February 2010

Living with Complexity

"This person sits unperturbed by the apparent chaos of his desk. How does he cope with all that complexity? I've never spoken with the person in the picture, Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and winner of the Nobel prize for his work on the environment, but I have talked with and studied other people with similar looking desks and they explain that there is order and structure to the apparent complexity. It’s easy to test: if I ask them for something, they know just where to go: the item is retrieved, oftentimes much faster than from a person who keeps a neat and orderly workplace. The major problem these people face is that others are continually trying to help them, and their biggest fear is that one day they will return to their office and discover someone has cleaned up all the piles and put things into their 'proper' places." (Donald A Norman - Living with Complexity)

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Content strategy is, in fact, the next big thing

"Content strategy is more or less on the same trajectory as social media was three years ago. Why? I think it’s because the reality of social media initiatives—that they’re internal commitments, not advertising campaigns—has derailed more than a few organizations from really implementing effective, measurable programs. Most companies can’t sustain social media engagement because they lack the internal editorial infrastructure to support it." (Kristina Halvorson)

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

The State Of Customer Experience 2010

"Only 11% have a very disciplined approach to customer experience." (Bruce Temkin - Customer Experience Matters)

Posted by PJB on February 26, 2010 | Classification: Design research - User experience | Permalink

Surprise as a design strategy

"A surprise reaction to a product can be beneficial to both a designer and a user. The designer benefits from a surprise reaction because it can capture attention to the product, leading to increased product recall and recognition, and increased word-of-mouth. Or, as Jennifer Hudson puts it, the surprise element 'elevates a piece beyond the banal'. A surprise reaction has its origin in encountering an unexpected event. The product user benefits from the surprise, because it makes the product more interesting to interact with. In addition, it requires updating, extending or revising the knowledge the expectation was based on. This implies that a user can learn something new about a product or product aspect." (Geke D.S. Ludden, Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein & Paul Hekkert)

Posted by PJB on February 25, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications

"Business Web application design is too often neglected. I see a lot of applications that don’t meet the needs of either businesses or users and thus contribute to a loss of profit and poor user experience. It even happens that designers are not involved in the process of creating applications at all, putting all of the responsibility on the shoulders of developers. This is a tough task for developers, who may have plenty of back-end and front-end development experience but limited knowledge of design. This results in unsatisfied customers, frustrated users and failed projects. So, we will cover the basics of user interface design for business Web applications. While one could apply many approaches, techniques and principles to UI design in general, our focus here will be on business Web applications." (Janko Jovanovic - Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on February 25, 2010 | Classification: HCI - Interaction design | Permalink

Dense and Thick

"This is where the future is entirely in your hands. You can leave here today promising yourself to invent the future, to write meaning explicitly onto the real world, to transform our relationship to the universe of objects. Or, you can wait for someone else to come along and do it. Because someone inevitably will. Every day, the pressure grows. The real world is clamoring to crawl into cyberspace. You can open the door." (Mark Pesce - The Human Network)

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

SpoolCast: Interesting Moments with Bill Scott

"Bill speaks about both patterns—successful interaction models for common interactions - and anti-patterns. By showing what not to do, anti-patterns often provide insight on the right way to do something." (Brian Christiansen - User Interface Engineering)

Posted by PJB on February 24, 2010 | Classification: Interaction design - Podcasts | Permalink

Training the Butterflies

"Whether it's in front of a huge audience or a handful of executives, smooth public speaking is essential to a successful web design career. Yet most of us are more afraid of speaking in public than we are of death. In a lively give-and-take, Liz Danzico interviews Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker, for tips on how to prepare for public speaking, how to perfect your timing, and what to do when bad things happen." (Liz Danzico - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on February 23, 2010 | Classification: Interviews | Permalink

Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow?

"Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a faster rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology advances might have predicted." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on February 22, 2010 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem

"Search is the Web's most powerful and frustrating tool. It's the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It's odd that something so important is so hard to harness. And it's not going to get easier anytime soon. We may think of search as static and mature because we've used those ubiquitous boxes for years. But it's a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs -- to name a few -- signal big changes ahead." (Mac Slocum - O'Reilly Radar)

Posted by PJB on February 22, 2010 | Classification: Interviews - Search | Permalink

Designing value beyond the inflection point

"In 1999, Pine & Gilmore presented a model for the progression of economic value in their bestseller 'the experience economy'. The model explains the generic progression of economic value that any business in our society goes through sooner or later; the shift for commodities to experiences. Prehaps the most used example is the progression from raw coffee beans to the starbucks 'experience'. The great thing about this model is that it's easy to use and applicable to almost any industry." (Marc Fonteijn - 31Volts)

Posted by PJB on February 22, 2010 | Classification: Service design - User experience | Permalink

Laban Movement Analysis for User Experience Design

"As a User Experience Designer, there have been moments on projects when I’ve had similar feelings of ineptitude—usually when I've been faced with a large, complex system or some completely new and foreign domain I didn’t understand. Have you ever experienced an awkward moment as you've tried to figuratively dance and negotiate your way through an uncomfortable situation? This often brings fear of making a decision or taking a step forward along with it—maybe even some shoe-flying moments. A recent acting class, in which I learned what Laban Movement Analysis is all about, helped me find a way to get past this fear. When people say knowledge is power, they are most assuredly correct." (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 22, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study

"In the design process we follow at my company, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery." (Michael Hawley - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 22, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

How social media is changing the face of enterprise applications

"User resistance can be a big contributor to IT project failure and a lot of this comes down to a poor user experience of dated, clunky user interfaces. In order to get people using business applications, you have to make interacting and engaging with them more satisfying." (Daily Mirror)

Posted by PJB on February 19, 2010 | Classification: Social Web | Permalink

New Ways of Interaction

"This channel is a collection of projects about newer ways of human and physical interaction. It features interactive installations and systems with a strong focus on technologies such as multi-touch, tangible and gestural interfaces, augmented reality and physical computing." (@Jens Franke)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2010 | Classification: Interaction design - Technology | Permalink

Do you need a strategy or a vision?

"(...) let’s take a closer look at some examples of visions and strategies. For my first example consider you are living in the 15th century and you have a family with 2 kids. As a responsible parent you want to make sure they are fed well. Your children haven’t had a full meal with a nice piece of meat in a while. As soon as you wake up you create your vision: "Today at 20.00 my children will eat a full meal with a fresh piece of meat, larger than they can eat!". That is pretty concrete, right? There is a time-line, a quantifiable goal, although the type of meat and the quantity is still left open. But you sort of get it, it is concrete enough." (Martijn van Welie - Thoughts on Interaction Design)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The Essence of a Successful Persona Project

"Personas are a flexible and powerful tool for user researchers. They're also one of the most misunderstood. When done well, they ensure the team focuses on the needs and delights of their users. Like other effective user research techniques, personas deliver confidence and insights to the team. Personas help the team make important design decisions with a thorough understanding of who the users are, what they need, and when they need it." (Jared Spool)

Posted by PJB on February 18, 2010 | Classification: Personas | Permalink

BBC Online: Our mobile future

"We are at a similar turning point in the internet age. We still, in the most part, define our digital agenda through the lens of broadcast output, and rightly so. But times are changing, and the internet is taking its place alongside TV and radio as a third platform in its own right." (Erik Huggers - BBC Internet Blog)

Posted by PJB on February 17, 2010 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

Sitemaps: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

"Sitemaps are a safety net. They can be a last resort for users before they abandon ship and leave your site having not found what they needed and vowing never to come back." (Rob Mills - Think Vitamin)

Posted by PJB on February 17, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

UX Strategy II: About the iterative diagram: What is it?

"In the second part of this Strategy discussion, I will concentrate on the Strategy diagram from the previous post. This post will cover what the diagram is and who is it for. There are more issues than that to be complete, but I can always add an additional post if there is a desire to read more detailed information about it." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand)

Posted by PJB on February 16, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Agencies at the Interface: Colloquium with Lucy Suchman

"This talk considers how capacities for action are currently figured at the human–machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Drawing on examples from recent scholarship in anthropology, science and technology studies, and media arts and design, Suchman argues for research aimed at tracing differences that matter within specific sociomaterial arrangements, without resorting to essentialist human-machine divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while taking responsibility for the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are made." (MIT Media Lab)

Posted by PJB on February 16, 2010 | Classification: HCI | Permalink

User Experience Design Career Development – Part 1

"So what we did was to articulate four (well, technically five) levels of consultant. These levels are based on obvious things like skills & experience, but also things like thought leadership activity, strategic acumen, client management, professional recognition, and business development. We defined specific criteria for each of these levels so that consultants can identify where they meet the criteria for their desired level and where they need to put in more effort. Granted, some of the criteria are pretty specific to an agency/consultancy model. But my hope is that those of you who work internally at large corporations, tiny startups, and anywhere in between can still use elements of our UX design career path to help structure your own." (Fred Beecher) - courtesy of jjursa

Posted by PJB on February 16, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

I Am Not A User!

"Well, first of all let's get rid off the word user and let’s talk about people. Because user implies something totally internal: I'm a user, I want to use this machine, so let's use it. This is a utilitarian/task cognitive approach to interaction design, a rather medieval kind of approach. If you talk about people, what they are and what they do in their daily lives, there are so many opportunities to discover… so users will not evolve, they will die out, but people will remain and I would like to talk about their lives and conquests." (I'm not a user)

Posted by PJB on February 15, 2010 | Classification: UCD - User experience | Permalink

Service Design: An Interaction Design Perspective

"What is service design? How is it different from interaction design? As an interaction designer with service design education and experience, offer my insights into what role interaction designers have in this emerging area of design." (Jamin Hegeman)

Posted by PJB on February 15, 2010 | Classification: Interaction design - Service design | Permalink

The Future of User Interfaces

"User interfaces - the way we interact with our technologies - have evolved a lot over the years. From the original punch cards and printouts to monitors, mouses, and keyboards, all the way to the track pad, voice recognition, and interfaces designed to make it easier for the disabled to use computers, interfaces have progressed rapidly within the last few decades. But there's still a long way to go and there are many possible directions that future interface designs could take. We're already seeing some start to crop up and its exciting to think about how they’ll change our lives. In this article are than a dozen potential future user interfaces that we'll be seeing over the next few years (and some further into the future)." (Cameron Chapman - Six Revisions)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2010 | Classification: HCI - Technology | Permalink

The UX Canon: Essential Reading for the User Experience Designer

"(...) besides slowly acquiring and reviewing more books, is to begin further classification of books. Until that can happen, this is my UX library. If I don’t own it or haven’t read it, it's definitely not on this list. At the same time, there are books that I own that aren’t included because I thought they sucked for one reason or another. The third option is that I have it, have read it, liked it, but simply forgot to include it." (Semantic Foundry)

Posted by PJB on February 12, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Better User Experience With Storytelling (Part Two)

"In the first part of this series, we explored some of the basic structures and story patterns found in myths and religions. We saw how these patterns continued into modern stories such as The Matrix and Star Wars. We also explored some of the basics of bringing storytelling into the user experience process and some places to get started. Concluding this two-part article, we hear from creative professionals who are leading the way in this relatively new world of combining the craft of storytelling with user experience. We'll also see how storytelling can be applied to more than just interactive experiences: we find it in everything from packaging to architecture." (Francisco Inchauste - Smashing Magazine)

Posted by PJB on February 11, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

UX Strategy is different than UI strategy: Part 1

"(...) a real iterative UX Strategy that is based on Design practice not software engineering practice." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2010 | Classification: HCI - UCD - User experience | Permalink

iPhone Apps Need Low Starting Hurdles

"Most mobile applications are used only intermittently, so they must be especially easy during initial use. In particular, upfront registration shouldn't be required before users experience an app's benefits." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2010 | Classification: Mobile design - Usability | Permalink

Words that Zing

"To select the right words, take cues from rhetoric and psychology. I do not mean use unctuous sales language or manipulative mind control, nor do I necessarily mean use catchy words. I simply mean add influential weight to web writing based on centuries of rhetorical wisdom and a growing body of scientific knowledge." (Colleen Jones - A List Apart)

Posted by PJB on February 10, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy - Writing | Permalink

The Synaptic Web

"The purpose of this document is to present a straw man overview of emerging trends on the next generation web. We encourage participation and conversation about these proposals so that we, as participants in this ecosystem, can come to a communal understanding our current and emerging opportunities for the web." (Khris Loux, Eric Blantz, and Chris Saad) - courtesy of ruurdpriester

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Social Web | Permalink

Hierarchical Task Analysis

"As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2010 | Classification: UCD | Permalink

Browse Is The New Black

"Search, search, search. Everyone is talking about search these days. Bing, semantic search, site search. That's all you hear. Don’t get me wrong: search is wildly important to our daily experiences on the web. I’ve written a bit on search on this blog. (...) But at the same time were seeing a lot of new products and interfaces that offer enhanced online browsing experiences. Browsing it totally underrated, I believe. What's more, looking broadly across human information behavior, we see that browsing is more than an accident, impulsive activity–it's not just aimless surfing." (James Kalbach - Experiencing Information)

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - Search | Permalink

iPad Interesting Moments

"The use of real world style transitions (flipping bookcase over, flipping pages, spreading stacks, rotating orientation, collecting selected elements into stacks) work extremely well with a multi-touch interface. I am using my physical body not a mechanical mouse so the response should feel more real world. This is also what Apple mentions in their UX guidelines." (Bill Scott - Looks Good works Well)

Posted by PJB on February 08, 2010 | Classification: HCI - Technology | Permalink

Live at Interaction’10

"The first day of Interaction 10 in the wonderful city of Savannah, Georgia, kicked off without a hitch. Though eventually everyone was plagued by spotty, windy rain storms, the general pulse of the conference was positive and uplifting. Attendees were still talking about some of the great workshops from the day before, and they carried that energy over into today’s sessions. If one thing had to describe the overall theme of the first day it would be the importance of providing meaning in the work that we do. Below are recaps of the opening and closing keynotes, as well as some of the sessions from the day. (...) After a night of some great parties, and even better conversation, the second day of Interaction 10 began with a preview of the new IxDA.org website redesign. The team doing the redesign covered all the great new features that are coming, and went into detail on how local groups will be able to leverage the new site for their own networks and events. The excitement from yesterday was easily carried over, and people were pumped to see what the presenters had in store for us today." (Niklas Wolkert & Brad Nunnally - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted by PJB on February 07, 2010 | Classification: Events - Interaction design | Permalink

Workshop on Search and Social Media

"It is my pleasure to report on the 3rd Annual Workshop on Search in Social Media, a gathering of information retrieval and social media researchers and practitioners in an area that has captured the interest of computer scientists, social scientists, and even the broader public." (Daniel Tunkelang)

Posted by PJB on February 04, 2010 | Classification: Search - Social Web | Permalink

Design the stakeholder experience

"To get the stakeholders on track for a successful UX project, use your skills and design the stakeholder experience." (Phil Barrett - Front to back)

Posted by PJB on February 03, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Attending to Performance

"As information architects, we have the opportunity to learn when our constituents are thwarted by information structure. If possible, we should observe actual performers doing actual work in actual work contexts. We should understand what performers need to know, what is better referenced and what is best supported. We should understand the pressures, activities, accountabilities, interruptions, relationships and consequences of good and flawed performance. And we should measure." (Thom Haller - ASIS&T Bulletin February/March 2010)

Posted by PJB on February 03, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture | Permalink

Content Is King

"Just because content is king doesn't mean, however, that the designer's job is any less important. How seriously would people take the King if his suit was poorly made? It has to look good." (Paul Boag)

Posted by PJB on February 02, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy - Podcasts - Writing | Permalink

Search Patterns

"Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe. This provocative and inspiring book explores design patterns that apply across the categories of web, e-commerce, enterprise, desktop, mobile, social, and real time search and discovery. Using colorful illustrations and examples, the authors bring modern information retrieval to life, covering such diverse topics as relevance ranking, faceted navigation, multi-touch, and mixed reality. Search Patterns challenges us to invent the future of discovery while serving as a practical guide to help us make search applications better today." (Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender)

Posted by PJB on February 01, 2010 | Classification: Patterns - Search | Permalink

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

"I am not anti-Agile although I’ve been bitten a few times and feel trepidation when I hear someone singing its praises without having much experience with it. Over the last eight years, I’ve seen Agile badly implemented far more often than well (and yes, it can be done well, too). The result of this is mediocre product released in as much time as it would have taken a good team to release great product using a waterfall approach. In this article, I will describe Agile and attempt to illuminate a potential minefield for those who are swept up in the fervor of this development trend and want to jump in headlong. Then I will present how practices within User Centred Design (UCD) can mitigate the inherent risks of Agile and how these may be integrated within Agile development approaches." (Anthony Colfelt - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted by PJB on February 01, 2010 | Classification: UCD - User experience | Permalink