http://www.informationdesign.org/ Dedicated to the growth and improvement of the information experience industries. en-us plato@xs4all.nl 2013-04-03T11:55:16+01:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 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) HCI 2013-04-03T11:55:16+01:00 "The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant." once said the legendary Mark Weiser. "A user interface that is invisible and that provides seamless interaction possibilities will help the user focus on their goals and direct them to what they need." (Patrick Cox a.k.a @pcridesagain ~ Codrops) HCI 2013-03-22T11:50:33+01:00 And does web design also need a Gang of Four? "I thought it would be interesting to explore if a connection between object oriented programming and how we develop visual design patterns exists." (Steven Bradley Glicksman ~ Vanseo Design) Design research 2013-03-19T10:22:53+01:00 Designers a.k.a. web designers and coders a.k.a. front-end coders. "Last 15 years changed everything. Design is generally considered just as important as technology. User Experience Design became the key to success and it's hard to imagine any grown-up company, without UXers on board. (...) We don't need coding designers and designing coders – we need people who can communicate, respect and understand each other." (Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ UXPin) Technology 2013-03-19T10:08:04+01:00 We tend to forget how important the content infrastructure and technology is. "They create a language to express publishing, content management, or reuse concerns, and then expect writers to write directly into what is really an internal content management format. Putting a graphical face over the markup does nothing to change this. The graphical interface only hides the syntax of the XML. It does nothing to change the fact that authors are being asked to create what should be the internal semantics of the publishing system — semantics they generally neither care about nor understand." (Mark Baker ~ EveryPageIsOne) Content management 2013-01-30T10:03:53+01:00 Can there be such a thing as software products? "When something is wrong, it deviates from truth or fact. And I can say, with more confidence than ever, that traditional Agile software development methodologies (i.e. Scrum) are wrong for UX. In order to prove my case, I want to take you back to the inception of Agile (as I have read and experienced it) and its related software development methodologies. Along the way, we'll point out the reasons these methodologies are incompatible with the field of User Experience Design." (Elisabeth Hubert a.k.a. @lishubert) User experience 2012-06-27T16:26:34+01:00 In the end, high quality screens will have more social impact than faster CPU cycles, improved bandwidth or cheaper storage. Think Retina Displays and beyond. "Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox) Technology 2012-05-05T21:29:33+01:00 The silver bullet is not as silver as you think it is. "Reading blogs out there, you will notice that every attempt to fix a responsive design process is still very experimental: there are as many offered ways as there are blog articles about it! Progress is being made, but nothing is really set in stone at the moment. Knowing that, the most important thing right now is to make sure you ask the right questions at the start of each project, make the right choices, and jump into experimentation yourself with a maximum amount of pragmatism. If you find a good idea to make all of these challenges smoother, please write about it and share your discoveries on the web!" (Rudy Rigot ~ Dev.Opera) ~ courtesy of luctiemessen Technology 2012-05-04T13:54:31+01:00 Knowing to code makes a better designer. "In this column, we'll discuss innovative approaches to application design that are based on our personal experience in the trenches." (Jim Nieters, Amit Pande, and Uday M. Shankar ~ UXmatters) User experience 2012-04-25T10:09:48+01:00 A well-thought through post on experience and systems. By IBM, who else. "But, socio-technical systems are oriented toward people and services. While product excellence and competitive costs are also important to services, they are not enough. The service sector is oriented toward consumption, that is, toward people, who are the consumers of services. Therefore, an overriding design objective for good socio-technical, service oriented systems has to be a positive user experience. Ease of use, intuitive interfaces and good overall customer service must be key objectives for a well designed system." (Irving Wladawsky-Berger) Information design 2012-04-13T13:41:56+01:00 Technology has always been a great driver of UX, closed or open. "I've been doing a lot of research recently about mobile design patterns and UX best practices for smartphone and tablet devices for both iOS and Android platforms. One thing has stood out more than anything else during this process: no one is talking about Android." (Catriona Cornett a.k.a. @inspireUX ~ inspireUX) Mobile design 2012-04-10T11:23:17+01:00 It can mean many things. Depending of who asks. "Many companies caught on to the mobile-first trend awhile back. Google surfaced their mobile-first strategy in 2010. As you've probably guessed from the name of this approach to site design, mobile first means designing an online experience for mobile before designing it for the desktop Web-or any other device. In the past, when users' focus was on the desktop Web, mobile design was an afterthought. But today, more people are using their mobile devices for online shopping and social networking than ever before, and most companies are designing for mobile. Mobile first requires a new approach to planning, UX design, and development that puts handheld devices at the forefront of both strategy and implementation. The digital landscape has changed, and companies have realized that consumers are now accessing more content on their mobile devices than anywhere else." (Riley Graham a.k.a. @lrileygraham ~ UXmatters) Technology 2012-03-06T09:49:35+01:00 Or how UX and CX can be disruptive. Love the comments. "A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Although the term disruptive technology is widely used, disruptive innovation seems a more appropriate term in many contexts since few technologies are intrinsically disruptive; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact." (Clayton M. Christensen a.k.a. @claychristensen ~ Interaction-Design.org) User experience 2012-02-14T12:04:48+01:00 As long as we see UX projects as software engineering projects and not the other way around, the plus and minus sides of the magnet will not connect. "Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design and user experience in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog. While both agile and UX methods share some best practices-like iteration and defining requirements based on stories about users-agile and UX methods evolved for different purposes, supporting different values. Agile methods were developed without consideration for UX best practices. Early agile pioneers were working on in-house IT projects (custom software) or enterprise software." (Jon Innes ~ Boxes and Arrows) courtesy of janjursa User experience 2012-02-03T10:19:01+01:00 Keep, hide or move. But are you telling the same story different on the desktop, the iPad or the smartphone? "Responsive design can have a major impact on your content. I'll tell you how it works, how it can affect your content, and why you should-and need to-care." (Sean Tubridy a.k.a. @tubes ~ Brain Traffic Blog) Technology 2012-01-20T09:36:38+01:00