http://www.informationdesign.org/ Dedicated to the growth and improvement of the information experience industries. en-us plato@xs4all.nl 2010-02-15T16:04:13+01:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 "Well, first of all let's get rid off the word user and let’s talk about people. Because user implies something totally internal: I'm a user, I want to use this machine, so let's use it. This is a utilitarian/task cognitive approach to interaction design, a rather medieval kind of approach. If you talk about people, what they are and what they do in their daily lives, there are so many opportunities to discover… so users will not evolve, they will die out, but people will remain and I would like to talk about their lives and conquests." (I'm not a user) UCD 2010-02-15T16:04:13+01:00 "(...) a real iterative UX Strategy that is based on Design practice not software engineering practice." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand) UCD 2010-02-10T12:39:18+01:00 "As UX professionals, we have a great many analytical and descriptive tools available to us. In fact, there are so many that it can sometimes be difficult to decide which tool is most appropriate for a given task! Hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an underused approach in user experience, but one you can easily apply when either modifying an existing design or creating a new design." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters) UCD 2010-02-08T12:41:40+01:00 "I am not anti-Agile although I’ve been bitten a few times and feel trepidation when I hear someone singing its praises without having much experience with it. Over the last eight years, I’ve seen Agile badly implemented far more often than well (and yes, it can be done well, too). The result of this is mediocre product released in as much time as it would have taken a good team to release great product using a waterfall approach. In this article, I will describe Agile and attempt to illuminate a potential minefield for those who are swept up in the fervor of this development trend and want to jump in headlong. Then I will present how practices within User Centred Design (UCD) can mitigate the inherent risks of Agile and how these may be integrated within Agile development approaches." (Anthony Colfelt - Boxes and Arrows) UCD 2010-02-01T09:53:13+01:00 "Overall, it seems other examinations of innovation have proven the exact opposite of what Norman claims in his article. There is indeed a wealth of evidence that people’s needs can and should precede technology. And frankly, Norman's 'examination' seems more of the back-of-the-napkin type with several errors." (James Kalbach - Experiencing Information) UCD 2009-12-24T12:02:33+01:00 "User-Centered Design is the methodology by which you design a holistic product while considering the needs of stakeholders and users. Agile Development is a programming methodology and philosophy intended to overcome the challenges of the waterfall development process and to deliver clean and functional code. How can these two methodologies come together?" (David Farkas - Johnny Holland Magazine) UCD 2009-12-14T13:19:49+01:00 "Follow a young man's journey as he discovers the three secrets of user-centred design. After reading this 40-page fable, you'll understand the framework of user-centred design and know how to apply it to your own design project. It's a small book that has big results." (UserFocus) UCD 2009-12-07T14:41:53+01:00 UCD 2009-11-24T16:43:32+01:00 "Understanding the people who will ultimately engage with a product or service provides the foundation for user experience design. Modeling those people and segmenting our models into meaningful groups lets us explore different clusters of needs, then address our solutions to meeting the needs of people belonging to specific clusters." (Steve Baty - UXmatters) UCD 2009-09-21T14:07:06+01:00 "In my discussions with designers, one of the interesting recurring conversations is the tools and process they use to prototype and mock up experiences. In particular, there’s a lot of divergence on how high or low-fidelity to go with a prototype." (Andrew Chen) - courtesy of uxtweets Prototyping 2009-09-18T15:11:40+01:00 "The sole purpose of this exercise is to document and map the emotional states of a user so that it can guide the creation and communication of personas to stakeholders while also informing the design process itself. I'm not one for ux deliverables for their own sake, but this is one that carry's a lot of weight and also goes a ways towards 'traceability' - that is, the ability to show all the real research that went into your personas." (Will Evans) - courtesy of ppf Personas 2009-07-06T10:13:02+01:00 "There are many good processes for software design. By process, I mean a prescribed way of performing software design. Every software company I’ve ever worked with has a design process they've adopted or created to meet their needs. However, after working on numerous software projects, I have come to realize how few projects actually follow their companies’ intended design processes. Why is it that so many companies don't follow their existing processes for software design?" - (Ron Gagnier - UXmatters) UCD 2009-05-26T10:30:04+01:00 "(...) the set of methods employed by most user-centered professionals fails to deliver truly user-centric insights. The so-called 'science' of usability which underlies user-centeredness leaves much to be desired. It rests too much on anecdote, assumed truths about human behavior and an emphasis on performance metrics that serve the perspective of people other than the user. - If we could de-couple user-centered design and usability then there might be some benefit but I don’t think this is as important as it might first appear. More important is the very conception we have of users and uses for which we wish to derive technologies and information resources. Designing for augmentation is a very real problem and a great challenge for our field theoretically and practically." - (Andrew Dillon - InfoMatters) UCD 2009-05-06T12:08:54+01:00 "Remember: a person is a first-time user exactly once (and in the case of the infusion pump, because of training and observation, nurses were actually never really first-time users), and in many cases a beginner for only a very short while." - (Steve Calde - Cooper Journal) UCD 2009-04-23T09:29:47+01:00 "Users of technology products—from mobile phones to ecommerce Web sites—often stop learning and adopting features long before they've mastered those products’ full capabilities. A learning plateau usually occurs once a user has learned the features that meet his minimum product-adoption criteria, when the benefit of adopting more features doesn't seem worth the extra effort or risk." - (Mike Hughes - UXmatters) UCD 2009-03-24T09:39:46+01:00