Interviews

An Interview with Lou Rosenfeld and Liz Danzico

"After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou - along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media - about starting a new publishing house and 'eating their own dog food'." (Joshua Kaufman - UXmatters)

Posted on May 08, 2008 | Permalink

The Role of Design in Business

Kate Rutter interviews Nathan Shedroff - "(...) I think Marketing was the big thing long before IT departments rose to the prominence they have. Most IT departments have a grip on senior management that is not healthy, simply because most senior managers don’t understand enough of the details of IT to disagree, haggle, and know when they’re being snowed. However, EVERYONE is a designer, so everyone thinks that they know enough to override design decisions, budgets, and processes. Organizations, however, are discovering that they aren’t managing the design development process well enough and are listening more and judging a little less." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on March 24, 2008 | Permalink

Out of the Lab: An Interview with John Maeda

"You know, I aspire to become the Steve Jobs of university presidents. Seriously, though, I envision RISD as the Apple brand in the university world." (Steven Heller - Voice)

Posted on January 14, 2008 | Permalink

Interview with Luke Wroblewski

"Visual organization is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It's the process of applying the principles behind perception - how we make sense of what we see - to illuminate relationships between content and actions." (WebGuild)

Posted on January 02, 2008 | Permalink

Peter Merholz interviews Don Norman

"I really enjoyed this chat. If we did The Believer-style keywords for it, they would read: adaptive cruise control, ubiquitous computing, human plus machine, 'user experience', 'affordances;, asking the right questions, coupling design with operations, busting down silos, TiVo has never made any money, Palm, many reasons for the Newton’s failure, boss as an absolute dictator, Henry Dreyfuss and John Deere, design evolving from craft to profession, systems thinking, “T-shaped people,” observing the world, water bottle caps. Sound interesting? Take a listen!" (Adaptive Path) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on December 14, 2007 | Permalink

Interactions 08 in the Garden of Good and Evil

An Interview with Dan Saffer - "We aren't human-computer engineers, usability professionals, information architects, or industrial or graphic designers, even though we have a lot in common with all of those groups. We're professional designers, not engineers or researchers or testers, and what we design is behavior - how systems behave in response to human action. The combination of interaction and design really set us apart from what existed." (Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on December 11, 2007 | Permalink

Burn Rate, Build2Flip, and Exit Strategy

"Adaptive Path, that rascally little South Park user experience studio at the center of all things web 2.0, celebrated it's sixth year in existence with a retro prom party. Last year, we had to find out what the meaning of Adaptive Path was? This year, we channel our inner VC and get the answers that any potential sugar daddy might ask." (Blip.tv)

Posted on November 27, 2007 | Permalink

Tech design with thought

"If anyone knows a thing or two about designing for human-computer interaction, it's Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University, author of 'The Design of Future Things', and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group." (C|Net News)

Posted on November 26, 2007 | Permalink

Bill Buxton on UX Designer Skills

"In the following video segment, Bill answers my questions: what takes to be a great User Experience Designer? What are the necessary skills or area of skills? Is it good to be a design generalist? And design opportunities at Microsoft for recent graduates. It's great to get a design guru like him's view on these things." (Canadian User Experience)

Posted on October 15, 2007 | Permalink

The Hot Strudel interviews BEEP

"There are very, very few projects where an IA can do all of the work; we have to work together with other user experience practitioners!" (Jan Jursa)

Posted on October 08, 2007 | Permalink

The 'Arms Race' Between Participation and Control

Interview with Howard Rheingold - "I agree with Benkler that there's a third form of production along with the market and the firm, that's emerging around common-space peer production, and that we don't understand a great deal about it yet. I would not dismiss it. But neither do I think we really know whether you can do it with things other than producing code or a knowledge repository online. What can't you do with it? We don't really know yet." (Scott Rosenberg - AssignmentZero)

Posted on July 25, 2007 | Permalink

Is There a Doctor of Design in the House?

An Interview with Meredith Davis - "The relationship between the visual representation of data and the human sensing of change is not an area with which design has much experience." (Steven Heller - AIGA Voice)

Posted on July 16, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Jess McMullin

"In our practice, the thing that has become a barrier for us in delivering successful projects is how our clients and the different stakeholders on a project work together." (Peter Merholz - AP blog)

Posted on July 16, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Brenda Laurel

"What do Aristotelian poetics have to do with human-computer interaction? Quite a bit, if you think about it like Brenda Laurel does. From an early interest in interactive theatre and interactive fiction, through falling in love with computer graphics and learning to code, and a long career designing computer games, Brenda has kept the cultural aspects of HCI at the forefront of her work. In this interview she talks about her work designing games for girls, and about working with others who inspired her (including Timothy Leary)." (Tamara Adlin - UX Pioneers)

Posted on June 29, 2007 | Permalink

An interview with Mike Kuniavsky

"Emotional design is good design. That's what I learned at the Milan Furniture Fair. It had plenty of bad design, but there are some beautiful, beautiful things there. The reason they are well designed is not because there's a lot of splash. It's because they've been thought through and they connect with us on an emotional level in addition to a functional level." (Tamara Adlin - UX Pioneers) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on May 22, 2007 | Permalink

David Weinberger in Conversation with Bradley Horowitz

"Categories are now applied to content when it is extracted from the infospace, whereas historically curators of information (such as librarians) have invested immense energy in organizing information on its way in." (Yahoo! User Interface Blog)

Posted on May 14, 2007 | Permalink

Advertising is Broken

Brandon Schauer interviews Clement Mok - "I see the opportunity to marry Experience Modeling with the smarts of the Information Architect to structure a powerful model in the user's world, whether that be through cell phones or tagging systems. The opportunity is to create a model that ties together the deep ethnographic understanding of the user, the system engineering understanding, and the brand/marketing understanding. Tying these three things together is quite powerful." (IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference 2006)

Posted on April 11, 2007 | Permalink

Nathan Shedroff on Making Meaning

Interview by Steve Portigal - "Experience design is an approach to design, and you can use that approach in pretty much any discipline—graphic design or industrial design or interaction design, or retail design. It says the dimensions of experience are wider than what those disciplines normally take into account. And if you think wider—through time, multiple senses and other dimensions - then you can create a more meaningful experience." (Core77 Design Blog)

Posted on February 28, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Adam Greenfield

"Language is also a domain of user experience. Shouldn't the words we use to describe a tool be as carefully crafted as the tool itself?" (Régine Debatty - WeMakeMoneyNotArt) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on January 23, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Doug Bowman

"My general interest (and without a doubt, my current position at Google) is pushing me to think about scale more often. Small scales and large scales. One of the components of my talk at Web Directions North will deal with scale of impact. Using our skills and innovation in technology and design to impact the greater good. The web reaches approximately one billion people now, and that number grows every day. Put one page or one application out there for the world to see, and, given the right factors, millions of people could potentially see it, experience it, or be inspired by it within days. How can we use that power for good? Can we harness our collective knowledge and skills to impact and make a difference both locally and in remote parts of the world?" (John Allsopp - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on January 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Key to Simplicity: Questions for Donald Norman

"Technology can help only if it can adopt a simple structure so that controls for different devices are as similar to one another as possible, making the learning much easier. Multiple purpose controls are an abomination. It is possible to have a single device transform itself into independent devices for controlling different tasks. But here the key is to make the switch from the support of individual technologies and individual devices to the support of cohesive, organized activities." (Eddie Lopez - User Centered)

Posted on January 11, 2007 | Permalink

The Line Between Clarity and Chaos: An Interview with Barry Schwartz

"Adding options is bound to make somebody better off, and further, it won't make anybody worse off. The more choice people have, the better they are. So how could it not be true? It's not true." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 02, 2007 | Permalink

From Data to Wisdom

An interview with Paco Underhill - "(...) Boxes and Arrows talks with Underhill about what's changed about behavior research, the science of watching people, and new considerations for the design community." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 29, 2006 | Permalink

Interview with Jeff Veen

"In this interview, conducted at the Future of Web Apps Summit, Sarah Drew talks to design and UI expert Jeff Veen, Design Lead at Google." (vitamin)

Posted on November 09, 2006 | Permalink

Information visualization conversation with Fernanda Viegas and Mike Migurski

"(...) if you look at the academic information visualization community, researchers aren't focusing on the social side of their applications. Infovis folks love to explore techniques that allow them to scale the data they are showing. But what happens when you scale the audience that's looking at a visualization?" (Peter Merholz - IDEA 2006 Blog)

Posted on September 12, 2006 | Permalink

Double Consciousness: Back to the Future with John Chris Jones

"Looking across the 35+ years in which Design Methods has been in use in multiple languages, what from your perspective is the biggest misconception about Design Methods?" (GK VanPatter - NextD)

Posted on August 28, 2006 | Permalink

developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee

"Originator of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium talks about how far we've come, and about the challenges and opportunities ahead." (IBM developerWorks) - courtesy of readwriteweb

Posted on August 23, 2006 | Permalink

Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'

"(...) good design is timeless, while bad design can be a matter of life and death." (Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr - NPR)

Posted on August 22, 2006 | Permalink

Rebecca Blood interviews Jason Kottke

"Tinkering with the medium of the web was always the attraction for me and weblog structure was another way of doing that." (rebecca's pocket)

Posted on August 10, 2006 | Permalink

A Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 3/3

Jesse James Garrett interviews Steven Johnson- "Tufte played a huge role in popularizing the story — to this day, most of the people I meet who are familiar with it read about it in Tufte first. He actually wrote about it twice, (...). His original assessment was factually wrong on a number of fronts - it greatly overstated the role of the map in solving the mystery of where the cholera was coming from, and the map itself that Tufte included was a heavily modified replica created for a 1912 textbook on public health. In the later book, he got the story right, though I think he’s a little too bullish on the map’s originality as a work of information design." - (Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 08, 2006 | Permalink

Conversation with Michael Bierut - Part 3/3

Peter Merholz interviews Michael Bierut - "Making room for the real world is even harder today than it was 30 years ago. The amount of technical skills a young designer needs is vast, and the degree of professional specialization is staggering. All of this helps to foster an atmosphere that seems to reward tunnel vision. But in the end, the designers who are doing the most exciting work — and in some cases it coincidentally happens to be the most beautiful work — are the ones who don’t hesitate to claim the whole world as their subject matter." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 02, 2006 | Permalink

A Conversation with Steven Johnson, Part 2

Jesse James Garrett interviews Steven Johnson- "Clearly interfaces are tools for understanding the world. So many of the most interesting debates in the 'new media' space revolve precisely around the question of how specific interfaces will shape the user’s view of the world. And those debates play back into the design decisions that shape the next generation of software." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 02, 2006 | Permalink

Interaction Design: An Introduction

Liz Danzico interviews Dan Saffer on his new book - "Genius design is when the designer relies on his or her own experience and skill to design, without any input from users. It's done by designers who either don't have the resources or the inclination or temperament to do research. Too often, it is practiced by inexperienced designers with little skill, but it can and has been used by many designers to create impressive things. Reportedly, the iPod was made with no user research, for example." (BusinessWeek.com)

Posted on August 02, 2006 | Permalink

A Conversation with Steven Johnson 1/2

"The one constant online (...) is that linked text is still central to the medium and its interface innovations." (Jesse James Garrett - Adaptive Path)

Posted on July 21, 2006 | Permalink

Getting Emotional With Donald Norman

"I believe that we now do understand how to design so that the result truly fits people. By 'we', I mean the design community, the design theorists (which is where I fit), and the university community of design." (Marco van Hout - Design & Emotion)

Posted on July 11, 2006 | Permalink

Conversation with Michael Bierut - Part II

"One of the hard lessons I had to learn as a designer starting out was that good design is not a self-evident imperative for most people. I tell students that they are spending time and money in design school acquiring an abnormal sensitivity to design that most regular people should not be expected to share." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on June 27, 2006 | Permalink

Where Visual Design Meets Usability: An Interview with Luke Wroblewski, Part I

"When properly applied, visual design is all about communication. The better at communicating we are, the easier it is for our users to use and appreciate the web sites we design." (Joshua Porter - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on June 22, 2006 | Permalink

Top Designer Says World Cup Design 'Just Embarrassing'

"They are over-organized; there are too many messages; and nobody wants to take on responsibility. In fact, it is a perfect mirror of German society right now. It is very much akin to the governing grand coalition -- two big parties that are basically canceling each other out because no one can make any decisions. Everyone is trying to be nice, everyone knows we have to do something, change society, change behavior, and economy, but no one wants to take the first step because we're so comfortable. We're still wrapped up in our nice security blanket. We know it's cold outside, but we just stay inside and huddle. This sort of World Cup design is very much communal huddling -- trying to please everyone but never even putting a finger outside of that security blanket." (says Erik Spiekermann - Deutsche Welle) - courtesy of dirkknemeyer

Posted on June 16, 2006 | Permalink

Conversation with Michael Bierut - Part I

"I've come to believe strongly that one of the roles of design is to bring humanity, intelligence and beauty to the world of business, and indeed to everyday life." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

The Importance of a Customer-Centric Design Approach: An Interview with Gerry McGovern

"The number one skill that every web team should have is the ability and desire to relentlessly focus on the needs of the customer. Web teams must enjoy being around the customer, they must be stimulated by thinking of the customer. You have those skills and everything else fits into place." (Christine Perfetti - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

Dogmas Are Meant to be Broken: An Interview with Eric Reiss

"And standards are just standards, and they can change as technology changes. Best practices are guidelines; they're not rules. It’s best to keep two seconds worth of stopping distance between you and the car in front of you, for example. That’s just good common sense. As cars get faster, these distances change, and the best practices change. But they remain only guidelines." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on May 31, 2006 | Permalink

Expert Voices: Peter Morville on Why Information Architecture Matters

"So it's very difficult to isolate the information architecture from the other elements of the user experience. You could certainly do that in a research lab, but in the real world all of these factors work together. It's quite possible to do a beautiful information architecture redesign but completely destroy the experience by messing up the graphic side of things." (CIO Insight)

Posted on May 25, 2006 | Permalink

Interview with Mimi Ito

"While designers often consider the different developments that emerge in both the east and the west, few scholars consider how technological design is connected to cultural practice. One exception is Mizuko (Mimi) Ito, an anthropologist who investigates new media use, particularly amongst young people in Japan and the United States. Her work ranges from mobile phone (keitai) practices to fandom, online game play to remix culture. Her edited volume 'Personal, Portable and Pedestrian' was just recently published, giving English-speaking scholars an opportunity to access Japanese media research. Because her cross-cultural work is of great value to designers, Ambidextrous decided to interview her to learn more." (Danah Boyd - Ambidextrous Preview issue 3)

Posted on May 10, 2006 | Permalink

Defining the Problem with Tom Chi

"(...) designers are often able to reframe business 'problems' to better communicate existing and potential relationships (and outcomes) between the market, customer goals, and product ecosystems. To further illustrate this point, I've asked a few seasoned designers that have successfully defined or re-defined business strategies to share their experiences defining problems." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on April 27, 2006 | Permalink

NerdTV Archives

Interviews with Doug Engelbart, Dave Winer, Andy Herzfeld and other illuminaries - "NerdTV is a new weekly online TV show from PBS.org technology columnist Robert X. Cringely. NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks - a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology." (Robert X. Cringely - NerdTV)

Posted on March 08, 2006 | Permalink

Ladder of Fire

A conversation with Peter Merholz - "(...) I never said design is not a field of knowledge. You asked if design was a field of "vast, deep, broad, and nuanced" field of knowledge like anthropology, and I said, 'No'. We never discussed whether design is another kind of field of knowledge, which I think it is. But it is fractured, rootless, and without a core. It doesn't have anywhere near the depth or nuance of anthropology." (GK VanPatter - NextD Journal) - Recommended reading

Posted on February 28, 2006 | Permalink

Hiding in Plain Sight

"Boxes and Arrows caught up with Adam Greenfield on the heels of finishing his first book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, due out in March 2006. Greenfield talks to us about how computing has moved away from the desktop into every part of our lives—from soda cans to the family pet. In this interview, he allows us to imagine what our new normal might look like. (...) Everyone who will be affected by this class of technologies should have a voice in shaping its emergence." (Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 27, 2006 | Permalink

On the Record: Paul Saffo

"I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have. Think about the rise of info-graphics in newspapers. Those were sense-making tools to help people (absorb information)." (SFGate)

Posted on February 21, 2006 | Permalink

Marc Rettig on The History (and Future) of Interaction Design

Interview excerpt from the upcoming book 'Designing for Interaction' - "Thanks to corporations that are learning the value of integrated teams, interaction designers will find themselves more often part of the team from beginning to end, rather than specialists who are called to make sporadic contributions from time to time." (Designing for Interaction - August 2006) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on February 13, 2006 | Permalink

Interview with Don Norman

"My goal is to put structure to the field of design. Design has no real theoretical structure and I'm trying to find one." (Ambidextrous Magazine Issue 2)

Posted on February 02, 2006 | Permalink

Experientia interviews Richard Eisermann

"Richard Eisermann is Director of Design and Innovation at the UK Design Council. In this interview, he discusses how the Design Council is using a design approach to help business, public services and educational institutions develop new products, services and strategies or redevelop existing ones, and how Italy can use some of the same ideas in its own approach to innovation." (Mark Vanderbeeken - Experientia)

Posted on January 17, 2006 | Permalink

Lou Rosenfeld Eats his own Dog Food

"Louis Rosenfeld, one of the founding fathers of information architecture, has a new project up his sleeve. Growing restless after co-founding one of the most renowned information architecture firms of all time, co-authoring one of the best-known IA books, helping to start both the Information Architecture Institute and the User Experience Network, and running his own IA consulting practice, Lou is setting his sights on a new endeavor. He's using his knowledge of user experience methods to launch a UX publishing house." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 16, 2006 | Permalink

Interview w/ Joi Ito

"Chaosradio Express episode 11 is an interview with 22C3's keynote speaker Joi Ito. The interview touches various topics including Chicago's club scene and Joi's affiliation with it, the early Internet days via X.25, Creative Commons licensing issues, the Open Source Initiative, political activism in general and what can and should be done, optimism vs. pessimism in the current situation of global political fighting, ICANN, living a super-public life and combining all kinds of modern communication tools, the influence of the Internet on political activism and democracy and of course the 22C3 and his personal experiences at the event." (Chaosradio)

Posted on January 03, 2006 | Permalink

Design by Politics

An interview with John Maeda - "I'm not only interested in marketing simplicity, I'm interested in marketing creative thinking. I believe that creative thinking is rapidly disappearing, because business is so focused on measurable outcomes and the economy is known to improve if reading and mathematics are strong in society." (Sascha Pohflepp)

Posted on January 02, 2006 | Permalink

Erik Spiekermann: Typography and design today

"(...) calls himself an information architect. He is equally comfortable and prolific as a writer, graphic and typeface designer, but type is always at the epicentre of this communication dynamo. He founded MetaDesign in 1979, started FontShop in 1988, is a board member of ATypI and the German Design Council, and president of the istd International Society of Typographic Designers. In July 2000, Erik withdrew from the management of MetaDesign Berlin - which created a bit of a stir - and set up his new studio, United Designers Network in the same neighbourhood." (Uleshka - PingMag)

Posted on December 11, 2005 | Permalink

Interview with Marko Ahtisaari

Director of Design Strategy at Nokia - "Designing simple elegant objects that simply works, that's a challenge." (Sebastian Campion - DDC) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on December 02, 2005 | Permalink

Findability is ambient: Interview with Peter Morville

"Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through wireless devices, empowering individuals and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire, and information is in the air, literally. And yet with this wealth of instantly accessible information, we still experience disorientation. We still wander off the map." - (Liz Danzico - AIGA Voice)

Posted on November 09, 2005 | Permalink

Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville

"Findability takes us beyond usability and information architecture into the realms of design, engineering and marketing. And it encompasses wayfinding and retrieval in physical and digital environments." (Liz Danzico - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 01, 2005 | Permalink

Louis Rosenfeld interviews Tony Byrne

"Content management, meet user-centered design. I'm glad to see this beginning to happen." (Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on November 01, 2005 | Permalink

Peter Morville: The Tagsonomy interview

"I'm an impatient information architect. I spend no more time organizing than absolutely necessary. (...) With respect to personal information architecture, less is more." (Gene Smith - Tagsonomy)

Posted on October 19, 2005 | Permalink

Cross-Disciplinary Exchanges

An interview with Donald A. Norman - "One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it's the box it comes in. That's because Apple really understood that the iPod was not about the iPod; it was about the entire experience: the way they design their stores, the box it comes in, the iTunes website, the ease of getting the user back and forth." (Mark Zachry - RedNova News) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted on October 05, 2005 | Permalink

Audio Interview with Jakob Nielsen

"To design a usable website, designers need to think how the user is going to use their website rather than present him with what they want him to see." (IT Conversations) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on September 30, 2005 | Permalink

Interview with Peter Morville

"(...) findability is only one of many qualities that can be designed into an information architecture, along with accessibility, credibility, desirability, and usability. Sometimes, it’s more important for a product to be attractive. Sometimes, companies rely more on push than pull. But as the Internet increasingly puts the customer in control, making it easy for your people to find your products and your support content becomes a top priority. And as ubiquitous computing propels us toward a massive, networked transmedia environment, findability will only become more important and challenging." (infonomia)

Posted on September 21, 2005 | Permalink

Why eBay needs Standards-Oriented Design

An Interview with Eric A. Meyer - "They've got to do millions upon millions upon millions probably an hour if not a day. And a typical auction page -- just the HTML document -- is somewhere in the vicinity of 40-45KB. It's all built with font tags, tables and spacer gifs." (David Poteet - User Interface 10 Conference)

Posted on September 13, 2005 | Permalink

Design as Glue: Understanding the Stanford d.school

A conversation between GK VanPatter and David Kelley (Co-Founder of the Stanford Design Institute) - "(...) businesses today are looking for ways to become more innovative. Corporations are expecting that revenues will come primarily from new innovations, rather than simply sprucing up existing products and services. What we've learned from companies is that they're looking for students to be able to come out and help them with their innovation strategy. Our goal at the d.school is to train students to be innovators." (NextD Journal 7.3)

Posted on September 09, 2005 | Permalink

Learning to haggle: Moving information architecture from design to implementation

"David Moore talks to information architecture expert Louis Rosenfeld about the problems with search features, why CMS Silver Bullets don't work, and why information architects need to be better at horsetrading." (iQ Content)

Posted on July 20, 2005 | Permalink

When Norman Meets Chinese...

"I dream of harmony between the things in our life and the social, emotional, and experiential parts of our lives. Artifacts are not just about making us work better: they are about living better, about enjoying life more, and about spreading these benefits to everyone, everywhere." (Christina Li - uiGarden)

Posted on July 10, 2005 | Permalink

Lazy, stupid and evil design

"Evil design is perpetrated by people who are deliberately doing the wrong thing, and this harms everyone. Nielsen cites pop-up windows as an example. Users now expect pop-ups to be unwanted ads, and close them without looking at them. As a result, good designers can no longer use pop-up windows even when they would be a good solution." (Jack Schofield - Guardian Unlimited)

Posted on June 26, 2005 | Permalink

Frozen Pictures? Can Design Journalism be Reinvented?

Interview with Julie Lasky - Editor-In-Chief of I.D. Magazine "Names, please. I know it's discomfiting to supply them, but that's the only way you'll help me understand the dimension you find lacking." (GK VanPatter - NextD)

Posted on June 10, 2005 | Permalink

Web Standards in the Real World: An Interview with Molly Holzschlag

"The learning curve to develop for standards is very high and demands that people constantly learn. The sheer volume of knowledge required to work this way is humbling, and I am challenged every single day by it. I think that's why it's so interesting for many developers." (Joshua Porter - User Interface 10 Conference)

Posted on June 01, 2005 | Permalink

An Interview with Edward R. Tufte

"Although many may refer to this field as 'information design', Tufte, (...) has come to prefer the name 'analytic design'. That name reflects Tufte's focus on visual displays that serve as evidence." (Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls - Technical Communication Quaterly) - courtesy of kottke

Posted on May 10, 2005 | Permalink

Interview: Steve Krug

"In April 2004, Boxes and Arrows sent a set of questions to Steve Krug for an interview to be published in the June edition. What we didn’t know at the time was that Steve is a notoriously slow writer, and easily distracted. Eleven months later, this turned up." (Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 30, 2005 | Permalink

John Jantsch on Corporate Blogging and Referral Marketing

"I interviewed John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing to get the 'how-to' on corporate blogging and referral marketing." (Rok Hrastnik - Marketing Studies Net) - courtesy of theotherblog

Posted on March 30, 2005 | Permalink

Joseph Konstan on Human-Computer Interaction: Recommender Systems, Collaboration, and Social Good

"A very interesting project. Computer scientists don't always try to change people's social behavior." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on March 25, 2005 | Permalink

Conversation with Richard Saul Wurman

"I had an epiphany at about twenty years of age, a true momentary epiphany. It had nothing to do with making things understandable for the world. It had to do with my own ignorance. Everything comes from that terrifying moment, that milli-second, that terrifying moment of utter truth that I understood that I understood nothing. Understanding what it is like not to understand is the one thing that touches every part of my life, Even at those times when I am engaged in fun, games, frivolity, glitzy stuff and making a fool of myself it always comes from that moment, the moment when I am an empty bucket." (GK VanPatter - NextD Journal 6.1)

Posted on March 21, 2005 | Permalink

Meet the MasterMinds: Common Sense Web Design with Steve Krug

"When you watch a lot of people use web sites (which is what usability experts do), you realize that even minor things that are left unclear or ambiguous often lead users astray and keep them from succeeding at whatever they're trying to do on the site." (Management Consulting News) - courtesy of webword

Posted on February 09, 2005 | Permalink

Design as a Core Strategy

An interview with John Zapolski, national AIGA board member and expert in the design of human-centered products, systems, strategies, and decision-making structures. - "(...) a very senior person in the organization, often the CEO, implicitly 'gets' design, and uses those biases to orient the activities of the corporation. Steve Jobs is probably the most obviously example. While Jobs may not consider himself a designer, I don't think he can talk about Apple for more than five minutes within mentioning design. His passion gets operationalized within the company in a number of ways: in who the company hires and promotes ('great product people' instead of 'sales guys'), in which projects it chooses to invest in, in how the company talks about itself publicly. And its a self-reinforcing cycle." (Institute of Design Strategy Conference)

Posted on February 02, 2005 | Permalink

Czerwinski on Vizualization: Displays to the Right, Displays to the Left, Displays Everywhere

"I think the sky's the limit. That's the beauty of working at Microsoft Research. We have a generous budget to create or purchase the kinds of equipment we need, and the beauty of working here is that we have some of the best minds in the business. (...) Well, I'll tell you that information is going to follow you around and have some understanding of your context — that's going to be there in the not-so-distant future." (Mary Czerwinski - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on January 18, 2005 | Permalink

Designing the Future: Exploring China's Design Transformation

GK VanPatter interviews Lorraine Justice - "I was also frustrated with the universities and the corporations in the US. I worked in both for many years and the structure and atmosphere was not inclusive for design. People were protecting their own turf on all accounts and didn't have room for the new guy (design). Many of us in the design profession spent every day promoting design through our work and other venues, but people are loathe to give up what little power and security they perceived they would lose if they made design important. I did see improvement over the last twenty years, but what alarmed and amazed me is that the Chinese government understood design and all its implications." (NextD Journal 5.2)

Posted on January 10, 2005 | Permalink

Science in the Making: Understanding Generative Research Now!

A conversation with Liz Sanders and GK VanPatter - "So much of what is talked about today under the name of co-designing or human-centered innovation is still based on the expert-driven model. Informed ethnography is just not enough to support human-centered innovation. Participatory design practices together with an attitude adjustment are needed. Experts design for people. In the future we will be designing and innovating with people, not just for them." (NextD Journal)

Posted on November 13, 2004 | Permalink

Jonathan Ive speaks on design

"Apple and Ive are known for their attention to detail. 'Simplicity speaks of the care of how our products are developed', he said, 'it's not obvious how hard it was'." (Jonny Evans - MacWorld UK)

Posted on October 29, 2004 | Permalink

Patterns in Motion: Examining Design's Reconstruction

"Harold G. Nelson and Garry K. VanPatter discuss ups and downs, ins and outs, challenges and opportunities, related to the reconstruction of design leadership. Not for the faint hearted." - (About NextD Leadership Institute)

Posted on October 21, 2004 | Permalink

Checking in with Ben Bederson

"By focusing on the user experience, the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab aims to improve lives through projects such as the International Children's Digital Library." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on October 12, 2004 | Permalink

Making Your Content Management System Work for You: An Interview with Jeffrey Veen

"(...) I find that businesses don't treat their web site as a publication, especially those organizations developing standard content, such as product and service descriptions. Instead, they view their site as a software project -- a product that undergoes a development process and needs to be 'released'." (Christine Perfetti - User Interface 9 Conference)

Posted on September 30, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Interview with Andre Haddad (eBay)

"Andre Haddad is the Vice President of eBay's Design Labs. He's in charge of the user experience for eBay's 114 million registered users. (...) During our interview, Andre listed five major tradeoffs, and why eBay's decisions within those tradeoffs necessarily make the seller's experience somewhat complex." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of uidesigner

Posted on September 30, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

"Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, but he had something bigger in mind all along. He tells TR how his 15 years of work on the 'Semantic Web' are finally paying off." (Mark Frauenfelder - Technology Review)

Posted on September 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

A Conversation between Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen

"Jay and Dan sat down recently to discuss the current state of journalism and the impact technology is having on traditional media." (O'Reilly Network)

Posted on September 15, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Honing Your Usability Testing Skills: An Interview with Ginny Redish

"My philosophy of usability testing has always been that it is the best way to find out how well a draft or prototype or product is doing for its users. I've always believed that usability is about helping designers and developers create products where users can quickly and easily find what they need and understand what they find." (Christine Perfetti - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on September 09, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Innovation by Design: Understanding IDEO Now!

A conversation with Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) - "The majority of companies today realizes that the world is changing faster than they can change, and therefore existing assumptions about markets, business models, and products and services will not necessarily hold true. The consequence of this is that the kind of questions asked by companies as they embark on design and innovation projects is different." (Garry K. VanPatter - NextD)

Posted on August 26, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

An Interview with Dick Berry, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Ease of Use

"User Engineering is a major advancement because it delivers value, not simply Ease of Use. We all salute the flag called Ease of Use, but when it comes time to pay for it, people are reluctant if they can't see the tangible value of a product. So if you try to identify that value up front, it makes investing in the product more concrete for the buyer." (IBM Ease of Use)

Posted on July 27, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Nigel Holmes... Simplifying the Complex

"What I try to do is to explain things to people, and for people, and sometimes to companies about themselves. Taking some complex procedure, or event, or set of numbers, and making it understandable for people that haven't got a clue about it in the first place." (Mike Buchheit - Creative Refuge)

Posted on July 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Crafting a Revolution

"Aza Raskin talks about The Humane Environment, his father (inventor of the Macintosh), and challenging the status quo. This apple doesn't fall far from the tree." (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on July 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

S. Joy Mountford on Interface Design

"The ultimate technology world will be soft, flexible and addressable. But the issues will remain the same, according to interface designer S. Joy Mountford: What do people like and what do people want?" (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on July 08, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Interview with Ben Shneiderman 

"Ben Shneiderman is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. He is founder of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory and has written extensively on human-computer interaction and human factors in computing. Ben received the ACM CHI Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. During the conference 'Interaction Design and Children' at the University of Maryland, Ivo Weevers and Wouter Sluis had the great opportunity to conduct an interview with Ben Shneiderman." (SIGCHI.nl)

Posted on July 08, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Time for a Redesign: Dr. Jakob Nielsen

"There is resistance. It comes in many different ways, and often it's from the highest-level executives who don't even realize how bad their intranet is, because they don't use it themselves." (Brad Wieners - CIO Insight)

Posted on July 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

An Architect in the City of Bits

"The trial separation of bits and atoms is now over, says William J. Mitchell, head of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Computers are ubiquitous. Wireless links provide constant connectivity. Everything is media. Increasingly, we are living our lives at the points where electronic information flows, mobile bodies, and physical places intersect in particularly useful and engaging ways. These points are becoming the occasions for a characteristic new architecture of the twenty-first century." (David Pescovitz - TheFeature)

Posted on June 05, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Navigating Innovation: Understanding the KaosPilots

"Organizations today are the people and all the relationships and emotions between people. Projects are living networks of people. That's a huge change from times past when you looked at organizations as machines." (Garry VanPatter - NextD Journal 4.1)

Posted on May 17, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Ten questions for Nick Finck

"Structure is the foundation in which good design is built. Just like a house, you wouldn't build it without blueprints and laying the foundation first. Structure is perhaps the most important thing that goes into a web site. Without structure the site is just a pile of broken 2x4s and sealed off doorways. In technical terms, structure is everything from the conceptual wireframes, to the tangible markup and coding." (Web Standards Group)

Posted on May 13, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

Making 1040s a bit less taxing

"Another big difference is how the instructions are written. When modifying language on the existing 1040, Karen Schriver took care to make statements before qualifying them." (Avrum D. Lank - JSOnline) - courtesy of beth mazur

Posted on April 21, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack

SIGWEB interview with Douglas Engelbart

"Firstly, can I ask if you're a regular visitor to the Hypertext Conference? - No, sorry to say. Possibly been over a decade; I think in Texas, and Tim B-L described the plans that turned into the WWW. (...) In terms of the concepts and innovations I've been trying to communicate to the world, I seriously feel that I have been a persistent failure." (Simon Harper - SIGWEB)

Posted on April 15, 2004 | Permalink | TrackBack