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Interviews A conversation with Dan Klyn: Richard Saul Wurman & IA for UXersStanding on the shoulders of giants gives a perfect view of the future. "Initially I went back to 1976. That's a fairly well-known time when Wurman introduced the idea of the architecture of information at this conference that he was the chairman of in Philadelphia but then going further back from there the artifacts become increasingly more difficult to get your hands on and yet the payload for how it could influence how we do our work today gets richer and richer." (Patrick Quattlebaum a.k.a. @ptquattlebaum ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on June 11, 2013 | Permalink Visualizing service designVisual tools empower all design fields. "When we speak about a service or a system, an ecosystem or concept, they are a lot of times abstract things. Visualization representation is a way to make them more tangible." (Elizabeth Wood ~ frog design mind) Posted on May 31, 2013 | Permalink Interview with content strategy author Ann RockleyGetting your hands dirty with markup for real. "Content strategists should realize that XML isn't scary and it is really powerful for doing cool things with your content. In the 'olden days' when we first began creating Web-based content we used to have to use HTML codes to tag the content, now you create content in web forms or Word and rarely, if ever, have to think about the HTML codes. The same is true of XML, you don't have to use codes to create content, there are lots of tools that 'hide' the XML tags. However, XML is much smarter than HTML. HTML tags describe the formatting structure of the content, XML defines the semantic structure of the content. For example, we can define that some content is a teaser and then have the system handle it differently when published to the Web, mobile, or even print." Posted on May 23, 2013 | Permalink A talk with computer graphics pioneer Ivan SutherlandAnother giant with strong shoulders. "I couldn't end a conversation with one of the fathers of computer graphics without asking him where he thought the field might go in the next fifty years. I should have remembered, though: Sutherland had already explained to me that he's not into the prediction game." (Harry McCracken a.k.a. @harrymccracken ~ TIME.com) Posted on April 16, 2013 | Permalink "The music is not in the piano"One of the giants on whom's shoulders we stand. Interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay ~ "One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent "agriculture" we could put the world back together and all would prosper." (David Greelish ~ Techland) Posted on April 03, 2013 | Permalink Interview with Luke WroblewskiCan be listened to while being mobile as well. "Joe Welinske of Blink recently interviewed Luke Wroblewski. Luke discusses the reaction to his book Mobile First. He offers suggestions for UX professionals on how to gain support for a mobile first design strategy." (ConveyUX) Posted on February 18, 2013 | Permalink Prototyping for mobile designsAlways wondered why mobile design would be different than plain software design. Is being able to move around the differentiator? "Building a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available." (Kelly Goto a.k.a. @go2girl ~ User Interface Engineering) Posted on February 08, 2013 | Permalink "All of the work we do is change management"Karens star is rising and rising. Interview with Karen McGrane. ~ "For us this is a generational issue, and it's our life's work to help contribute to organizations’ learning how digital design (and information architecture) should fit into their organization. If we are going to be successful, we may not fix it for ourselves, but for the next generation of digital designers, I want to leave those organizations better off. There will also be some social darwinism, where the organizations that successfully navigate this transition are the ones that are going to survive." Posted on February 05, 2013 | Permalink What do you predict will be the future trend of user experience?Being recognized, valued and appreciated by business is important in a society in which everything is seen as a market and a transaction. "I think user experience will continue to become more strategically important instead of just service-oriented. What I'm seeing right now is user experience company-wide goals and metrics that are driven by the highest management level. This is starting to happen more in the technology world, but might spread to other types of products. UX roles might become a lot more specialized; however, what companies will look for is people that have cross-functional skills and can work in a variety of settings. You will start seeing compartments in the field as companies try to find out the best user experience strategy. You will also see the new grads with lots of different skills in their education and a background in design combined with other types of fields that previously might not be associated." (Danielle Arad a.k.a. @uxmotel ~ UX Motel) Posted on January 17, 2013 | Permalink Design your lifeOne of my very few 'heroes'. "It occurs to me at this point that Richard Wurman behaves like a 77-year-old child. I do not mean this to be condescending or dismissive. It is one of the things I like most about him. He seems to have somehow maintained a portion of preoperational egocentrism and the world is richer as a result." (Brendan McGetrick ~ Domus) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio Posted on December 06, 2012 | Permalink An Interview with Ann Rockley, the "Mother of Content Strategy"A mother, not thé mother. Who's the father? Who's the child? "The other driver is the digital content revolution. While best-of-breed technical communication and training departments have been creating multi-channel outputs for years using a write-it-once, use-it-often strategy, traditional publishers haven't felt the pressure to adopt this approach until the Kindle, smartphones, tablet computers - and of course, the iPad - changed consumer demand." Posted on November 29, 2012 | Permalink User Experience is Not Just Design, It's the Key to Innovation and GrowthIt's Garrett, not Garret. "It's not every day you have Jesse James Garrett stop by to talk about the state of user experience and its role in the future of business. But, we were fortunate to have him visit the set of Revolution to talk about the importance of people and experiences and how UX deserves the attention of the c-suite." Posted on October 26, 2012 | Permalink An interview with Ben ShneidermanFrom the New New to the New. There's progress. "HCI courses are still not mandatory for CS students. It is still a new discipline." Posted on October 05, 2012 | Permalink Three questions for Lou RosenfeldAnd more and more 'publishers' ahead. "Rosenfeld Media is bringing the concept of publisher as platform to life." (Joe Wikert a.k.a. @jwikert ~ Tools of Change for Publishing) Posted on September 25, 2012 | Permalink Future of Work: Interview with Hugh DubberlyHugh has great vision, knowledge and focus. "(...) it is imperative that companies focus on service design to gain competitive advantage." Posted on August 30, 2012 | Permalink The gadfly of information architectureAlways a delight to have him speak. Q&A with Richard Saul Wurman ~ "At a sprightly 77 years, Mr Wurman is the author of scores of books on technology and design, and is credited with having coined the term "information architect". During the interview, he was true to his eccentric, irascible self, which has inspried many to his causes. "We can't make use of success or failure from one place or another because we have no common language," he says metaphorically. "We also have no common language in medicine. We have very few common languages," he says. "You need common filters. In all this big data, you need filters, because often innovation comes from this filter, because you can see a pattern. And I'm interested in those patterns."" Posted on August 16, 2012 | Permalink Why Top Execs are Starting to Care About UX DesignCrossing the border to CX. "Garrett shares how research, psychology, behavior and design can open the doors to meaningful creativity for design and product experience strategies. But more importantly, he shares how executives across the organization can learn from the UX team to improve services, business models and overall customer relationships." (Brian Solis a.k.a. briansolis ~ Mashable) Posted on August 14, 2012 | Permalink Future of Work: Interview with Hugh DubberlySo, don't think about designing things, but systems, as in biology. "Understanding the soul of a product (or of an organization) requires a conversation - about what you believe in, about fundamental values, and about quality. These ideas must be argued and agreed upon. Likewise, expressing the soul of a product requires still more conversations, still more argument and agreement. At this level, design is conversation." Posted on July 16, 2012 | Permalink Bringing Drama to Service DesignA kind of method acting. "We spoke with Adam StJohn Lawrence, who describes himself as a a customer experience and service design consultant, a professional comedian and an actor. Together with service innovator Markus Hormess working under the name of Work•Play•Experience, they use unique theatrical tools to help companies turn good services into memorable service experiences." Posted on May 30, 2012 | Permalink The QofC Interview: Luke Wroblewski, Author of Mobile FirstLukeW and Forbes: quite a combination. "To me it seems more like inside-out versus outside-in. Inside-out thinking is, This is our process, this is our org chart, this is how we do things, and everything is sort of we, we, we. And they try to project that out to the world. Versus outside-in is like here's some poor guy who's going to wind up on our website, let's look at it from his perspective. He doesn't care that we have these fifteen departments. He doesn't care about these fifteen processes that we have for making decisions, he wants to do blank. And just kind of flipping your mindset like that can go a very long way." (Anthony Kosner ~ Forbes) Posted on February 05, 2012 | Permalink Out with the Old, In with the NewLots of food for thought in it. A Conversation with Don Norman and Jon Kolko on Trends in and the Relationships between Art, Business, and Design ~ "The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful." (Richard Anderson a.k.a. @Riander) Posted on November 14, 2011 | Permalink Kristina Halvorson on Content StrategySpreading the gospel with exposure of the person and the field in the MS universe. "Content strategy identifies how content will help achieve your business objectives. It informs how organisations create, deliver and govern or take care of their content, online and beyond. It helps people move from thinking about content launch to content life cycle, allowing them to create a plan to manage that content over time." (Tom May a.k.a. @tom_may ~ .net Magazine) Posted on November 04, 2011 | Permalink Anthropology extracts the true nature of techHave we found the Margaret Mead of user experience in Technology? "Genevieve Bell, director of interaction and experience research at Intel Corporation, says when she approaches technology she is "less interested in thinking about the piece of technology itself and more interested in the kind of work that technology is trying to do and the larger context in which it finds itself." In the following interview, Bell discusses her experience as a 'Thinker in Residence' and how anthropology concepts can be used to make tech more consumer centric." (Jenn Webb a.k.a. @jennwebb ~ O'Reilly Radar) Posted on October 31, 2011 | Permalink Why is usability so important in healthcare?Too bad user experience (still) doesn't ring a bell. "Usability is critical for any medical device and is a key element of our product design and innovation. A product may be technically excellent, but if there is a problem with how it is used or applied, its effectiveness will be impaired." Posted on October 11, 2011 | Permalink Site Search Analytics: A Conversation with Lou RosenfeldAdding some more buzz to the launch. "Lou Rosenfeld's newest book, Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers, has been the subject of more prelaunch buzz than most UX books have gotten this year. It seemed everyone was tweeting, talking, or speculating about it before the ink had even had a chance to dry. And, true to the hype, this book delivers in spades. If you read one book this year to hone your craft, add value to your UX practice, or enable you to help your clients, this is the one! Lou recently found some time in his very hectic schedule to sit down and talk with me about his book and the burgeoning practice of site search analytics (SSA)." (Kristina Mausser a.k.a. @krismausser ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink Q&A with Colleen Jones"How did you come to think of influential content in this way? Two big reasons. One was I studied rhetoric in grad school. I kept using rhetorical principles in my work successfully. But, if I tried to explain to people what I did as rhetoric, they had no idea what I was talking about. So, I saw an opportunity to make those principles practical and usable. The other big reason was over the past few years, I've seen persuasive marketing and design use pushy tactics in the name of cognitive and social psychology. Psychology principles focus more on form than on substance. Psychology, as a simple example, would tell you to have logos and quotes that endorse your product or service. Rhetoric would tell you to have those endorsements be from brands and people that your audience identifies with." (Rachel Lovinger ~ Scatter/Gather) Posted on May 05, 2011 | Permalink Karen McGrane: CS Forum podcast episode 4"People love the recent history of things like Xerox PARC and Apple Computer. And I might set the history of content strategy almost on like a separate track, an alternate timeline. A lot of the history of principles that apply to content strategy come out of very old traditions in rhetoric and technical communication. (...) And that's one of the things that's so exciting to me about content strategy is, it's bringing a lot of these principles that have been discussed for decades into this new space of the web and digital media." (Randall Snare ~ CS Forum '11) Posted on April 05, 2011 | Permalink Andreas Resmini on Pervasive IA"(...) it's not just the Web anymore. There's bigger game out there for us to design, and I'm going to make a point that attendees walk out of the workshop with three basic fundamental take-aways: they understand why we talk of pervasive information architectures, they know what pervasive information architectures are, and they have the tools to hack them." (IA Summit 2011) Posted on March 13, 2011 | Permalink On the scalability of design thinking and transdisciplinary design education"Interview with Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2011. Topics include design thinking and India, design,innovation and entrepreneurship driving India's inclusive growth, transdisciplinary design education and design thinking and designers." (aabhira aditya) Posted on March 03, 2011 | Permalink CS Forum podcast episode 1: Gerry McGovern"There is nothing more important on the web than content. But don't talk about it. Talk about the success of the customer or the lack of success of the customer. Because most organizations realize today that if they're not customer centric, they don't have much of a future." (Randall Snare ~ CS Forum 2011) Posted on February 24, 2011 | Permalink Content and Clout: A Chat with Colleen Jones"There's a big difference between persuasion, or influence, and manipulation. People have experienced much interactive marketing (...) as a collection of manipulative tricks—to the point that the connotations of marketing and advertising are now almost synonymous with lying. That really needs to change." (Kristina Mausser ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 21, 2011 | Permalink Effective Design Documentation Without a FussAn Interview with Dan Brown - "Design documentation is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation." (Brad Nunnally ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on February 18, 2011 | Permalink The Digital Life: Episode 12"The Digital Life is an online radio show that explores important, timely topics in the world of digital design and technology. (...) Five questions with special guest Aaron Marcus." (Dirk Knemeyer ~ The Digital Life) Posted on February 09, 2011 | Permalink The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan"(...) all media - in and of themselves and regardless of the messages they communicate - exert a compelling influence on man and society. Prehistoric, or tribal, man existed in a harmonious balance of the senses, perceiving the world equally through hearing, smell, touch, sight and taste." (Next Nature) Posted on January 27, 2011 | Permalink An Interview with Jesse James Garrett"I'm pretty excited that the new edition of Elements of User Experience is out - the first edition was one of the first books I really connected with, and it's great to see a refresh. What are some of the highlights in this version? (...) There is so much evident care and craft in the Rosenfeld Media books - I think they now occupy the place O'Reilly books held 15 years ago as definitive works." (Russ Unger ~ Peachpit) Posted on December 21, 2010 | Permalink An interview with Bill Verplank"Back in the late 1980s, Bill Verplank, when working at what would become IDEO, stopped calling what he did 'user-interface design', and instead coined a new term: 'interaction design'. His work over the years has included Xerox Parc, IDTwo/IDEO, and collaborations with design schools such as the RCA, MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Steve Baty talked with him about interaction design." (Steve Baty ~ Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on December 16, 2010 | Permalink An interview with Mike Kuniavsky"And we never fully understand our technology. We may understand the technical aspect of it, but we never fully understand the social implications of it. Lots of people point out that every technology is a double-edged sword; for every positive thing that it does, there's a negative effect that it has. What we do is try to balance those. As designers, I think the role is to try to understand as much as possible about that, given the time, budget, and knowledge constraints that we have, in order to be able to make decisions to try to mitigate the negative aspects while amplifying the positive aspects of technology." (David Bevans ~ Morgan Kaufmann Publishers) Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink The Art and Science of Influential Web Content: An Interview with Colleen Jones"The goal is helping people make good decisions and then act on those decisions. The goal is matching a business, product, or idea with users who are interested in and can benefit from it, then act on it. The goal is being a trusted advisor to users, not controllers of users’ minds. (...) Content strategy is more than a set of skills. It’s a mindset and a process. I would advise anyone interested to focus on that first, then worry about the skills. Skills, tools, and tips constantly change and are hard to use properly without understanding the mindset and process first." (Peachpit) Posted on November 26, 2010 | Permalink The Big Show #25 (Karen McGrane)"Karen McGrane joins Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin to discuss putting publications online, the state of content management, careers in web design, running a design business, teaching UX and design, and more." (The Big Show) Posted on November 03, 2010 | Permalink Why Content Strategy Matters (video interview w/ Scott Abel)"The conversation around content strategy has exploded in the last few months. We’ve certainly contributed to that conversation ourselves, as you've undoubtedly seen on this blog. Still there remains some ambiguity about what exactly is content strategy and why it's important? In the following series of videos, MindTouch's Mark Fidelman spends some time with Scott Abel, aka The Content Wrangler, and investigates the realm of content strategy, the benefits of application, and its relation to technical communicators and social media." (MindTouch) Posted on November 02, 2010 | Permalink Storytelling for UX: An Interview with Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks"This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst, or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice." (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 01, 2010 | Permalink Content strategy and customer service: A talk with Ann Rockley"A unified content strategy is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements up front, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on demand to meet your customer’s needs. Intelligent content/smart documents are the way in which we prepare our content so that it's structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. So the content strategy is the plan of action, and intelligent content is the way we implement it." (Jill C. Nagle ~ Zengage) Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink Six Questions from Kicker: Kim Goodwin"It wasn’t when I got my first job as a designer, I felt I had to achieve some degree of skill before I deserved the label. I'm not even sure where I had set that internal bar, but it took at least a couple of years. The beauty of interaction design being a relatively new profession is that it’s been easy for people to get into the field. The problem with interaction design being a relatively new profession is the same thing…there are lots of people with the job title who have great intentions and no idea what they're doing. This can affect perceptions of the profession as a whole, which is one of many reasons I think it's important to evangelize good techniques." (Kicker Studio) Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink Lou Rosenfeld On Search Analytics"So one thing I encourage people to do is to try to categorise the data in other words gee it seems like there is a lot of queries here about physical places, maybe our organisation has different offices or campuses or different buildings, look for things that seem to be people or different topics that emerge what you start doing is that you force yourself to get very close to the way users are thinking because you are looking at what their needs are, and actually it is a good way of looking at what sort of metadata your site ought to have and what kinds of content type people seem to be asking for and it might even help you do things like prioritise your next content migration because you start getting a sense of what are the really important content types that people seem to be requesting when they are searching so there are other things which you might delve into." (Boagworld) Posted on July 07, 2010 | Permalink Lou Rosenfeld Talks Past, Present And Future Of User Experience Design"I had the pleasure of interviewing Lou and, I have to admit, I was surprised by what I learned about my own role in the world of User Experience Design. We all contribute to the Big Tent of User Experience, and the future is very bright." (Anthony Viviano ~ Three Minds) Posted on June 04, 2010 | Permalink Peter Merholz: The Want Interview"The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they're shifting away from 'user experience' and towards 'experience design'. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful 'customer journeys' by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three 'waves' - and predicts the fourth." (Want Magazine) Posted on May 05, 2010 | Permalink Search Patterns is Customer Behavior and Business InsightsInterview with Peter Morville about his new book Search Patterns - "(...) I'm a skeptic when it comes to grand visions of The Semantic Web. In narrow domains such as medicine, we can develop thesauri (or 'ontologies') that define terms precisely and map hierarchical, equivalent, and associative relationships. But these approaches simply don't scale, and they can't keep up with the rapid evolution of language and knowledge." (Bridgeline Digital) Posted on April 27, 2010 | Permalink UX at Year X"Adaptive Path co-founder and principal Jesse James Garrett's accolades range from creating seminal works on user experience to coining the term AJAX. Ahead of his UX London presentation, he talked to us about The Elements of User Experience a decade on, how service design relates to user experience, and his pick of future UX rock stars. (...) the phenomenal success Apple has had in the last ten years has been a double-edged sword for us." (Jeroen van Geel - Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on March 24, 2010 | Permalink Training the Butterflies"Whether it's in front of a huge audience or a handful of executives, smooth public speaking is essential to a successful web design career. Yet most of us are more afraid of speaking in public than we are of death. In a lively give-and-take, Liz Danzico interviews Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker, for tips on how to prepare for public speaking, how to perfect your timing, and what to do when bad things happen." (Liz Danzico - A List Apart) Posted on February 23, 2010 | Permalink Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem"Search is the Web's most powerful and frustrating tool. It's the conduit to unfathomable amounts of information, yet it requires a fair degree of user education to reach its full potential. It's odd that something so important is so hard to harness. And it's not going to get easier anytime soon. We may think of search as static and mature because we've used those ubiquitous boxes for years. But it's a tool in flux. Developments in mobile, augmented reality, and social graphs -- to name a few -- signal big changes ahead." (Mac Slocum - O'Reilly Radar) Posted on February 22, 2010 | Permalink Design and Meaning: An Interview with Nathan Shedroff"(...) it’s clear to me that business, design, and sustainability can no longer be approached or practiced separately and that one of the most powerful points at this intersection is meaning." (Vicky Teinaki - Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on December 16, 2009 | Permalink A Conversation on Design w/ Richard Saul Wurman"Germany. First printed book in Western world. Importance and misinterpretation. Pagination. Yellow Pages. Google. Encyclopedia Britannica. Finding things. Making the complex clear. Aesthetics change. Understanding is permanent. The Tango. The duality of design." (Thirty Conversations on Design) Posted on November 26, 2009 | Permalink The Power of Prototyping: An Interview With Todd Zaki Warfel"Any design based on a written spec is a design based on theory. A design based on a prototype is a design based on experience and practice." (Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on November 24, 2009 | Permalink The Age of the Informavore"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on." (Edge) Posted on November 03, 2009 | Permalink The Scoop on Content Strategy: An Interview with Kristina Halvorson"There are lots of different definitions floating around out there. It was important to me to talk about content strategy in a way that people can understand easily. I define content strategy as planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. Planning is the key. Planning is about asking the right questions to collect data and information, with the goal of delivering a plan that gets you from where you are now to where you want to be." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters) Posted on October 20, 2009 | Permalink Vinay Venkatraman on Interaction Design"Vinay Venkatraman, an interaction designer, is one of a rapidly expanding group of scholars and professionals around the world working to define the way our stuff behaves. Although it's natural for most people to understand the need for interaction with gadgets like software and mobile devices, the field is actually remarkably broad. In an increasingly interactive age, the success of systems, services and even whole corporations and organizations often comes down to an effective interface, created with human behavior in mind." (WorldChanging) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst Posted on September 18, 2009 | Permalink An Interview With Edward Tufte"(...) as far as academic memory serves, the revolution in modern information design started with a man named Edward Tufte." (VizWorld) Posted on September 13, 2009 | Permalink A few words with Ezio Mancini"Professor of Industrial Design at Politecnico di Milano, Director of the Research Unit Design and Innovation for Sustainability and coordinates the Masters in Strategic Design and Doctorate in Industrial Design programmes. He works on strategic design and design for sustainability, with a focus on scenario building and solution development. He has written several books on product-service systems and sustainability." (Philips New Value Sept. 2009) Posted on September 08, 2009 | Permalink An interview with Joe Lamantia"Ahead of this year's EuroIA conference I caught up with experience architect, strategist and all-round nice guy Joe Lamantia. We talked about designing for experiences, games design, Killzone and monasteries." (Steve Baty - Johnny Holland Magazine) Posted on September 01, 2009 | Permalink Scott Berkun: Growing Ideas In The Garden Of Innovation"In this upbeat interview, Scott explains what drove him to write his book on innovation: after many years working in an innovation-obsessed software industry, he wanted to dispel the myths advocated in so much literature on the subject, or what he describes as the 'fantasy' that there is only one simple way to go about innovation and creative thinking." (Namahn interviews) Posted on August 11, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Scott Berkun"In 1956 a documentary called The Mystery of Picasso was released, showing two hours of Pablo Picasso doing what he did best: making paintings. This film gave the public a first-hand glimpse directly into this infamous artist's creative process. Public speaker and writer Scott Berkun and I got together for tea to talk about the film and our own experiences around creativity. As both managers of creative teams and creators of work ourselves, we looked at how our processes aligned with Picasso's... or where we could learn from him. As the discussion unfolded, we came up with an interesting set of guidelines that enable creativity to flourish." (Tea with Teresa) Posted on July 03, 2009 | Permalink Future Practice Interview: John Ferrara"Working in the user experience, we want to capitalize upon interfaces that people already have a lot of experience using. If gaming is so ubiquitous, we'd be terribly remiss in not paying careful attention to it. But there's also just so much innovative work going on in games right now. Game designers are viciously competing with each other to create unique, engaging experiences, and you see rapid development of new ways of interacting. There's really exciting work being done in motion control, voice control, gesture-based interfaces, and online collaboration, as well as elegant solutions to significant design challenges in unassuming games. I think these things make games impossible to ignore." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on July 02, 2009 | Permalink Interactions interviews Adam Greenfield"Serendipity, solitude, anonymity, most of what we now recognize as the makings of urban savoir faire: it all goes by the wayside. And yes, we’re richer and safer and maybe even happier with the advent of the services and systems I'm so interested in, but by the same token we're that much poorer for the loss of these intangibles. It's a complicated trade-off, and I believe in most places it's one we're making without really examining what's at stake." (Speedbird) Posted on July 02, 2009 | Permalink A conversation with Ed Niehaus, new CEO of Cooper"Working with Steve can be brutal, but you get a chance to see firsthand his tremendous eye for detail and the clarity of his vision. Nobody can judge work like Steve can -- design, advertising, engineering -- you name it, Steve knows, and look out because he'll tell you. He has got a hierarchy of judgment that's really pretty simple: at the top is 'Insanely great', which is the best in category that you'll see in your lifetime. Then there's 'really, really, really great', - and he says it packed with emotion - that's the best that you'll see this year or maybe this decade. And, there's 'shit', and that's the entire hierarchy." (Cooper Journal) Posted on June 24, 2009 | Permalink Lauralee Alben on Sea Change Moments"Lauralee Alben talks with Marc Rettig of Fit Associates about Sea Change Moments – moments that spark a positive, profound, enduring transformation in people, brands, and the world. She also discusses the Sea Change Design Process, which aligns the creative output of an organization with its inner values and intentions. In this age of transformation, Lauralee's ideas and examples are compelling. She offers a creative, generative method that embraces a whole-system, whole-business point of view while recognizing the necessity of drawing from our deep authentic selves. Enjoy the unusual blend of acumen, experience, heart and spirit in her words." - (Sustainable Life Media) Posted on May 27, 2009 | Permalink All About Card Sorting: An Interview with Donna Spencer"Donna Spencer is one of Australia's best-known information architects, organizer of the UX Australia conference, and a frequent presenter at UX conferences in Australia, the US, and Europe. I caught up with Donna between her appearances at the IA Summit and RedUX DC to talk about card sorting and her new book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, which Rosenfeld Media recently published." - (Steve Baty - UXmatters) Posted on May 26, 2009 | Permalink Future Practice Interview: Ginny Redish"For a long time, content was typically left for last and given so little thought. I'm happy to say that the situation is changing. Content and content strategy are hot topics now (...) Content strategy means thinking strategically about your content. It means planning the content, coordinating content over the entire web site, and managing content over time." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on May 15, 2009 | Permalink How Sustainable Thinking Can Change Design"Greener design methods hold a world of possibilities for businesses, from saving a bit of money on materials to developing completely new products, packaging and distribution methods. They also have the potential to change how designers learn, how they think about projects and, on a larger scale, alter designers' careers." - (Terry Swack - Sustainable Minds) Posted on May 11, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Richard Saul Wurman (Part 4)"In this segment, RSW talks about his approach to creating websites (spoiler: it's how he approaches everything), extolls the 'mundane' aspects of IA, and expresses skepticism about the idea that architects' work might benefit from separating out the instructional and diagrammatic from the emotional and experiential." - (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) Posted on April 22, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Richard Saul Wurman (Part 3)"In the first part of this segment, RSW expands on the Kahnian design principle of 'dumbness', refuses to be included in or associated with anything called deliverables, talks about his favorite Kahn buildings, and the spiritualism in Kahn's charcoal drawings. (...) In the second part of this segment, I ask RSW about what architects might have that in their process or training or approach that allows them to do a better job with clients in the early schematic phase of a project." - (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) Posted on April 14, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Peter Morville at IA Summit 09"I think we are at another of these interesting moments, (...) we are integrating with the last wave. We are still waiting to see what is going to come next. My prediction is that as we start to dig out of this recession or depression what have you, we will have a new wave of innovation with some really exciting things so perhaps IA Summit will have a whole new set of threats and opportunities to grapple with, but I don’t know what those are just yet." - (Think out loud) Posted on April 07, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Richard Saul Wurman (Part 2)"[Kahn] said to me, after a pause, he said "Ricky," (...) because that's what he called me, he said "Ricky, even when I get a haircut I'm an Architect"; he said "(...) do whatever interests you." He gave me permission. And that was like a bag of sand off of my shoulders, and gave me permission to follow my interests." - (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) Posted on April 05, 2009 | Permalink Interview with Richard Saul Wurman (Part 1)"Part one of my first interview with RSW. In this introductory segment, I asked him about the 1976 AIA Conference (I posted a PDF of the advance program from this milestone in the history of Information Architecture a few weeks ago), about the job-title 'information architect' and also about librarianship as it pertains (or not) to his concept of IA. Many more segments to follow!" - (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate) courtesy of petermorville Posted on April 03, 2009 | Permalink Q&A with Jesse James Garrett"(...) I believe our profession is intrinsically good." - (Liou Yamane - CHI Nederland) Posted on March 18, 2009 | Permalink Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications"I had the opportunity to speak with Afshan Kirmani on her article. (...) We talk about the design of an online web based application. Part 1 of the series focuses on the web based form where the user experience is critical before the user enters the application. The various aspects include a good entry point into a form which determines if users stay or leave. The beginning of every form is most important as details like usability set your apart from your competitors." - (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on March 13, 2009 | Permalink The History and Evolution of User Experience DesignAn interview with Peter Merholz, President and Co-founder of Adaptive Path. - "User experience design is, at its core, a philosophy that products and services should be designed so that they are pleasurable and easy for people to use. While that might seem an obvious design approach, it's actually not the way many designers historically thought about making things. In fact, it wasn't until the 1990s that an industry came together around this particular approach to design." - (Tea with Teresa) courtesy of deluca Posted on March 11, 2009 | Permalink Single Question Interview: David Merrill of Tacolab on Siftables"(...) the major problem is not anymore the amount of computation we have, it’s how we can interact with that computation." - (Peter Merholz - AP blog) Posted on March 02, 2009 | Permalink Future Practice Interview: Bill Scott"How do you get team members to start speaking the same language? Constant communication between the teams. What also works is adopting a common language to describe interactions. The use of design patterns is a powerful way to disseminate common thinking and approaches to common problems. I have been pleasantly surprised when language that design and engineering use to describe certain bad approaches (anti-patterns) gets in-grained even in our product managers vocabulary as well." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on February 12, 2009 | Permalink What the heck is user experience design??!!Interview with Jesse James Garrett - "Some describe it as making things easy and enjoyable to use. Others describe it as all the elements that impact someone's perception of a product or system. Jesse James Garrett says it's a lot like going on a great first date. For those who haven't heard of it before: You'll be surprise by how much it impacts your life. For those who know it well: Believe it or not, the complexity made simple. You'll finally know what to say in the elevator when someone asks you what you do for a living." (Tea with Teresa) - courtesy of janjursa Posted on February 03, 2009 | Permalink Pattern Languages for Interaction Design"Will Evans stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, styleguides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year's Interactions in Vancouver and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O'Reilly." (Will Evans - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on January 27, 2009 | Permalink Introduction to Interaction DesignAn Interview with Dave Malouf - "interaction design is about deciding the flows and conversation, the narrative that these interface points make up - the notes that are played by the musician." (Will Evans - Johnny Holland) Posted on January 19, 2009 | Permalink Game Mechanics for Interaction DesignAn Interview with Amy Jo Kim - "Game mechanics are a collection of tools and systems that an interactive designer can use to make an experience more fun and compelling. Used well, game mechanics make a Web design more engaging, sticky and viral by incentivizing certain behaviors. However, game mechanics are not a panacea: to be effective, the mechanics need to be integral to the experience." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo) Posted on January 16, 2009 | Permalink Jesse James Garrett - The Lost IDEA 2008 Interview"I think IA does have a future as a practice - the future of IA may not look like the present or past of IA, but if IA is the practice of the structuring of information for human understanding, well that's never going to go away." (Russ Unger - UserGlue) Posted on January 13, 2009 | Permalink Google's view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt"There's such an explosion of content, and yet there's so little understanding of it." (The McKinsey Quaterly) - courtesy of deluca Posted on January 02, 2009 | Permalink What is Design Thinking?"(....) a great interview with Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman. He provides a very crisp definition of what design thinking is about. Design thinking is about creating better things, while traditional analytic thinking is about choosing between things." (Diego Rodriguez - metacool) Posted on December 17, 2008 | Permalink Future Practice Interview: Indi Young"Instead of thinking in terms of the organization and all the services and support this organization offers people, think in terms of real life. Look past the clinical kind of data and get to the warm, fuzzy, human heart of how people are making decisions and justifying actions and having emotional reactions to things that get in their way." (Victor Lombardi - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on November 18, 2008 | Permalink Future Practice Interview: Luke Wroblewski"In my view, Web form design should be a part of any Web designer or developer's toolkit. Because of the impact good form design can have, I think it behooves anyone making Web applications to know the ins and outs of Web form design." (Louis Rosenfeld - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on November 10, 2008 | Permalink How It Really HappenedInterview with Robert Cailliau (1997) - "(...) essentially America has completely wiped out all computing industry in Europe." (IEEE Computer Society) Posted on November 05, 2008 | Permalink An Interview with John Carroll"If you are ACM, you always put the computer first! (...) today, we identify professions like usability engineer and interaction designer, even user experience designer. But in the early days, it was human factors engineers and documentation designers. That human factors constituency was critical in the early days." (Tamara Adlin - UX Pioneers) Posted on October 14, 2008 | Permalink Lou Rosenfeld on site search analytics"We in the user experience community often tend to be a bit uncomfortable when analysing quantitative data; that's not the sort of thing that we learned in design school." (Richard Maven - e-consultancy) Posted on October 03, 2008 | Permalink Futures, experiences & designAn interview with Nathan Shedroff - "Design processes bring a culture of brainstorming, critique, prototyping, and testing to the product and service development process." (Nik Baerten - pantopicon) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken Posted on October 02, 2008 | Permalink Four Essential Skills for Information ArchitectsAn Interview with Donna (Maurer) Spencer - "Lots of information architects are really good at doing detail work and lots are really good at the strategy work. But it's a pretty amazing skill to accomplish both at once and to flip between them from second to second." (Jared Spool - User Interface Engineering) - courtesy of usernomics Posted on August 28, 2008 | Permalink IDEA 2008: An Interview with Bill DeRouchey"Bill has over fifteen years experience as a writer, information architect, product manager and now senior interaction designer with Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon. With Ziba, he frames and details the experience, flow, and interaction on consumer and medical products. Bill also writes about the variety and history of interaction design in everyday experiences on his blog, Push Click Touch, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He is determined to stretch how people think about interaction design, from beyond the pure digital to any interaction between humans and the artifacts they create. Bill is on the Board of Directors of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, and serves as Treasurer." (Russ Unger - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on August 14, 2008 | Permalink Tamara Adlin interviews Peter Morville"(...) I wanted to push the awareness of the term and concept of findability as high as usability. Folks like Jakob have done an amazing job of getting that word usability into everybody's heads, and I've been on a campaign to do the same with findability." (UX Pioneers) Posted on August 08, 2008 | Permalink Sustainable Product Design: Terry Swack on the Importance of User Experience"A 25-year veteran of the design and technology industries, Terry Swack hopped on the Internet bus a little earlier that most of us. As founder, in 1994, of web strategy firm TSDesign, and later Green Building Blocks and BlueEgg, she has witnessed firsthand consumers' enthusiasm for (and resistance to) adopting new green products and technologies. She now heads up Clean Culture, a customer experience research and strategy consultancy focused on making clean tech and sustainable products more understandable and desirable. We asked Terry how the concept of user experience has helped shape her approach to product design." (Sustainable Life Media) Posted on August 06, 2008 | Permalink Jensen Harris Tells Dan About Microsoft Office's Ribbon Interface"When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail." (Dan Harrelson - Adaptive Path) Posted on July 30, 2008 | Permalink What's Design Mean to You? Interview with Vinay Venkatraman"Design is one of the professions that bridges the analytical way of doing things with the synthetical way of doing things. If you consider analysis to be breaking a thing down into finite elements, and looking at relationhips inside it and making sense out of it, you can say that synthesis is about the interrelationships and the combinations of things. I think that designers have this unusual intuition for what could be meaningful in this analytical [information]. It’s less rational, and more emotional in its approach." (Matt Balara - Interviews) Posted on July 29, 2008 | Permalink Ryan Freitas talks with Mitch Kapor"As always, Mitch has plenty of wonderful things to say. There's a significant history lesson, some pointers on entrepreneurialism, and some very frank perspectives on the principles of design." (Ryan Freitas - Second Verse) Posted on July 23, 2008 | Permalink The future and what it holds"The focus of my questions in this video interview with Howard Rheingold, was kindly suggested by the event organizer Leandro Agrò, and they focused on (a) the future of technology, (b) the speed at which things change, (c) who will eventually control the Internet, (d) what we can do about it, and (e) how pervasive technology will become in the next few years." (Robin Good's Latest News) Posted on July 02, 2008 | Permalink Death to Lorem Ipsum & Other Adventures in Content"(...) to push the thinking further with a discussion about content, UX teams, and how the relationships can be strengthened to create experiences and projects that really sing. The resulting conversation start with content basics and closes with a bold challenge." (Kate Rutter - Adaptive Path blog) Posted on June 26, 2008 | Permalink Interview with Joy Mountford"What are your favorite prototyping tools? (...) I think paper and pencil are really the most important, and the reason for that is that you can use them without any difficulties except for the fact that most people these days don’t know how to draw anything. In the good old days we used to teach engineers how to draw. I don’t mean draw a beautiful picture, I mean like draw a rectangle for a screen. Teaching them how to draw was essential. You and I could sit and draw, and then stick our drawings on the wall or on paper." (Ambidextrous Magazine Issue 9) Posted on June 03, 2008 | Permalink Bringing Information Architecture to the World's Great Cities"With the publication of his first book in 1962 at the age of 26, RSW began the singular passion of his life: making information understandable. He chaired the International Design in Aspen in 1972, the first Federal Design Assembly in 1973, followed by the National AIA Convention in 1976, before creating and chairing TED (Technology/Entertainment/Design) conferences from 1984-2002. He is the current Chair of the TEDMED Conferences. A B.Arch and M.Arch 1959 graduate with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Wurman's nearly half-century of achievements includes the publication of his best-selling book Information Anxiety and his award winning ACCESS Travel Guides. Each of his 81 books focus on some subject or idea that he personally had difficulty understanding." (BIF3) Posted on June 02, 2008 | Permalink Getting Emotional With... Lorraine Justice"Lorraine Justice Ph. D., is currently head of the Design School at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr. Justice has served in higher education for the past seventeen years, teaching in the areas of industrial design and human computer interface design. (...) Currently, Lorraine is involved in the shared organization (between the Polytechnic University and the Design & Emotion Society) of the 6th International Conference on Design & Emotion in Hong Kong, October 6-9, 2008 . The International Conference on Design & Emotion is a forum where practitioners, researchers and industry meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion. Lorraine will also give a key-note lecture at this exciting event." (Design & Emotion - Marco van Hout) Posted on May 19, 2008 | Permalink 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 BusinessKate 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 EvilAn 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 ControlInterview 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 BrokenBrandon 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 MeaningInterview 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 WisdomAn 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 3/3Jesse 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 3/3Peter 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 2Jesse 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 IntroductionLiz 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 ArchivesInterviews 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 FireA 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 DesignInterview 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 PoliticsAn 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 AhtisaariDirector 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 ExchangesAn 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 DesignAn 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.schoolA 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 StrategyAn 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 TransformationGK 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Interview with Ben Shneiderman
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