft. This site is not affiliated with my employer, it is not a Microsoft initiative, it's simply me having fun in my spare time." (Michael Kordahi) - courtesy of rnagtegaal

Posted by PJB on June 16, 2009 | Classification: Search | Permalink

Content Strategy: Content is King! (preso)

"Why do users visit a website? Most likely it's for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design? Delivering the right content to meet user needs requires attention throughout the process -- it must be planned, analyzed, produced, edited, managed, and maintained. Even though content is the centerpiece of the user's experience, it rarely gets the attention it deserves during site design and development. This workshop addressed how to integrate content strategy into the website design process, ensuring that the content that gets created is what users need." (Karen McGrane)

Posted by PJB on June 16, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

UX London: In Favour of Complexity

"Don Norman's In Favour of Complexity keynote at UX London 2009 made the case for complexity with order, lucidity and understandability." (notes from LukeW)

Posted by PJB on June 15, 2009 | Classification: Complexity - User experience | Permalink

Designing a Unified Experience: Bringing Interaction, Visual, and Industrial Design Together

"Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age." (Kim Goodwin - The UX Workshop)

Posted by PJB on June 12, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

The effectiveness of Web search engines to index new sites from different countries

"The biased coverage of Google and Live Search raises concern because of their international nature. The coverage bias by the European search engines only seems to have local or regional significance." (Ari Pirkola - Information Research 14.2)

Posted by PJB on June 12, 2009 | Classification: Search | Permalink

EuroIA 2009 Programme: What's Happening

"This year we will explore the theme of 'Beyond Structure'. That's because websites have moved to a new level. Any random page can be accessed from Google. Pages themselves may consist of information from many sources. And even the concept of a 'page' is changing thanks to new backend technologies. In other words, we’ve moved beyond the traditional sitemap and into a new and exciting era of web development." (EuroIA.org)

Posted by PJB on June 10, 2009 | Classification: Events - Information architecture | Permalink

International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used

"Despite the authoritative nature of international standards for usability, many of them are not widely used. This paper explains both the benefits and some of the potential problems in using usability standards in areas including user interface design, usability assurance, software quality, and usability process improvement." (Nigel Bevan - Journal of Usability Studies May 2009)

Posted by PJB on June 09, 2009 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

What the heck is the nature of UI design?

"In this article, I will offer an answer and then I will take a look at authority, power and weight of UXP on multimedia projects relating on the teams and how it could or should refer to for guidance in their work. I hope my answers to these questions will be helpful as well as provocative enough to drive some reactions and feedbacks from readers." (Holger Maassen - ux4dotcom)

Posted by PJB on June 09, 2009 | Classification: HCI - User experience | Permalink

Preso: Sketching the Mobile User Experience

"If you're a web or interactive designer, chances are sometime very soon you will be asked to design something for a mobile phone. This presentation will introduce rapid and flexible design and prototyping techniques to help you test early, test often and create great mobile experiences." (Bryan Rieger - Yiibu)

Posted by PJB on June 09, 2009 | Classification: Mobile design - Wireframes | Permalink

Design With Intent: How designers can influence behavior

"(...) we're experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement." (Robert Fabricant - design mind) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted by PJB on June 09, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Apple, IKEA and Their Integrated Architecture

"The design of a physical space can and should take advantage of information architecture (IA) deliverables, in particular when designing an integrated model of IA across environments. The user must be able to easily consult technology-dependent environments such as digital media or printed paper catalogs in line with the information flow carried through the website. Conveying the relevance of information to the user/consumer by means of applying IA principles with a view to designing a crisscross-connecting model of human-information interaction is the focus of these studies." (Davide Potente and Erika Salvini - ASIS&T Bulletin April/May 2009)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Using Content to Grow Customer Relationships

"Want to keep your customers despite tough economic times? Don't add yet another feature to your Web site. Stop worrying about redesigning it. Instead, take a hard look at improving your site's content." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

Know Your Core: Providing Focus for Web Applications

"As the Web has grown, the cost of getting a new application online has plummeted. Web hosting services with unlimited bandwidth and storage now cost less than ten dollars a month. Free open source platforms can easily power the back-end of an application. Free development toolkits for client-side programming (JavaScript) and styling (CSS) make building the front-end of an application much faster. In aggregate, these factors enable a new Web application to get in front of a global audience very quickly and easily." (Luke Wroblewski - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations

"Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on June 08, 2009 | Classification: Design research - Usability | Permalink

Dear Content Strategists

"Well done. You guys are fantastic. You've got some great leaders among you, and more importantly, you seem to be generating a lot of meaningful grass roots activity. The world really needs you, and you're poised to achieve some big things over the next couple years. Just don't screw it up, OK?" (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted by PJB on June 07, 2009 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

What is an Experience Strategy?

"An experience strategy is that collection of activities that an organization chooses to undertake to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions which, when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way; that is unique, distinct and distinguishable from that available from a competitor." (Steve Baty - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted by PJB on June 04, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

The Life Cycle of a Wireframe

"For those who are looking for my slides from the Puget Sound SIGCHI lecture and for those who missed it but are curious, here is my presentation. It focuses specifically on my personal process for creating wireframes. There are 4 parts to my process, each has a series of deliverables that feed into it and principals I try to keep in mind, the outcome is either a single or a series of IA deliverables. My overall strategy for IA is three step process; understanding the problem (note: not merely identifying the problem but really understanding it), find a solution (there may be more than one solution, but there is often only one right solution), and present the solution (a large part of your job as a IA is presenting your work so the client can understand the results). Hope you enjoy the slides, these are admittedly pretty rough. I plan to refine and show better pairing between the principals and the specific outcome of applying them to the wireframes in the future." - (Nick Finck)

Posted by PJB on June 03, 2009 | Classification: Information architecture - Wireframes | Permalink

Designing the Windows 7 Desktop Experience

"The new Windows 7 desktop experience, including the new taskbar and Aero Snap, is both a major user experience change for Windows and an early success story. How did we go about evolving pieces of UI that haven't seen major change since 1995? Come hear about our design process and see the evolution of the design through sketches and prototypes. Find out about our challenges and learn how we used iteration, developer collaboration and design principles to increase customer satisfaction and enthusiasm." - (Stephen Hoefnagels - MIX09 videos)

Posted by PJB on June 03, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

From Idea to Feature: A view from Design

"What about unarticulated needs? The data plus intent shows the 'known world' and 'known solution space', but one role we have is to be forward thinking and consider needs or desires that are not clearly articulated by those who do not have the full time job to consider all the potential solution spaces. The solution space could potentially be much broader than readily apparent from the existing and running product—it might involve a rearchitecture, new hardware, or an invention of a new user interface." - (Engineering Windows 7)

Posted by PJB on June 03, 2009 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

Nice Research on Persona Effectiveness

"The paper compares three groups; one group that is briefed with photos of personas, one which uses illustrations of the personas and the last group is briefed to with no personas, and uses aesthetic design." - (IxDA Discussion) Intensely debated topic (again).

Posted by PJB on June 02, 2009 | Classification: Interaction design - Personas | Permalink

Dear AmericanAirlines

"I'm a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have a couple questions and three suggestions for you." - (Dustin Curtis) courtesy of rmoens

Posted by PJB on June 02, 2009 | Classification: User experience | Permalink