October 2010

What is Service Design?

"Our economy consists of both goods and services. Traditionally, design has focused on one, not the other. Laura Forlano talks to leading practitioners in this emerging field. (...) services require designers to empathize with users, to understand interactions as a series of 'touchpoints' and to develop a holistic understanding of the ways in which our relationships to services govern everyday life." (Laura Forlano ~ Urban Omnibus)

Posted by PJB on October 28, 2010 | Classification: Service design | Permalink

Attention and Information

"People often argue that we have too much information and too little attention; that this is a condition of being 'modern'. But the opposite may be true: that attention is a human constant and that it constantly seeks new forms. Where there's 'surplus attention' we always come up with things to occupy it." (The Aporetic) ~ courtesy of clayshirky

Posted by PJB on October 28, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

The UX Design Education Scam

"If you emerge from university today with a web design degree, chances are rather slim that you’re employable as a user experience or web designer. Maybe you learned a lot of stuff; it's just probably the wrong stuff. Congratulations, you've been defrauded. Hope it didn't cost you or your parents too much." (Andy Rutledge)

Posted by PJB on October 26, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Qwiki: Introducing the information experience

"Qwiki's goal is to forever improve the way people experience information. Whether you're planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family AppleTV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search. We are the first to turn information into an experience. We believe that just because data is stored by machines doesn’t mean it should be presented as a machine-readable list. Let's try harder." (About Qwiki) ~ Adding more machine power to the information overload

Posted by PJB on October 26, 2010 | Classification: Events - Information design - Metadata | Permalink

Journalism in the Age of Data

"Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?" (Geoff McGee)

Posted by PJB on October 25, 2010 | Classification: InfoViz | Permalink

Real-Time News Curation: The Complete Guide

"By scouting and researching what has been written on this topic and by tapping on my own experience and intuition, I have prepared this 'curated' guide to the business side of news and content curation." (Robin Good)

Posted by PJB on October 25, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton

"The 2nd Design Mind Salon in Amsterdam brought together 60 selected guests from the business and design world for one afternoon to discuss how design triggers transformation." (Fellermedia)

Posted by PJB on October 22, 2010 | Classification: Information design | Permalink

Service design at a crossroads

"There are a number of competing stories about service design. One is that it's a new interdiscipline, a mix of concepts, methods and tools from several different fields, brought together to address the challenges that organisations face as they try to improve and innovate in services. As an interdiscipline it is presented as a happy fusion of the best bits of management or business, design and technology, and the social sciences. In this version of service design, the incompatibilities between the values and worldviews of these different disciplines are smoothed away to produce a better user experience and increased business value." (Lucy Kimbell)

Posted by PJB on October 21, 2010 | Classification: Events - Service design | Permalink

More on European UX Events

"In Adaptive Path's newsletter of September 28, I shared my views on the European UX scene. In response, several people wrote to me with additions to the landscape. Below are the most interesting ones, followed by my impressions of 3 more European conferences: Euro IA, UX Russia and Design by Fire. And yes, I will count Russia as part of Europe in this respect." (Peter Boersma ~ Adaptive Path)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - User experience | Permalink

Developing a Strategy and Vision: Part 1

"A good strategy doesn't fall out of the air by itself. You'll want to have several strategies on the table later on so that you can choose the best one. So first we need to create some basis for creating strategies." (Martijn van Welie)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2010 | Classification: Design research - Information design | Permalink

Using Personas During Design and Documentation

"(...) although demographics and task analysis play an important part in persona creation, personas are more than just a collection of user profiles and groups. You should make them as real as you can. They should embody all the human attributes you'd expect to find in your users. For example, they could be moody, very task oriented, work in a specific type of environment, or even hate the idea of referring to documentation unless they are absolutely compelled to do so." (Niranjan Jahagirdar and Arun Joseph Martin ~ UXmatters.com)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2010 | Classification: Personas - UCD | Permalink

Infusing Usability Testing with Reality

"The setup for this study was similar to that for any typical usability study. We invited people to participate in one-on-one sessions with a moderator and asked participants to complete a series of tasks while using the think-aloud protocol. Project team members, including designers and business sponsors, watched from another room. We wanted to gain the best possible understanding of the entirety of the proposed user experience, including branded words for labels, information architecture, and categorization. Therefore, during the course of the sessions, I asked participants to describe what they expected to see in a section or on a page behind a link before they clicked it. I thought this would help me to understand the users’ mindsets coming into the experience." (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters.com)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2010 | Classification: Usability | Permalink

Going Mobile

"In this edition of Ask UXmatters - which is the first in a two-part series focusing on user experience design for mobile devices - our experts discuss designing for a wide range of devices with different screen sizes and how to promote your mobile application." (UXmatters.com)

Posted by PJB on October 19, 2010 | Classification: Mobile design | Permalink

Mental Models

"What users believe they know about a UI strongly impacts how they use it. Mismatched mental models are common, especially with designs that try something new." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 18, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Usability | Permalink

Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide

"A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage. This guide will provide design knowledge and fundamentals for this type of UI development. We highly recommend that developers adopt the Metro design style whenever possible. Although requirements may vary based on the application, paralleling this experience will create a more consistent, fluid UI experience from the custom and built-in application view." (The Windows Phone Developers Blog)

Posted by PJB on October 15, 2010 | Classification: HCI - Mobile design - Technology | Permalink

Richard Buchanan Keynote: SCAD 2010

"Designers are great facilitators of conversations among people who have wildly different views about the world. That's a definition of a "wicked problem" by the way. A wicked problem is where there are essentially contested values. Not accidentally contested, not arbitrarily contested. But essentially contested, meaning that there are fundamental differences that cannot be resolved. That to resolve them would be to violate the truths that have been discovered by different people. Designers work with wicked problems. They work with them by the use of dialectic (...)" (Jeff Howard ~ Design for Service)

Posted by PJB on October 13, 2010 | Classification: Design research - Information design - Service design | Permalink

Fear, loathing and content strategy

"There is a prevailing and ongoing confusion around the relatively new title of content strategist, and the field called content strategy. I find these arguments simultaneously boring and frustrating, and while I hardly think one post from me is going to silence the issue, I wanted to see if I could tease out some of the arguments here." (Mapped)

Posted by PJB on October 12, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy | Permalink

US UX versus EU UX – What’s the difference?

"In response to questions from Amy Knox regarding US.UX and EU.UX, Søren Muus (creative director at FatDUX and co-initiator of ECUX) recently posted on the mail list of the Information Architecture Institute some interesting ideas in this matter. We are happy to republish his piece, because we find it food for debate." (European centre for user experience)

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

Research and Practice in IA

"Research and practice in IA are fractured, with very weak connections in between (and this gap is not unique: many disciplines face this challenge)." (Andrea Resmini and Keith Instone - ASIS&T on Information Architecture)

Posted by PJB on October 11, 2010 | Classification: Events - Information architecture | Permalink

Information as a Material

"This talk will discuss what it means to treat information as a material, the properties of information as a design material, the possibilities created by information as a design material, and approaches for designing with information. Information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object-oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments." (Mike Kuniavsky ~ Kicker Studio D3)

Posted by PJB on October 11, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Interaction design - User experience | Permalink

Oliver Sacks on Empathy as a Path to Insight

"Oliver Wolf Sacks is a British neurologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also holds the position of Columbia Artist. He previously spent many years on the clinical faculty of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine." (HBR IdeaCast)

Posted by PJB on October 08, 2010 | Classification: Information design - Podcasts - User experience | Permalink

The IxD Library: A collection of materials related to interaction design

"(...) a collection of books, articles, and presentations of interest to interaction designers. It attempts to not be the definitive collection of every piece of content about interaction design, only the best and most influential. It is also strictly (as is possible) about interaction design and not usability, information architecture, visual design, human factors, or even general experience design, although certainly all of those fields affect and exist alongside interaction design in the field." (About)

Posted by PJB on October 07, 2010 | Classification: Interaction design | Permalink

Making it suck

"Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage." (Cooper Journal)

Posted by PJB on October 07, 2010 | Classification: Interaction design - User experience | Permalink

Visualisations in Service Design

"The thesis provides an academic basis on the use of visualisations in service design. It is concluded that it seems like the service design community currently sees services as being not-goods, a line of thought other service disciplines have discarded the last ten years and replaced with a view of services as the basis for all transactions. The analysis highlights areas where there is a need to improve the visualisations to more accurately represent services." (Fabian Segelström)

Posted by PJB on October 05, 2010 | Classification: InfoViz - Service design | Permalink

The Increasing Momentum of Content Strategy

"(...) the content strategist's role requires you not only to wrangle an immense amount of content into one unified whole, but also to wrangle and guide large groups of stakeholders and other decision leaders toward the same end." (I'd Rather Be Writing)

Posted by PJB on October 04, 2010 | Classification: Content strategy - Writing | Permalink

Prototyping Theory: Understanding How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results

"This research examines aspects of the creative process such iteration and comparison, two key strategies for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our experiments also indicate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel— as opposed to serially — leads to more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. Most recently, we found that groups who produce and share multiple prototypes report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal information, share more features, and overall, reach a better consensus." (Stanford HCI Group)

Posted by PJB on October 04, 2010 | Classification: Prototyping | Permalink

Inspiration Beyond the Lab

"Over the last ten years, both of us have read countless articles about innovation, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible ventures that change the world. The theme that appears to emerge time and time again is the importance of getting out of the office, visiting different cultures, looking outside the bubble we live in, and experiencing new adventures. But it wasn't until a recent vacation in Costa Rica, where Bryan had the opportunity to see rural farm workers using cell phones to talk with other farm workers—people who appeared to be very poor—that he fully realized the importance of understanding the world beyond that which we encounter on a daily basis." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on October 04, 2010 | Classification: Information design - User experience | Permalink

Index Pages: Unsuspected Project-Profitability Killers

"During an information architecture project, creating index pages for items within categories can result in a lot of unexpected work." (Nicola Rovetta ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on October 04, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - Metadata | Permalink

Aligning UX Issues’ Levels of Severity with Business Objectives

"Many of us in the field people now generally refer to as user experience have long used levels of severity as a means of indicating the criticality of a product’s or service’s usability issues to clients. Over the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the vague and somewhat solipsistic nature of the gradations UX professionals typically use to describe the severity of usability issues. High, medium, and low don't begin to sufficiently explain the potential brand and business impacts usability issues can have." (Paul J. Sherman ~ UXmatters)

Posted by PJB on October 04, 2010 | Classification: User experience | Permalink

Alphabetical Sorting Must (Mostly) Die

"Ordinal sequences, logical structuring, time lines, or prioritization by importance or frequency are usually better than A–Z listings for presenting options to users." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted by PJB on October 03, 2010 | Classification: Information architecture - Metadata | Permalink

Researcher-practitioner interaction update (UXRPI)

"One thing that has been useful for me is the overall model of the problem space that emerged for me." (Keith Instone) - courtesy of resmini

Posted by PJB on October 01, 2010 | Classification: Design research - Information architecture - User experience | Permalink