User experience

Document Engineering and User Experience Design

"A great user experience on the web site doesn't mean squat if this back stage 'content choreography' goes wrong. So I've been saying that it is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a 'service system'. We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience." (Robert J. Glushko - DocOrDie)

Posted on May 13, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience Evaluation in Nokia 

"Nokia has a long history in designing for experiences, as mobile phones are very personal and experiental devices. We have established processes to take user needs and wants into account when designing new concepts, and we do various types of evaluations with real users during the development process. Experience evaluations are, however, an area we want to improve. In this paper, we describe the user experience evaluation practices in the different phases of Nokia product development process." (Virpi Roto et al.)

Posted on May 05, 2008 | Permalink

So You Want to Be a UX Manager—Seriously?

"This is my first column on the management of UX. In my column, I'll articulate what I've learned from my experience as a manager, senior manager, and director and three years in intensive senior leadership development programs. Have you ever known a manager you felt shouldn't manage people? Maybe you've worked for one. Most of us have at one point or another. On the other hand, most of us have also had great managers. What sets great managers apart from bad ones? That's one of the questions I'll explore in this article." (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted on April 23, 2008 | Permalink

Swimlanes for the Win!

"Swimlanes are a great tool for helping clients understand users, business needs and technology all at once. They help bridge the differences between multiple stakeholders by showing all the 'moving parts' of an experience in one document." (Gene Smith - nForm)

Posted on April 17, 2008 | Permalink

Experience Partners: Giving Center Stage to Customer Delight

"Today, the design industry is at the threshold of a new epoch—a point of theoretically limitlessness potential for expansion. We must decide just how, going forward, we will relate to the people who use our designs—as people who are “busy and eager to get on with it” yet “alert and caring” or, much less constructively, as people who are merely “simple-minded and stupid.” Therefore, I want to propose the concept of experience partners as a whole new way of thinking about our customers as partners in holistic product experiences. We need new terminology to describe this concept, because the term users limits us to old ways of thinking about the world we live in and the products we develop. The term experience partners reflects an emerging paradigm shift from a focus on product features to instead conceptualizing holistic product experiences and embodies our best understanding of how to design products that create delight and become integral, harmonious parts of people’s lives." (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Permalink

Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon

"The word experience has gained significant traction over the past 15 years. Beginning with the mainstreaming of the term user experience in the software industry and, later, extended to the work of marketing professionals who began thinking about marketing as being experiential, the idea of experience as a focused professional area of endeavor is alive, well, and growing rapidly. However, the more our space grows, the more confused and chaotic is our collective understanding of the meaning of these terms. To try to help clarify this murkiness, I want to share my definitional model for the fields of experience and provide guidelines for the use of various terms." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Permalink

Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?

"Much has been said about how the Web 2.0 era has fundamentally altered the way consumers interact online. But to what degree is today’s digital consumer really changing her online behavior? Are the hallmarks of Web 2.0 site design (tag clouds, wikis, social media, etc.) on the way to becoming mainstream hits or just techno-hype? And what are the implications for us, as experience designers, as we strive to create more useful and usable digital products?" (Garrick Schmitt - AA | Razorfish Digital Design Blog)

Posted on April 11, 2008 | Permalink

Sharing Your Experience about User eXperience 

"Why is the lack of a shared definition? There are several reasons: First, UX is associated with a broad range of fuzzy and dynamic concepts, including emotional, affective, experiential, hedonic, and aesthetic variables. Typical examples of so-called elemental attributes of UX like fun, pleasure, pride, joy, surprise, and intimacy are but a subset of a growing list of human values. Inclusion and exclusion of particular values or attributes seem arbitrary, depending on the author’s background and interest. Second, the unit of analysis for UX is too malleable, ranging from a single aspect of an individual end-user’s interaction with a standalone application to all aspects of multiple end-users’ interactions with the company and the merging of the services of multiple disciplines. Third, the landscape of UX research is fragmented and complicated by diverse theoretical models with different foci such as emotion, affect, experience, value, pleasure, beauty, etc." (MAUSE COST Action 294)

Posted on April 11, 2008 | Permalink

The User Experience of Software-as-a-Service Applications

"Over the last several years we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of software applications offered over the internet. The ability to release user interface changes on a potentially daily basis has forced user experience professionals to rethink their traditional linear methodologies. With a new set of internet-based usability techniques as well as the remarkable ability to receive real-time, continuous feedback from end users, designers today have the potential to create the most usable and competitive software user interfaces to date." (Katrina Rhoads Lindholm - ISD Symposium Spring 2007)

Posted on April 03, 2008 | Permalink

Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?

Audio and slides - "An audio recording synchronized to the presentation of slides is now available for my CHI 2007 conference session entitled, 'Moving UX into a position of corporate influence: Whose advice really works?' For a sense of how the members of the panel repositioned themselves on stage during the session (which you'll hear but, of course, not see), read 'So, whose advice really works?'" (Richard Anderson - riander blog)

Posted on April 01, 2008 | Permalink

Placing Value on User Assistance

"User assistance writers are often the Rodney Dangerfields of the UX world, bemoaning the fact that we don't get any respect. I think the real problem is that user assistance folks are not particularly good at communicating the ways in which we add value to an enterprise. This column explores two models that show how user assistance adds value and how we can communicate that value to those who pay our salaries—something I would like to encourage other user assistance writers to do." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on March 25, 2008 | Permalink

Closing the Communication Loop

"When our online service channels fail to meet the needs of our customers, if we’re lucky, customers will resort to an alternative channel to get the assistance they need. In doing so, our customers offer us the potential of gaining rich insights into their needs and mental models. Feedback forms, complaints, call center logs—all of these tell us valuable information about customers' failed interactions. It's in the nature of user experience work that we really begin to understand the success of our designs only after a project goes live. We minimize the risk of a complete failure by using iterative design methods and carrying out usability testing at various stages of the implementation. Whether we follow user-centered design or activity-centered design or even agile development methods, there is a certain element of uncertainty about the quality of the finished result until it hits the production servers." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted on March 17, 2008 | Permalink

Creating Killer Services

"(...) user experience design pales in comparison to experience design. Most digital encounters aren't designed to be memorable events. Users are impatient and carry a healthy sense of entitlement. Give me what I want and then get the hell out of my way." (Jeff Howard - Design for Service)

Posted on March 07, 2008 | Permalink

Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience

"This article is the fifth in a series sharing a design framework for dashboards and portals. In this article, the author describes ways to enhance the long-term value and user experience quality of portals created with the building blocks by encouraging portability and natural patterns of dialog and interaction around aggregated content." (Joe Lamantia - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on March 05, 2008 | Permalink

Show and Tell: Imagining the User Experience Beyond Point, Click, and Type

"More reliable and permanent than human memory, the technology of written language dominates as the primary method human beings use for conveying abstractions of complex ideas across space and time. The evolution of written language has complemented that of new distribution technologies—from handwritten papyrus scrolls to books and other print publications produced on offset printing presses to the pixels on our computer screens." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on February 26, 2008 | Permalink

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Human Needs and Desires

"Part One of this series, Applied Empathy, introduced a design framework for meeting human needs and desires and defined five States of Being that represent the different degrees to which products and experiences affect and motivate people in their lives. Part Two explained the three Dimensions of Human Behavior and outlined a variety of specific needs and desires for which we can intentionally design products. This third and final part of the series shows how this design framework maps to a variety of well-known products and experiences and illustrates how this framework can be put to practical use." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted on February 26, 2008 | Permalink

The road to finding is paved with data: Web analytics and user experience

"The non-digital world often provides designers with metaphors and models of how things work; these metaphors and models provide the raw material and inspiration for our digital designs. However, in physical information spaces it's difficult to integrate different modes of finding, so they provide few if any good sources of inspiration for how to integrated finding in the digital environment." (Louis Rosenfeld - Adobe Design Center)

Posted on February 20, 2008 | Permalink

Konigi

Knowledge Sharing & Competitive Research for User Experience Design - "The idea of researching how others have designed the look and feel of web sites and crafted their user interfaces is a practice many of us are engaged in continually. We may monitor innovative designers and the sites of influence that have paved the way for the practices we engage in as user experience and visual designers. In a way, it allows us to remain competitive to know what others are up to, but that awareness alone can be a double-edged sword. (...) My goal in all of this is to prove the point that design patterns are nice, but innovation for the sake of improving contextual experience is better. This site is also about demonstrating the idea that not only is it our job to give users what they expect and think they want, but more importantly it is to give them what they need and might not be able to express. I think some of the examples I showcase here do that exceptionally well." (About Konigi) - courtesy of petervandijck

Posted on February 19, 2008 | Permalink

Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future

"Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people’s needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers—or any groups of stakeholders—remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users—the very people most designers work hard to benefit—and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

Posted on February 14, 2008 | Permalink

Subject to Change: Creating great products and services for an uncertain world

"The book addresses our philosophy in creating products and services, the importance of the right kinds of research, of making design an organizational competency, of thinking of your offerings as part of a larger system, and of approaching your technological solutions in an agile way." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path blog) - Available February 25, 2008

Posted on February 05, 2008 | Permalink

Richard Buchanan Keynote - Emergence 2007

"To give information and the tools to construct knowledge, to make it actionable to use, to use it wisely or foolishly. That's what service design is about." (Design for Service)

Posted on February 05, 2008 | Permalink

What does experience design have to do with sustainability?

"Think about how to appeal to consumers and businesses with a complete solution that goes beyond the product itself, and where possible, minimize the use of products by delivering great services." (Alexa Andrzejewski - AP blog)

Posted on January 30, 2008 | Permalink

The Prism of User Experience Design

"Each idea must refract upon the six constants namely user, design, technology and mind, body, environment. What results out of this refraction is the spectrum of user experience!" (Dinesh Katre - Journal of HCI Vistas)

Posted on January 28, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience in India

"The usability and user experience communities of practice are experiencing great growth and have emerged in countries throughout the world. These developing practices have brought about a huge economic boom in the UX market as both customers and clients are beginning to understand the business benefits they bring. In India, we have undoubtedly seen the growth of these practices. Indian UX companies are delivering designs that satisfy users’ needs to their clients." (Afshan Kirmani - UXmatters)

Posted on January 23, 2008 | Permalink

How Direct Marketing and User Experience Are the Same

"What I'm telling you is that marketing and UX are blood brothers. We share similar testing methods, if not common goals. We use metrics, they use metrics. That's the key. If we can blend UX and direct marketing everyone wins." (John S. Rhodes - Apogee)

Posted on January 10, 2008 | Permalink

Engagement: Should We Care?

"These days, the idea of customer engagement is almost as hot as Web 2.0—and almost as controversial. As busy UX professionals, should we invest our time and energy in caring about engagement, or is it just another buzzword? I think we do need to understand customer engagement, so that, at a minimum, we can respond intelligently to questions about it from marketers or executives. We might even glean some useful insights from thinking about engagement. This column aims to cut through the hype and reveal the potential value of engagement" (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on January 07, 2008 | Permalink

Motorcycle UX: Riding in the Fast Lane

"As a UX designer, understanding what contributes to a great user experience, how to define who users are, what their mental models consist of, and what kinds of interactions encourage them to succeed—all of these things make me happy. But the thing that makes me the happiest is spending time riding my Moto Guzzi Breva 1100—a rare, handmade Italian motorcycle. For me, it's the ultimate user experience." (Joe Sokohl - UXmatters)

Posted on January 07, 2008 | Permalink

The Coming Age of Magic

"Yes, 'magic', meaning enchanted objects. I do not advocate that we pretend that technology is a kind of magic, but that we use our existing cultural understanding of magic objects as an abstraction to describe the behavior of ubiquitous computing devices, says Kuniavsky." (ITConversations)

Posted on January 03, 2008 | Permalink

Engaging User Creativity

"With so many choices as to how we can spend our time in the digital age, attention is becoming the most important currency. In today's splintered media environment, new digital products and services must compete with everything under the sun, making differentiation key to developing an audience that cares, invests, and ultimately drives value." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on December 19, 2007 | Permalink

Flow Online: Lessons Learned and Future Prospects

"Although the flow construct has been widely studied over the past decade in marketing and related fields, it has proven to be an elusive construct to measure and model. In this paper, we first examine two of the most important themes in flow research in the last decade: the conceptualization and measurement of flow in online environments and the marketing outcomes of flow. Second, while the unique characteristics of the Internet contributed to our belief that flow was an important construct for understanding consumer use of the Web in 1996, the environment of the Web itself has changed radically over the past decade. Thus, we consider the current context of the Internet for the role and application of the flow construct, as well as important related constructs that will be useful for understanding compelling experiences in the contemporary online environment." (Donna L. Hoffman and Thomas P. Novak - UCR eLab)

Posted on December 13, 2007 | Permalink

A Moment of Truth for Digital Agencies

"Brand shops understand the language of emotion and making promises. Digital shops understand how experiences deliver upon these brand promises." (Experience Matters)

Posted on December 07, 2007 | Permalink

Towards a UX Manifesto 

"COST294-MAUSE affiliated workshop. Effie Law, Arnold Vermeeren, Marc Hassenzahl, & Mark Blythe (eds.) 3rd September 2007, Lancaster, UK. - In this workshop, we invited researchers, educators and practitioners to contribute to the construction of a coherent Manifesto for the field of User Experience (UX). Such a UX manifesto should express statements about issues like: Fundamental assumptions underlying UX (principles), positioning of UX relative to other domains (policy) and action plans for improving the design and evaluation of UX (plans). The UX manifesto can become a reference model for future work on UX." (MAUSE COST Action 294)

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

The Perpetual Super-Novice

"(...) the problem of the perpetual super-novice. What is this? Simply put, it's the tendency of people to stop learning about a digital product—whether it's an operating system, desktop application, Web site, or hardware device. After initially becoming somewhat familiar with a system, people often continue using the same inefficient, time-consuming styles of interaction they first learned. For example, they fail to discover shortcuts and accelerators in the applications they use. Other people learn only a small portion of a product's capabilities and, as a result, don't realize the full benefits the product offers. Why? What can operating systems, applications, Web sites, and devices do to better facilitate a person's progression from novice to expert usage?" (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

The Repertory Grid: Eliciting User Experience Comparisons in the Customer's Voice

"Chances are that, if you do user research, you conduct a fair number of user interviews. When conducting interviews, our training tells us to minimize bias by asking open-ended questions and choosing our words carefully. But consistently asking unbiased questions is always a challenge, especially when you’re following a participant down a line of questioning that is important, and you haven’t prepared your questions ahead of time. Also, if you do a lot of interviews, you might fall into a pattern of asking the same types of questions for different studies. This might not bias participants, but you can bias yourself if you always investigate the same types of issues. Finally, are you sure you are asking the right questions? Your interview questions might be relevant to you and your project team, but are they the questions that will get at important issues from a user's perspective?" (Michael Hawley - UXmatters)

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

Building the UX Dreamteam

"Finding the right person to compliment your User Experience team is part art and part luck. Though good interviewing can limit the risk of a bad hire, you need to carefully analyze your current organizational context, before you can know what you need. Herein lies the art. Since you can't truly know a candidate from an interview, you gamble that their personality and skills are what they seem. Aimed at managers and those involved in the hiring decision process, this article looks at the facets of UX staff and offers ways to identify the skills and influence that will tune your team to deliver winning results." (Anthony Colfelt - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 28, 2007 | Permalink

Assessing the Quality of User Experience

"User Experience (UX) has become an increasingly important consideration in the design of technology. As part of a corporate wide strategic initiative focusing on creation of platforms, Intel has been steadily shifting toward a more holistic and user-centered approach to the design and development of technology. In essence, Intel's platform approach is about integration of technology, ingredients, infrastructure, and service or content to ensure the creation of new end-user value." (Beauregard, R. et al. - Intel Technology Journal)

Posted on November 23, 2007 | Permalink

Personalized Museum Experience: The Rijksmuseum Use Case

"This paper describes ongoing work exploring aspects of personalized access to and presentation of virtual museum collections. The project demonstrator illustrates an interactive approach to collecting data about museum visitors in terms of their interests in and preferences about artefacts from the Rijksmuseum collection. This data is stored in user profiles used further to recommend routes through the museum and to guide the users towards artefacts related to their interests and preferences. The overall goal of the project is to explore different users' characteristics and personalize users' museum experiences within the Rijksmuseum virtual and physical collections." (Lora Aroyo - Museums and the Web 2007)

Posted on November 22, 2007 | Permalink

The DIY Future: What Happens When Everyone Is A Designer?

"Broad cultural, technological, and economic shifts are rapidly erasing the distinctions between those who create and those who use, consume, or participate. This is true in digital experiences and information environments of all types, as well as in the physical and conceptual realms. In all of these contexts, substantial expertise, costly tools, specialized materials, and large-scale channels for distribution are no longer required to execute design. (...)" (Joe Lamantia)

Posted on November 21, 2007 | Permalink

Trust in the Little Things

"If this column's title sounds familiar to you, the bad news is you're getting old, but the good news is your memory hasn't gone yet. It was the title of a presentation I gave at the STC conference in Anaheim ten years ago. However, many of the points I made in that talk are still relevant to user assistance today, so I would like to update some of them and offer some new thoughts as well." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted on November 21, 2007 | Permalink

UXnet: The User Experience Network

"We have been working on a new site for UXnet and have a beta version available for you to check out. We have a new design, an automatic news feed from Putting People First, and a better calendar. We have more improvements to make, of course. We plan to switch over to the new site in a few weeks." (Keith Instone)

Posted on November 15, 2007 | Permalink

Designing for Nonprofits

User Experience Professionals Can Make a Difference in Society - "We all find ourselves looking in the mirror at one time or another and asking ourselves if we're doing all we can for the good of society. What's it all for? Those of us in the user experience profession can actually do something about it. As information architects, interaction designers, usability consultants, and developers, we don't have to change our careers to do something good for society. All we have to do is connect with the right nonprofit: One that shares our goals and whose mission we support." (Olga Sanchez-Howard - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 15, 2007 | Permalink

Quack! Some thoughts on DUX07 and the State of User Experience

"After attending numerous design events this past year, I’ve realized that they’re all evolving to a similar place, free from the specifics of their particular domain, and towards a shared “big D design” understanding. The IDSA event, nominally for industrial designers, dealt with many of the same issues as the Information Architecture Summit, the AIGA annual, DUX07, and even Adaptive Path’s UX Week. And while all these design disciplines have distinctions in their details, what they all share is an emerging orientation to serving the user’s experience. And while DUX07 began to speak to that shared space, it’s interaction-design orientation left it falling short. There’s a huge opportunity to bridge practitioners from across all these design disciplines, to weave their various approaches and challenges into a larger experience design braid. The User Experience field is still crying out for leadership." - (Peter Merholz)

Posted on November 13, 2007 | Permalink

DUX 2007: A great conference, but fundamentally off the mark

"Perhaps it's a function of the organizing process, but it appears to me that with only a few exceptions, most of the speakers and workshop leaders -- and I suppose, attendees -- appear to be shy of 40 years of age." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on November 06, 2007 | Permalink

The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

"When attempting to answer the third question, I use a framework I discovered early in my career: The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. This framework comprises the competencies a UX professional or team requires. The following sections describe these five competencies, outline some questions each competency must answer, and show the groundwork and deliverables for which each competency is responsible." (Steve Psomas - UXmatters)

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

Customer Support on the Web: Don't Call Us, We'll Call You

"When customers arrive at a Web site, they have goals and tasks they want to complete—for example, buying a movie ticket, transferring money, signing up for a service, applying for a loan, asking for help, and so on. An important requirement for a Web site is the ability for customers to serve themselves, so they can generally complete their tasks without needing to contact Customer Support or ask a friend for help. However, understandably, there are times when customers do need help from Customer Support—by either speaking over the phone or using live chat—so they can solve more complex problems or complete tasks they cannot complete on their own. In such cases, customers need email addresses and phone numbers that let them contact Customer Support directly." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters)

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

From ID to Designing for XP

Keynote at 3rd International Conference on Information Design (ICID), Curitiba, Brazil, October 8-10, 2007 - "It sums up well my current thinking about information design, user experience design, designing for experience, and the composition of memorable experiences." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

Presence and the design of trust

"Designing presence in environments in which technology plays a crucial role is critical in the current era when social systems like law, education, health and business all face major challenges about how to guarantee trustworthy, safe, reliable and efficient services in which people interact with, and via, technology. The speed and scale of the collection and distribution of information that is facilitated by technology today demands a new formulation of basic concepts for our modern societies in terms of property, copyright, privacy, liability, responsibility and so forth. The research question assumes that presence is a phenomenon that we have to understand much better than we currently do." (Caroline Nevejan)

Posted on October 25, 2007 | Permalink

Marketing Isn't a Dirty Word

"Think you're not into marketing? Think again. As UX professionals, we share much in common with our close cousins, the marketers. We all seek to understand customers—needs, preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and more. We all seek to create positive touchpoints with customers and, in turn, a positive affiliation with our product or company brand. We all know the importance of communicating effectively with customers and evaluating the performance of our work." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on October 24, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience 101: How to create a great online experience

"Clothes cover you. Cars move you from place to place. Yet while we care that products have some basic features, all things being equal we choose the one that delivers, or at least appears, to deliver the user experience we desire." (Kevin Mireles)

Posted on October 16, 2007 | Permalink

Who includes user experiences in large companies?

"This poster presents a case study in which Marketing and R&D departments of a large company collaborated in a context mapping project. Emphasis was placed on exploring who the results should be communicated to and in which way this communication should be conveyed. The presented case study shows that user experiences fit the domain of R&D, and that an intensive process involving various stakeholders throughout the organisation is necessary." (Froukje Sleeswijk Visser and Pieter Jan Stappers - Include 2007 Papers, posters and workshops)

Posted on October 11, 2007 | Permalink

Interaction Experience: Pliability, Fluency and Other Experiential Qualities

"Everybody wants to design for good use experiences, but not many seem to know exactly what that means once we move beyond usability and usefulness. In this presentation, I introduce the notion of experiential qualities, which refers to attempts to characterize what 'good use' means for different genres of digital products and services. Two experiential qualities are introduced in more detail: (1) Pliability: the sense of captivating and malleable information in interactive visualizations, and (2) Fluency: a desirable characteristic in situations of multiple media streams fighting for the user's attention." (Jonas Löwgren - FromBusinessToButtons)

Posted on October 03, 2007 | Permalink

SlideShare UX Presentations

A collection of presentations on the topic of User Experience. (SlideShare)

Posted on September 25, 2007 | Permalink

UX Design as Communities of Practice

Including slides and audio - "The cluster of practices and professions we've come to think of as supporting User Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person's discipline define that person's work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues among communities of learning and doing, i.e. communities of practice. The communities of practice model gives us a better language for discussing our roles, our work and the future of our respective practices and disciplines. It also gives us a useful way of thinking about how to design for particular kinds of collaboration, especially emergent, collective work in support of improving a practice." (Andrew Hinton - Adaptive Path UX Week 2007)

Posted on September 20, 2007 | Permalink

Virtuosos of the Experience Domain 

"There is a lot of talk lately about 'Experience Design'. Companies sell experience design, but don’t define what it is. Online discussion groups debate who the virtuosos of the experience domain should be. Design educators wonder if they should be teaching it. And they wonder how they should be teaching it. (...) There is no such thing as experience design. You can't design experience because experiencing is in people. You can design for experiencing, however. You can design the scaffolding or infrastructure that people can use to create their own experiences." (Liz Sanders - MakeTools)

Posted on September 19, 2007 | Permalink

The best experiences aren't designed. They're composed.

"The most evocative experiences -- those that have lasting power, that alter one's perspectives, apprehension, appreciation, and actions -- aren't designed. They're composed. The distinction isn't subtle. Compositions are easy to identify and remember: everyone can cite his or her favorite composed experiences. Designs, for the most part, aren't so easy to identify or remember. In many cases, they're not even designed to be memorable; they're designed to be imperceptible." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience: Towards a Unified View 

Proceedings of the 2nd COST294-MAUSE International Open Workshop (October 2006, Oslo Norway) - "The concept of usability has been evolving, along with the emerging IT landscape and the ever-blurring boundary of the field of HCI. Specifically, the so-called user experience (UX) movement is gaining ground." (COST Action 294)

Posted on August 29, 2007 | Permalink

XcD

"The scope of human-computer interaction design has widened to include concerns with fun, emotion, beauty, aesthetics and values. There is an increasing emphasis on holistic approaches to user experience and what is now called experience design. A number of frameworks and theoretical approaches to experience design have been developed and a range of methods and techniques have also been proposed. This website is part of the work carried out on the EPSRC grant Theory and Method for Experience Centred Design. This site links to our own work and that of others on theory and method for experience centred design or XcD as we seem to have started calling it." (Mark A. Blythe)

Posted on August 27, 2007 | Permalink

Design for the Dream Economy

"After the eras of the Commodity Economy, the Manufacturing Economy, the Service Economy and the Information Economy, we have now entered the era of the Dream Economy.The key to success in the Dream Economy is an in-depth and holistic understanding of people. It's not only about meeting people’'s practical needs, but also about meeting their aspirations and providing a positive emotional experience." - (Pat Jordan - uiGarden.net)

Posted on August 24, 2007 | Permalink

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

"As creators of digital user experiences, we must transform complex workflows and tasks into useful applications. Experts have written much about the UX design process as it applies to broad audiences, industry-specific vertical markets, and large corporate user groups. However, as our evolving information economy continues to encourage greater and greater specialization of job roles, there is an increased need for customized applications—digital systems that only a select few people will ever use." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on August 21, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience and the Analysts

"As part of our ongoing research of the UX environment, we recently took a closer look at the six major analyst firms (Aberdeen, AMR, Forrester, Gartner, IDC, and Yankee). We were hoping to determine if the analysts were paying much attention to user experience, so we searched a variety of UX-related terms (21, to be precise) on their respective web sites. We then looked at which firms paid attention to which UX topics, how these firms stacked up against each other, and how they compared to the web's overall UX consciousness." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on August 16, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience Strategy

"For while our work certainly supports incremental progress towards better usability, findability, and credibility, user experience methods are equally well-suited to disruptive innovation. In the deep dives of design research, we gain insight into the latent needs of users, and with our sketches, mental models, and prototypes we bring greater richness and depth to the exploration of possible, probable, and preferable futures." (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted on July 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Market Maturity Framework is Still Important

"Now, more than ten years later, we're finding ourselves talking about the framework once again. Time has let us simplify it: Stage I is now Technology, Stage II is now Features, Stage III is now Experience, and Stage IV is now Integration." (Jared Spool - UIE Brain Sparks)

Posted on July 18, 2007 | Permalink

Comparing UXD Business Models

"When leaders of UX organizations get together, we always seem to talk about how our UX groups are structured and why. Just as designers solve user interface design problems, their leaders solve organizational design problems. It's what we do." (Jim Nieters and Garett Dworman - UXmatters)

Posted on July 12, 2007 | Permalink

On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

"Whether the emergence of a self-conscious experience design community reflects a canny land-grab on the part of a few visible and reasonably influential practitioners, an underlying recognition that our technosocial practices have transcended the rather limited model of the 'user' ultimately derived from old-school human-computer interaction studies, boredom with a thoroughly mapped landscape, or something else entirely, it’s undeniably been a successful way of framing things." (Adam Greenfield - Speedbird)

Posted on June 29, 2007 | Permalink

Audio and the User Experience

"For most people, sound is an essential part of everyday living. Sound can deliver entertainment—like our favorite music or the play-by-play call of our hometown baseball—and vital information—like the traffic and news reports on the radio as we drive to work." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on June 26, 2007 | Permalink

LEMtool: Understanding, researching and integrating emotion in the design process

"The LEMtool will help you to improve the user experience and build relationships based on form, function, usability and emotions!" (About LEMtool)

Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Marc Hassenzahl

English language interview and video registration of Marc Hassenzahl's keynote address at the conference. (HCI methods: way to go? - Chi Nederland)

Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink

What Does Rich Mean?

"Amid the hype of Web 2.0, 'rich' has become the prime buzzword for fresh, sexy digital products, marked by glossy buttons with AJAX actions. But what does rich really mean? Using the concepts of Classical rhetoric as a framework, Uday Gajendar looks to transcend the hype and dig into the value of richness for digital products." (Uday Gajendar - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on June 06, 2007 | Permalink

12 Theatrical Tools

"Everyone is talking about the experience economy, customer experience management, and experience design these days. The big idea is, in a world where all products are pretty good and all services are fairly decent, any one of them do the job well enough. So offerings become interchangeable - or commoditised - and can only compete on price." (Adam Lawrence - Experience Design .de)

Posted on June 01, 2007 | Permalink

Sharing Ownership of UX

"The three key members of a multidisciplinary product team—the product manager, UX architect, and system architect—work together collaboratively to define a product’s vision, functionality, and form. Each key member of the product team has primary responsibility and decision-making authority for a specific aspect of the product vision." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on May 29, 2007 | Permalink

Catalyze: Creative People Designing Extraordinary Software (beta)

"Catalyze is a member-driven community for all professionals involved in Application Definition and Design. If you are a business analyst, UI designer, information architect, usability professional, interaction designer, product manager, project manager or anyone else involved in the definition process of software applications, this community is for you and will be worth your time." (About Catalyze) - courtesy of bertmulder

Posted on May 29, 2007 | Permalink

What is experience?

"In April 2007, I posted five questions about the nature of experience. I asked Total Experience's readers to offer their answers as comments." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on May 23, 2007 | Permalink

What Is Holding User Experience Back Where You Work?

"Interestingly, in several cases, 'propelling forward' encompassed 'moving upstream', to use yet another metaphor which, at least on the surface, is moving in the opposite direction!" (Richard Anderson - UX Magazine)

Posted on May 22, 2007 | Permalink

How chopsticks came to symbolize user experience design

"Lessons learned: A great product keeps customers coming back for more. A great experience makes them bring friends." (Robert Barlow-Busch - chopsticker)

Posted on May 21, 2007 | Permalink

Towards Experience-Focused HCI

Videos - "Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Ph.D. Candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, talks about 'Towards Experience-Focused HCI' at the March 2007 BostonCHI meeting." (BostonCHI)

Posted on May 18, 2007 | Permalink

The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision

"When you create an experience vision, you try to picture mentally what the experience of using your design will be like at some point in the future. As we conduct our research exploring best practices for experience design, we’ve discovered that nearly every successful team has actively created an experience vision that they frequently refer to. Often their visions are for experiences five or ten years in the future." (Jared Spool - User Interface 12)

Posted on May 15, 2007 | Permalink

Different

"There were three evaluations required at the inception of a product idea: a marketing requirement document, an engineering requirement document, and a user experience document," Donald Norman recalls. Rolston elaborates: Marketing is what people want; engineering is what we can do; user experience is how people like to do things." (Daniel Turner - Technology Review)

Posted on May 08, 2007 | Permalink

UX Pioneers

"The UX Pioneers project aims to reveal the motivations and perspectives of key players in the User Experience industry through in-depth interviews and discussions with the site's publisher (...)" (Tamara Adlin)

Posted on May 03, 2007 | Permalink

Envisioning the Future of User Experience

"What is the future of user experience as a practice, as a philosophy of design, and as a research topic?" (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on April 10, 2007 | Permalink

Using Technical Communication Skills in User Experience

"User experience professionals can also learn some lessons from and find potential recruits in technical communicators as they have skills that can be applied directly to the design process." (Theresa Putkey - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 10, 2007 | Permalink

Framework of Product Experience

"In this paper, we introduce a general framework for product experience that applies to all affective responses that can be experienced in human-product interaction. Three distinct components or levels of product experiences are discussed: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience. All three components are distinguished in having their own lawful underlying process. The aesthetic level involves a product’s capacity to delight one or more of our sensory modalities. The meaning level involves our ability to assign personality or other expressive characteristics and to assess the personal or symbolic significance of products. The emotional level involves those experiences that are typically considered in emotion psychology and in everyday language about emotions, such as love and anger, which are elicited by the appraised relational meaning of products. The framework indicates patterns for the processes that underlie the different types of affective product experiences, which are used to explain the personal and layered nature of product experience." (Pieter Desmet & Paul Hekkert - Int.'l Journal of Design 1.1) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on April 04, 2007 | Permalink

Ruining the User Experience

"There's a lot we, as designers of the web experience, can learn from something as simple as a water glass." (Aaron Gustafson - A List Apart)

Posted on March 29, 2007 | Permalink

LEMTool: Measuring emotions during interaction

"The project is about developing a web based measurement tool to measure emotions during interactions with websites. This is a long sentence with many important words, but it’s basically about an appliance that helps web designers improve the user experience. A better experience will satisfy the user and will most likely improve his or her thoughts and certainly feelings about the owner of the website. All of this results in trust, loyalty, credibility, profitability and returning customers that are willing to purchase products." (Kevin Capota - Design & Emotion)

Posted on March 23, 2007 | Permalink

Experiencing and Experience

"Technology, from my father's point of view, was always be an extension and enrichment of experience not a substitute for experience. (...) One of his great gifts as a speaker was the fact that he made you experience his ideas and carried you along with the connection between your experience and his experience. 'Information is experience. Experience is information.'" (Allegra Fuller Snyder - The Buckminster Fuller Institute)

Posted on March 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Experience Evolution: Developments in Design Practice 

"Designers today have opportunities to design much more than simply static objects. We are designing integrated and dynamic interactions with objects, spaces and services and helping companies with more strategic decisions. Expanded opportunities have spawned developments in traditional design practice." (Jane Fulton Suri - IDEO)

Posted on March 19, 2007 | Permalink

Tools for Experience Design

"This is a project-based studio course in which students from a variety of disciplines work together in small teams on a quarter-long design project. It attempts to answer the question, 'How do you support the innovation design process in a complex world with tangible, real world solutions?'." (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design)

Posted on March 19, 2007 | Permalink

The Difference Between Usability and User Experience

"User experience takes far more effort to do well, but the results have far better impact." (Jared Spool - User Interface Engineering Brain Sparks)

Posted on March 16, 2007 | Permalink

UX Zeitgeist

"UX Zeitgeist combines input from the UX community with data from a variety of web services to generate an unequaled collection of UX books and related topics. UX Zeitgeist also profiles the trends that describe the field's evolution." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media) - congrats!

Posted on March 10, 2007 | Permalink

Marc Hassenzahl on User Experience

"Usability [with its focus on effectiveness and efficiency] wants us to die rich; user experience wants us to die happy." (HOT Topics) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on March 09, 2007 | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 2

"(...) we'll cover how moving into product management will change your focus, responsibilities, and challenges; what you will gain and lose leaving user experience work; and some ways to prepare yourself for the move." (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 26, 2007 | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 1

"User experience professionals are increasingly becoming interested in the business aspects of what they do. At their core, the user experience roles focus on understanding user needs and creating useful and easy-to-use products that address those needs." (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on February 14, 2007 | Permalink

The human factor in gadget, Web design

"Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA's Mission Control." (Stefanie Olsen - C|net news.com)

Posted on February 13, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience Teams & Information Architects

"User Experience is critical for the success of products. Consumers/end users have come to expect an integrated, easy to use experience of web sites and applications. No single individual can perform all tasks necessary for user experience and a team needs to be created that takes corporate politics into consideration and properly balances the goals of the individual team members." (Mike Oren - Shiny Happy People)

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Permalink

Connecting Cultures, Changing Organizations: The User Experience Practitioner As Change Agent

"Readers of UXmatters probably know that user-centered design (UCD) and usability activities have the most positive impact when they're carried out early in the ideation, design, and development cycle. Probably, many of you have worked in organizations that weren’t very experienced in UCD or usability engineering. You may have experienced something like the following the interchange with a development manager (...)" (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on January 21, 2007 | Permalink

The iPhone User Experience: A First Look

"A collective gasp was heard around the world following the January, 2007, MacWorld Conference, when Steve Jobs pulled the wraps off the long-rumored iPhone. He proclaimed it a revolutionary product with a brand-new 'multi-touch' interface as breakthrough and breathtaking as the mouse interface of the 1960s. Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let's take a look." (Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on January 17, 2007 | Permalink

Experience design is not about brands

"The problem is that 'brand' will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an 'inside-out' proposition - a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company. Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. 'Experience' is outside-in." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path blog)

Posted on January 04, 2007 | Permalink

Pervasive fun

"Fun is a pervasive feature of software development, not only for open source programmers but in the area of commercial software development too: Open source developers that are paid for their work are observed to be very motivated and prepared for future effort, especially if they enjoy their development time. Furthermore, the fun that programmers experience functions as a good proxy for their productivity. Therefore, employers that want to enhance the programmers’ productivity can safely invest in an environment of fun for developers in their company." (Benno Luthinger and Carola Jungwirth - First Monday 12.1)

Posted on January 04, 2007 | Permalink

The Bottom Line of Experience Design: Q&A with Nathan Shedroff

"The word design means many things, but to people who design for a living, their profession normally breaks down into specific categories like graphic design, industrial design, and information design. Nathan Shedroff is one of the pioneers in experience design, an approach that encompasses multiple senses, usually in a physical environment. As author of the book Experience Design and president of the Board of Directors for the AIGA Center for Brand Experience, Nathan has important insights for those who design experiences with PowerPoint." (Cliff Atkinson - sociable media)

Posted on December 14, 2006 | Permalink

We need theories of experience design

"(...) it's pretty difficult to state a theory of experience design. Theories are rare in every design discipline, but in those where theories exist -- like the theory of taxonomical structure in information design or wayfinding theory in environmental design -- they're reliable guides to practice." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on December 10, 2006 | Permalink

Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience

"Browsing the Web with a small mobile phone may sound absurd at first. The increasing importance of the Internet means, however, that a person should be able to access Web services even when not sitting in front of a computer. Since there are approximately three times more mobile phones than computers in the world, a mobile phone may provide the only way to access the Web for many people. Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. Understanding the user needs in different use contexts is the key to improving the user experience and thereby popularizing device independent access to Internet. In her dissertation research, Virpi Roto has interviewed users of mobile browsers in several countries, and identified characteristics that help improve the mobile browsing user experience if taken into consideration. In addition to user and use context, all the system components should be taken into account: device, browser, network infrastructure, and web site." (Virpi Roto - Nokia Research Center) - courtesy of vuccosic

Posted on December 07, 2006 | Permalink

What is holding User Experience back or propelling User Experience forward where you work?

"Why bother with the speed boats and the anchors and the propellers? There are several reasons, but one of the most interesting, in my view, is how they appear to help tap what participants actually 'experience' in their workplace." (Richard Anderson - Riander)

Posted on December 06, 2006 | Permalink

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

"Typically, we design products for a specific end state. For example, someone has an idea that a large beanbag can function as a chair. Or someone imagines how improving a paperless payment system can work more effectively than a manual system that is currently in use. Or customer feedback leads to the optimization of a Web site workflow that helps people complete their tasks more quickly. But in each of these examples, the focus is on things other than the essence of the actual people who will use the products—whether that focus is on the application of a particular material, on using technology to make a process easier, or responding to customers’ feedback to keep them satisfied. As I previously described in Part One of this series, the intentional attempt to satisfy people’s internal needs and desires simply isn’t there." (Dirk Knemeyer - UXmatters)

Posted on December 04, 2006 | Permalink

Creating Pleasurable Interfaces

Notes and presentation slides - "A special thanks to everyone who made it out to either of these events. As was probably evident, this is a topic I'm somewhat passionate about. And, as is true of any subject dealing with emotions, beauty or pleasure, this is a rich and somewhat subjective discussion. My User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model forms the skeleton of my presentation. Think of it as 'Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs' except for interfaces." (Stephen P. Anderson - poetpainter)

Posted on November 26, 2006 | Permalink

Teehan+Lax UX Fund

"The UX Fund is an investment experiment inspired by Jeneanne Rae and the Design Council. We believe that companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price." (teehan+lax)

Posted on November 14, 2006 | Permalink

User Experience Research

"Creating a 'killer user experience' owes a lot to understanding subtle aspects such as User Interface Friction, and that is why I believe it is a very important notion. In many ways, creating an excellent user interface has become the digital equivalent of first-class manufacturing: we need it as users, and we need to understand what contributes to it if we are developing technology." (Andreas Pfeiffer - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on November 07, 2006 | Permalink

The Web and Beyond: SIGCHI Conference in Amsterdam

"The Netherlands’ tenth annual SIGCHI Conference took place on Thursday, June 8th, 2006, in Amsterdam. Titled 'The Web and Beyond', the conference focused primarily on interaction design for Web 2.0. The conference drew a capacity crowd to the fabulous art deco Theater Tuschinski." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on October 25, 2006 | Permalink

Conference Report: The Web and Beyond

"About the so-called Semantic Web Initiative, Jared stated that, as an historian, he wanted proof of its existence. Only when people can show him the Semantic Web will he have an opinion about it. According to Jared Spool, in general, 99.9% of everything is crap." (Peter J. Bogaards - UXmatters)

Posted on October 24, 2006 | Permalink

Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience 2/2

"An information architect's evaluation of user experience is often highly subjective and gains value with an evidence-based understanding produced by web analytics. User testing and web analytic data are currently the only ways to verify the heuristic assumptions upon which a website is redesigned." (Andrea Wiggins - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 19, 2006 | Permalink

The Coming Age of Magic

"(...) I presented a short history of the desktop metaphor as a way of thinking about screen-based user interface design and laid out my thoughts for why magic should be a metaphor for the user experience design of ubiquitous computing." (Mike Kuniavsky - Orange Cone) - courtesy of adaptivepath

Posted on October 15, 2006 | Permalink

Experiencing Experience

"Technically, most designers are attempting to design meaning, not experience. The experience of eating a cookie, for instance, can be described in very clear terms. But, capturing the unique meaning which that cookie had for one individual was what made Proust's madeleine the stuff of great literature. A simple cookie for one person is a trigger for emotion-laden memories for another. But, most often, designers must create experiences for people they don't know. So, how can designers create opportunities for meaningful experiences for people they don't know? By paying close attentions to patterns." (Tom Guarriello - UX Magazine)

Posted on October 15, 2006 | Permalink

What Is User Experience Design?

"(...) the field of user experience design takes a broad approach to the enhancement of products, combining elements from various fields to create an optimal and well-rounded experience. This wholistic methodology is often more adept at helping to reach a set of goals that encompass passive and active user interactions–goals determined both by users and the business or organization." (Paradyme) - courtesy of usernomics

Posted on October 13, 2006 | Permalink

Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before

"Because evolutionary products are far more common than revolutionary products, UCD techniques have focused more on how to approach projects for which the problem space is fairly well understood - both by UX designers and by users. UCD techniques are best at helping us determine how to solve such problems - which is not to downplay the challenges of those sorts of projects. However, the situation is different for breakthrough products, where potential users often have difficulty imagining a solution to a problem." (George Olsen - UXmatters)

Posted on October 11, 2006 | Permalink

Design and Emotion 2006 Conference Proceedings

"The Design and Emotion Society and Chalmers University of Technology invite you to the fifth conference on Design and Emotion, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 27-29, 2006. Emotions arise towards people, towards places, towards food, and towards things. Emotions influence our well-being as well as our purchase decisions. From a design perspective, we need to know more about how artefacts elicit emotions. We also need to know more about the way we can identify the relevant emotional aspects and how we can evaluate the emotional impact of a particular design. The International Conference on Design and Emotion 2006 is the arena for these topics." (D&E 2006 - Design & Emotion Society)

Posted on October 05, 2006 | Permalink

Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience

"Cooperative selection of success measures early in the project's definition or discovery phase will align design and evaluation from the start, and both the information architect and web analyst can better prove the value of their services and assure that the project’s focus remains on business and user goals. To provide a useful context for design, Rubinoff's user experience audit is one of several tools information architects can use to evaluate a website." (Andrea Wiggins - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 02, 2006 | Permalink

Strategy06: A UX Professional's Experience of the Conference

"Strategy06, the second annual IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) Institute of Des