User experience

The (Near) Future of Managing Experiences

"What's your plan for the near future? If you're like most in our field, the path forward is murky and no one at your office is handing out maps. We'll look at the trends and tactics that matter, so you can make your own map for moving ahead." (Brandon Schauer - MX Managing Experience 2010)

Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink

We learn from stories and experience

"When it comes to learning and genuinely retaining something, nothing beats experiences. Formal educational or speaking settings don't always allow for actual hands-on experience with the content, but almost every learning situation — including presentation in various forms — does permit the use of stories." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink

SXSW Live: Beyond the Desktop

"Some people think it's just the hardware, but it’s not. It's also about the software, the context, and the overall user experience." (Michael Leis)

Posted on March 16, 2010 | Permalink

The Virtues of a UX Professional

"UX professionals can be an egotistical lot. We like to think that only certain people with certain qualities can do what we do. Not everybody has the right stuff to fly to the moon or storm the beaches at Normandy. And in a similar way (sort of) not everybody has what it takes to create great user experiences." (Colman Walsh - IQBlog)

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink

User Experience Books Free to Read Online

"The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realisation among computer scientists and industry professionals of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in user interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not." (Simon Whatley)

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink

Can you mix Agile and UX?

"Here's my open transparent written exploration of how I am navigating this concept. (...) I think the concept of Agile is fine, its the execution of it that I think is where the story kind of starts to fall a little to the way side, I think from a UX standpoint you really need to outline the features ahead but do so in a way that is suited to a ready, aim, fire model." (Scott Barnes)

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Permalink

The State Of Customer Experience 2010

"Only 11% have a very disciplined approach to customer experience." (Bruce Temkin - Customer Experience Matters)

Posted on February 26, 2010 | Permalink

Surprise as a design strategy

"A surprise reaction to a product can be beneficial to both a designer and a user. The designer benefits from a surprise reaction because it can capture attention to the product, leading to increased product recall and recognition, and increased word-of-mouth. Or, as Jennifer Hudson puts it, the surprise element 'elevates a piece beyond the banal'. A surprise reaction has its origin in encountering an unexpected event. The product user benefits from the surprise, because it makes the product more interesting to interact with. In addition, it requires updating, extending or revising the knowledge the expectation was based on. This implies that a user can learn something new about a product or product aspect." (Geke D.S. Ludden, Hendrik N.J. Schifferstein & Paul Hekkert)

Posted on February 25, 2010 | Permalink

Designing value beyond the inflection point

"In 1999, Pine & Gilmore presented a model for the progression of economic value in their bestseller 'the experience economy'. The model explains the generic progression of economic value that any business in our society goes through sooner or later; the shift for commodities to experiences. Prehaps the most used example is the progression from raw coffee beans to the starbucks 'experience'. The great thing about this model is that it's easy to use and applicable to almost any industry." (Marc Fonteijn - 31Volts)

Posted on February 22, 2010 | Permalink

Laban Movement Analysis for User Experience Design

"As a User Experience Designer, there have been moments on projects when I’ve had similar feelings of ineptitude—usually when I've been faced with a large, complex system or some completely new and foreign domain I didn’t understand. Have you ever experienced an awkward moment as you've tried to figuratively dance and negotiate your way through an uncomfortable situation? This often brings fear of making a decision or taking a step forward along with it—maybe even some shoe-flying moments. A recent acting class, in which I learned what Laban Movement Analysis is all about, helped me find a way to get past this fear. When people say knowledge is power, they are most assuredly correct." (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted on February 22, 2010 | Permalink

Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study

"In the design process we follow at my company, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery." (Michael Hawley - UXmatters)

Posted on February 22, 2010 | Permalink

UX Strategy II: About the iterative diagram: What is it?

"In the second part of this Strategy discussion, I will concentrate on the Strategy diagram from the previous post. This post will cover what the diagram is and who is it for. There are more issues than that to be complete, but I can always add an additional post if there is a desire to read more detailed information about it." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand)

Posted on February 16, 2010 | Permalink

User Experience Design Career Development – Part 1

"So what we did was to articulate four (well, technically five) levels of consultant. These levels are based on obvious things like skills & experience, but also things like thought leadership activity, strategic acumen, client management, professional recognition, and business development. We defined specific criteria for each of these levels so that consultants can identify where they meet the criteria for their desired level and where they need to put in more effort. Granted, some of the criteria are pretty specific to an agency/consultancy model. But my hope is that those of you who work internally at large corporations, tiny startups, and anywhere in between can still use elements of our UX design career path to help structure your own." (Fred Beecher) - courtesy of jjursa

Posted on February 16, 2010 | Permalink

I Am Not A User!

"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)

Posted on February 15, 2010 | Permalink

The UX Canon: Essential Reading for the User Experience Designer

"(...) besides slowly acquiring and reviewing more books, is to begin further classification of books. Until that can happen, this is my UX library. If I don’t own it or haven’t read it, it's definitely not on this list. At the same time, there are books that I own that aren’t included because I thought they sucked for one reason or another. The third option is that I have it, have read it, liked it, but simply forgot to include it." (Semantic Foundry)

Posted on February 12, 2010 | Permalink

Better User Experience With Storytelling (Part Two)

"In the first part of this series, we explored some of the basic structures and story patterns found in myths and religions. We saw how these patterns continued into modern stories such as The Matrix and Star Wars. We also explored some of the basics of bringing storytelling into the user experience process and some places to get started. Concluding this two-part article, we hear from creative professionals who are leading the way in this relatively new world of combining the craft of storytelling with user experience. We'll also see how storytelling can be applied to more than just interactive experiences: we find it in everything from packaging to architecture." (Francisco Inchauste - Smashing Magazine)

Posted on February 11, 2010 | Permalink

UX Strategy is different than UI strategy: Part 1

"(...) a real iterative UX Strategy that is based on Design practice not software engineering practice." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in ArnoLand)

Posted on February 10, 2010 | Permalink

Design the stakeholder experience

"To get the stakeholders on track for a successful UX project, use your skills and design the stakeholder experience." (Phil Barrett - Front to back)

Posted on February 03, 2010 | Permalink

Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment

"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)

Posted on February 01, 2010 | Permalink

Better User Experience With Storytelling (Part One)

"Stories have defined our world. They have been with us since the dawn of communication, from cave walls to the tall tales recounted around fires. They have continued to evolve with their purpose remaining the same; To entertain, to share common experiences, to teach, and to pass on traditions. Today we communicate a bit differently. Our information is fragmented across various mass-media channels and delivered through ever-changing technology. It has become watered down, cloned, and is churned out quickly in 140-character blurbs. We’ve lost that personal touch where we find an emotional connection that makes us care." (Francisco Inchauste - Smashing Magazine)

Posted on January 29, 2010 | Permalink

Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions

"How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? One of the bleeding edge ideas we’ll be talking about at the UIE Web App Masters Tour is adding motivation to web applications. How do you encourage user behavior through the design of your web app? It may initially sound a little far-fetched, but there’s an industry that's been shaping its customer’s behavior since the beginning: the gaming industry." (UIE Brain Sparks)

Posted on January 29, 2010 | Permalink

UX Case Study: Designing a user-focused web app

"I wrote this article to give you insight into the complete design process for the redesign of Nearby Tweets. Web app developers and entrepreneurs will hopefully gain some ideas or reinforce their own processes. Users may find it interesting to see what goes into the design of a complex UI. I'd love your ideas, feedback, and thoughts at the end of this article! Enjoy." (Brian Cray)

Posted on January 27, 2010 | Permalink

The Differences between Usability and User Experience

"Usability refers to the ease with which a user can accomplish his or her goals using any tool. (...) Somewhat in contrast, user experience refers to the way a user perceives his or her interaction with a system. User experience design encompasses both interaction design and visual design and seeks to promote an interface that is pleasing to the user." (RJ Owen - InsideRIA)

Posted on January 25, 2010 | Permalink

Preso: UX Strategy as told by the paintings of Jan Steen (and friends)

"UX strategy lacks strategy, it is usually just a glorified waterfall process, even agile processes are just incremental waterfall. This presentation tells the current state of UX strategy in pictures while it outlines a real UX Strategy in words." (Jonathan Arnowitz)

Posted on January 22, 2010 | Permalink

20 User Experience Books you should own

"These highly recommended user experience books cover everything from user research and interface design, to information architecture and UX strategy. If you're really serious about your career as a user experience professional, these books should be the cornerstone of your personal library." (UXbyDesign)

Posted on January 21, 2010 | Permalink

UX design in print media: Designing with the user in mind

"Due to the increasing popularity of usability design and user experience design articles that focus on the internet and web design, you might not be aware that user experience design has been around a lot longer than the internet has. This article will discuss the effects that user experience design has specifically in print design. It is my firm belief that user experience design is important in any design setting and your future success in the design industry depends on how well you can design an experience." (Preston D. Lee - Graphic Design Blender)

Posted on January 20, 2010 | Permalink

What have we forgotten about UX?

"Maybe I'm not very smart (don't answer that!). Possibly it's because I got my Graphic Design degree almost 20 years ago. Or maybe it's because most of what I've learned about UX design is geared toward eLearning, where the overriding goal is to make sure the user has the best possible chance of absorbing whatever content is presented. But I seem to have some concepts about what constitutes good usability that are at odds with what I see demonstrated on websites that are about UX and design or are by people who are using their sites to market their UX design services. Before I get specific about what I'm seeing in these sites, I thought I'd outline what the criteria are for me for good UX." (Amy Blankenship - InsideRIA)

Posted on January 19, 2010 | Permalink

Embedding User Experience in the Product Development Lifecycle

"All UX professionals, not just user assistance developers, face the problem of integrating their work into the product development lifecycle. At lower levels of organizational usability maturity, too often, the contributions of User Experience tend to be reactive. Usability professionals test the usability of a given product, then designers mitigate any shortcomings they find, and user assistance developers merely document what is already there. This column takes a look at the full scope of the product development lifecycle and how UX professionals can add value." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on January 18, 2010 | Permalink

UX Leader as Sales Agent?

"(...) many UX professionals feel a bit frustrated that it is necessary for them to convince their business partners that user experience is valuable—and that our core practices should be a central part of standard business practices." (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted on January 18, 2010 | Permalink

People don't remember what was said: People remember how they felt

"This mantra has been one of my favourites for a good 7 years now. Working with a range of companies, charities and individuals, and having been in many board rooms, held live events, and developed digital strategy, I can certainly say it's true. I'm not trying to brag here, but point out through experience I've learned that Experience itself is a big a deal. The other people who know how big a deal experience is are restaurant owners. They know that it's not only the food they serve that people are paying for – it's everything else that goes with it – and the things that go before and after it." (Search Engine People Blog)

Posted on January 15, 2010 | Permalink

52 Weeks of UX

"This is the first rule of UX. Everything a designer does affects the user experience. From the purposeful addition of a design element to the negligent omission of crucial messaging, every decision is molding the future of the people we design for." (Joshua Porter and Joshua Brewer)

Posted on January 08, 2010 | Permalink

UX University 1: Subliminal Priming

"The first UX University was held on the 2nd of December 2009. We invited 20 people who attended to meet with UX experts and learn about subliminal persuasion. Martijn Veltkamp, expert for subliminal research, held a succinct presentation explaining the idea of subliminal persuasion and introducing some interesting researches." (About UX University)

Posted on January 07, 2010 | Permalink

25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time

"We're all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older videos that are still relevant. It will take you more than 16 hours to watch all of these videos. So, make some popcorn, turn off the lights and enjoy." (Janko Jovanovic - Smashing Magazine)

Posted on January 05, 2010 | Permalink

The web designer's guide to user experience: Experts demystify the process behind UX design

"Good UX doesn't happen by magic: you have to plan for it." (Craig Grannell - TechRadar UK) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on January 05, 2010 | Permalink

Testing Content Concepts

"As UX professionals, we’re all familiar with the need to test user experience designs. Testing content, however, might be a different story. Most companies haven’t given testing content the attention it deserves—partly because it’s challenging. One challenge is that time and budget usually do not allow us to test every single piece of content. Another challenge is that gathering too much unfocused feedback can freeze our projects in analysis paralysis. To meet these challenges, try testing your content concepts—and start testing them early in your projects." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on December 21, 2009 | 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

Web Site User Experience Anatomy

"Just like human anatomy, the anatomy of a web site is composed of different user experience parts that must all work together seamlessly. Optimizing the user experience of each part however is problematic: Where do you start? How much user experience testing and adjusting should you do on each of your page types? What’s critical, important or just a nice to have in terms of spending your limited user experience testing resources?" (Craig Tomlin - What Makes Them Click)

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Permalink

How to seduce your users with web design

"We all like being seduced. Interaction on the web can take advantage of this idea. There is a notion of “seductive interfaces”. It’s about surprise and delight. We are all seducers. We are doing it out of instinct. This doesn’t have to do with deviation, mind control, and trickery. It’s not about the one-night stand; it’s about forming a long-term relationship with the user." (ZDNet) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on December 16, 2009 | Permalink

Using Emotional Experience Design to Engage Customers on Your Website

"The results, while not surprising for any web designer, usability tester or marketing specialist, show the way the web is continually evolving. From Web 2.0 to 3.0, the web has the power to engage and connect users. However, as the report reminds us, it’s not always employed in a helpful and user-friendly way." (CMS Wire) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Permalink

Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World

"Our language is limited and imperfect. Typically, people type search queries quickly and with little forethought, so queries are definitely less than perfect. When a customer constructs a query that may have more than one meaning, a good search user interface provides tools to help the customer define the query in less ambiguous terms, so the search results more closely match the person's intention. This process is known as disambiguation, and best practices for effectively supporting the disambiguation of search queries are the subject of this column." (Greg Nudelman - UXmatters)

Posted on December 07, 2009 | Permalink

Optimization: Applying Moore’s Law to User Experience

"As UX designers, our vision is to optimize the overall human‑computer system, improve the ability of humanity to solve important problems, and help people to gain insights more effectively. In this column, I'll look at what optimization means, as well as some of the ways in which we can optimize user experience." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted on December 07, 2009 | Permalink

The Experience Imperative: A Manifesto for Industrial Designers

"The challenge is not to design an object, but to design an object that changes dynamically and adapts over time. This requires a new approach to design. (...) Call yourself an experience designer." (Ken Fry - Core77)

Posted on December 02, 2009 | Permalink

Can Experience be Designed?

"We naturally assume that the way we experience our world must be unique. The idea that our experience has been shaped by someone else threatens our belief in individuality and personal freedom. Out of the fear to not be special many will even reject the idea that two people can share a similar physical experience." (iA)

Posted on December 02, 2009 | Permalink

Measure User Experience

"Qualitative studies allow receiving quick and valid feedback that is needed during the development process of an interface. Another reason is that qualitative tests are usually cheaper than tests with a larger sample size. But this larger sample size is needed when it comes to really measure user experience." (Tim Bosenick - Usability Marathon 2)

Posted on November 30, 2009 | Permalink

Social and Experience Design: Inspired Ideas, Practical Outcomes (IDEA 2009 Day 2)

"IDEA2009 had the world's foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto's MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people's lives and systems are converging to affect society. Listen and learn from experts in a variety of fields as we all continue the exploration of Social Experience Design." (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on November 19, 2009 | Permalink

UX Design Tools & Techniques

"UX design defines how software looks and behaves. We're deeply interested in the interaction models that affect how software is perceived, learned and used. Our goal is to make compelling software that's usable, useful and desirable. We are not the only discipline at Microsoft that has an active hand in experience design. In fact, we are a partner." (Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering)

Posted on November 18, 2009 | Permalink

UX Design Patterns

"This is a simple, HTML-based list of the design patterns in Quince. We suggest using the Quince UX Patterns Explorer for richer pattern discovery and community interaction." (Quince)

Posted on November 18, 2009 | Permalink

I Have an Idea! Forums for Design Conversations and Negotiations

"Working together in a group to produce a creative outcome is difficult - don't let anyone tell you it's not. Let me share a memory with you - from my Performance Theatre and Community class." (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted on November 16, 2009 | Permalink

First, Do No Harm

"In my column, On Good Behavior, I'll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction desigdefining the scope this column will cover - then explores some key design principles." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on November 16, 2009 | Permalink

Cooking a Website

"(...) what I do find interesting is that I'm seeing several parallels between cooking and designing interfaces and websites." (Usability Post)

Posted on November 16, 2009 | Permalink

Agile User Experience Projects

"Agile projects aren't yet fully user-driven, but new research shows that developers are actually more bullish on key user experience issues than UX people themselves." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on November 04, 2009 | Permalink

Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients

"As UX researchers, we're hired to be the glue between business stakeholders and users. In a sense, we're informed facilitators. And before a contract is signed, our role is to influence our clients with kindness, grace, and wit, on the true value of our engagement." (David Sherwin - A List Apart)

Posted on November 04, 2009 | Permalink

Participate in the 2009 UXmatters Reader Survey

"This month, we're celebrating the fourth anniversary of UXmatters, which launched in November 2005. UXmatters is thriving. Since our launch we’ve published 290 articles on a great diversity of topics. Our community of readers is growing. Over the last year, almost 260,000 UX professionals have read UXmatters." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on November 02, 2009 | Permalink

Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing

"An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees, in addition to its basic function of providing access to documents and procedural information. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically, as collections of disjointed Web sites for different departments or document repositories for particular workgroups." (Michael Hawley - UXmatters)

Posted on November 02, 2009 | Permalink

Infuse Emotion Into Experience Design

"The Web is becoming an increasingly important channel for companies, yet online experiences leave a lot to be desired. Our research shows that most sites have poor usability and they don't reinforce key brand attributes." (Bruce Temkin - Experience Matters)

Posted on November 02, 2009 | Permalink

Science and Design

"But as the world grows more complex, more interconnected, with the underlying infrastructure less and less visible, hidden inside electronic and optical mechanisms, conveyed as all-powerful yet invisible information and knowledge, design more than ever needs a body of reliable, verifiable procedures. Science is the systematic method of building a reliable, verifiable, repeatable, and generalizable body of knowledge. Science is not a body of facts: it is a process. Design is the deliberate shaping of the environment in ways that satisfy individual and societal needs. Scientific methods can inform design. Designers can create a science of design." (Donald A. Norman - IASDR09)

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Permalink

On Authenticity

"Calling something 'authentic' may connote original, traditional, indigenous, old, rare, the real thing, or in some crucial way a better example of its category. We use the term today as a messy amalgam of its twin roots: the art historian’s validation of an object and the philosopher's valuing of the true self. While the concept of authenticity is employed in vague and subjective ways, we want to believe that an item’s authenticity is an absolutely determinable quality, an expectation that (as you’ll see) is not wholly realistic." (Steve Portigal - ACM SIGCHI Interactions Magazine XVI.6)

Posted on October 29, 2009 | Permalink

Creating a Timeless User Experience

"(...) the kinds of products, websites, and applications that survive and continue to be effective are those that that focus on the user experience. The digital world evolves continually, but we need to manage this by making sure we don't leave the people who use our applications and websites in the dust. In this article we will explore creating a timeless user experience." (Francisco Inchauste - Six Revisions)

Posted on October 28, 2009 | Permalink

Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

By Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - "This book presents a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns that we have observed and codified, thus capturing user-experience best practices and emerging social web customs for web 2.0 practitioners." (About the authors)

Posted on October 20, 2009 | Permalink

Usability Testing Versus Expert Reviews

"In this Ask UXmatters column—which is the first in a series of three columns focusing on usability—our experts discuss the use of usability testing versus expert reviews. In the upcoming columns, we'll discuss what usability techniques to use when money or time is tight and how to best conduct remote usability testing." (Janet Six - UXmatters)

Posted on October 20, 2009 | Permalink

UX Design Defined

"(...) User Experience Design is the practice of integrating user-centered design methods, collecting, interpreting and applying meticulous user research, process management for testing elements of a system independently in gradually increasing levels of fidelity, and integrating multiple symbolic systems (languages) to affect and influence users of an interactive system in a predictable and measured way, according to the user’s own criteria for success and happiness." (Michael Cummings - UXDesign) - courtesy of thehotstrudel

Posted on October 19, 2009 | Permalink

25 tips for writing the user experience

"While this article tends toward copywriting for the user experience as it pertains to the online world, you can apply it to other aspects of your brand as well. The most important point being to take the user, aka the person, reading what you're writing into account from the get-go. Communicate for them first and foremost." (Karen Goldfarb)

Posted on October 16, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience Engineering

"User experience is becoming a more and more specialized area of expertise, says Mayhew. IT departments need to invest in multidisciplinary teams and then provide a work environment that fosters mutual respect, collaboration, and highly effective teamwork among them. Training can be one very effective way to support this agenda." (Kurt Marko - Processor) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on October 16, 2009 | Permalink

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

"The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users. An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world's unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data." (Alex Wright - NYT)

Posted on October 15, 2009 | Permalink

Interactions and Relationships

"(...) I was asked to do a session that addressed the everyday reality that managers of user experience live in, to reflect on that reality, and to share some approaches and ideas for that reality. I decided to focus largely on some of the interactions and relationships that comprise that everyday reality, but particularly those by managers intent on enabling experience research and design to play a strategic role in their companies." (Richard Anderson - riander)

Posted on October 15, 2009 | Permalink

The State of User Experience

"As the field of user experience grows and evolves, UX practitioners find themselves having to master new techniques to take on new challenges. Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garrett takes a look at where user experience has been and where it's going." (Jesse James Garrett - UX Week 2009)

Posted on October 12, 2009 | Permalink

Experience Themes: How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products

"There's an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what's important about the story. He'll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end). The story will be all the better for it because it all hangs together with a central idea that will give it greater impact and meaning." (Cindy Chastain - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 06, 2009 | Permalink

UX: An art in search of an methodology

"Perhaps like all forms of design, in practice user experience design rarely resembles the execution of a method, so much as it resembles the practice of an art. There is a heavy reliance on intuition, and when a designer does choose to refer to some piece of shared knowledge, that knowledge usually takes the form of a pattern (in the architectural sense) rather than empirical studies or a unified theoretical framework." (Justin Tauber - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on October 05, 2009 | Permalink

Can UX Be Agile?

"Traditional, heavyweight development methodologies can be very effective at solving well‑defined problems, where the person solving the problem has a clear understanding of the initial and goal states, the available options, and the constraints on the problem. At the opposite end of the spectrum are ill‑defined, so-called wicked problems. When it's necessary to balance numerous, often‑conflicting factors, traditional development methodologies are much less effective." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted on October 05, 2009 | Permalink

The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol

"Symbols and icons can be both friend and enemy to UX designers. They can convey a great deal of information in the span of just a few pixels or utterly confuse users, depending on the context. The careful application of icons, however, can greatly enhance software, enabling quick access to a feature or function, using a minimal amount of screen real estate." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on October 05, 2009 | Permalink

Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience

From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on October 05, 2009 | Permalink

Understanding the Experience of Social Network Sites

"This past year social media, and social network sites in particular, have reached new heights of popularity and adoption. It is no longer unusual for clients to request that designers “add Facebook” to their respective sites, mainly for the purpose of increased engagement and community building for their brand as a part of a greater social marketing strategy." (Alla Zollers - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX

"Some think the best way to demonstrate the value of usability in a corporate setting is to emphasize the resulting cost savings. While that may be sage advice in some organizations and industries, following it in the information technology and government arenas would cost you respect and a meeting. For some years, I was guilty of following this tack—before I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles." (Kate Walser - UXmatters)

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

NING: Agile Experience Design

Integrating the Agile and Experience Design Practices - "Our goal is to explore, evolve, and empower the emergent discipline that fuses Agile Software Development with User Experience Design." - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink

(Preso) Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patterns

"In this presentation we share a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns to help user experience designers and strategists grapple with the social dimensions of their products and services. The family of patterns, principles, and practices provides a framework and starting point for the conceptual modeling of any interactive digital social experience." (Erin Malone & Christian Crumlish)

Posted on September 18, 2009 | Permalink

Playfulness, Usability, & Context: The Three Pillars of a Delightful User Experience

"When I bought my first iPhone almost three months ago, I also acquired a new obsession with the role of playfulness in user experience design." (Fred Bleecher) - courtesy of hotstrudel

Posted on September 17, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience Vision Videos

"As powerful networked device capabilities continue to enter mainstream use, several technology companies have released 'vision' videos portraying how capabilities like augmented reality, flexible OLED screens, and rich sensors can alter our lives in the future." (LukeW)

Posted on September 16, 2009 | Permalink

HCI 09: Interaction gets all Emotional

"The ubiquity of computing means it’s now present in all aspects of our lives, and – perhaps not unexpectedly – that increasingly means our emotional lives. Emotions drive a huge proportion of what we do and likewise, our interactions with technology impact on our emotions. Emotion as a 'property' to take into account during design and usability evaluation featured in many papers – hinting at a whole new field of emotional design to come." (Usability News)

Posted on September 15, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience Designer vs. Creative Director

"Professionals within our industry are completely awash with opportunities by which they can tweak and cajole better user experiences from their projects. The difficult part is maintaining quality across all of these channels. Because of how multifaceted User Experience is, a user experience designer begins to take on a more directorial position within a project/company, which I see as analogous to that of a creative director." (UX Booth)

Posted on September 08, 2009 | Permalink

The Art and Science of Experience Design

"Businesses that historically have approached things in a purely scientific manner are now trying to engage their users at a more fundamental level. Through great experiences. And great experiences, the way in which these stories unfold, have this innate ability to change or enhance the way in which people view and interact with their world. We're not advocating that we throw our concerns about platforms and technology considerations out the window but rather how best to combine them with thoughtful, engaging design principles. The Art and Science behind great experiences balancing one another in harmony, embodied within the end product." (Christian Saylor - InsideRIA)

Posted on September 01, 2009 | Permalink

The Ambivalence of Engaging Technology: Artifacts as Products and Processes

"In this paper, I will discuss several cases in order to explore how technological artifacts engage and are engaged in larger sociotechnical arrangements. I will show how they inscribe a certain relationship between users and designers and a certain level of engagement." (Cristiano Storni - Nordic Design Research Conference 2009 Engaging Artifacts)

Posted on September 01, 2009 | Permalink

Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product

"A product is actually a service. (...) In reality a product is all about the experience. It is about discovery, purchase, anticipation, opening the package, the very first usage. It is also about continued usage, learning, the need for assistance, updating, maintenance, supplies, and eventual renewal in the form of disposal or exchange." (Donald A. Norman - Interaction Magazine XVI.5 Sep/Oct 2009)

Posted on August 31, 2009 | Permalink

Preso: UX design, service design and design thinking

"What is UX design, service design & design thinking? How are they related?" (Sylvain 'Sly' Cottong - IntegratedPlace)

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Permalink

Top 10 User Experience Myths

"Myth#2: People Read - Short: They don't." (Keith Lang - Carsonified)

Posted on August 26, 2009 | Permalink

How to Extend Your Customer Experience Through Social Media

"The worst offenders are those who see social media as simply another platform for marketing communications, blasting press releases and other promotions without regard." (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted on August 24, 2009 | Permalink

Online Advertising: Factors That Influence Customer Experience

"In this article, I'll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web." (Afshan Kirmani - UXmatters)

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Permalink

Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality

"Many people enter the inside-out world of augmented reality (AR) by doing something as ordinary as visiting a major city like New York and trying to get to a local friend's favorite pizza shop, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, via public transportation. Standing in Times Square on a summer evening, they might hold up a new smart phone and pan it slowly around the Square to see a pointer to the nearest subway entrance overlaid on their phone’s video display of the buildings around them." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Permalink

Effective UX in a Corporate Environment: Part I

"Today's consumers have growing expectations for higher quality and ease of use in new products. They typically evaluate brand values and product specs before paying top dollar for products. Companies are scrambling to align their brand touchpoints and gain loyal customers for their current and future product lines. Without strong brands, consumers buy with their wallets, not their hearts. They may miss product innovations companies have designed to fill major gaps in their markets and increase their market shares—even products they've painstakingly tested with users." (Janet M. Six and Chris Anthony - UXmatters)

Posted on August 19, 2009 | Permalink

The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design

"I live and breathe user experience design, and yet it took me two years to get myself the device referenced by almost every single presentation about user experience since 2007... Apple's iPhone. My reasons were very specific and perhaps boring, but what is interesting is the perspective this wait has afforded me. Since it was released, the iPhone has grabbed an astonishing share of mobile Web traffic, been regarded as a 'game-changer' in both the design and business worlds, and has even been referred to as the 'Jesus Phone'. Now that I've owned one for two weeks I've developed a different perspective. The iPhone is surprisingly difficult to use, but it sure is fun! And that is why it's a game-changer." (Fred Beecher - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on August 18, 2009 | Permalink

Mobile User Experience Research: Challenges, Methods & Tools

"The main goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers from industry and academia, designers, and creators of mobile research tools to discuss methods, tools and infrastructure for mobile UX and HCI research. To achieve this goal, we plan to provide a forum for participants to share past experiences, success stories, failures and associated learnings, as well as recurring problems; to jointly prioritize these; to map out the dimensions required of mobile research tools, and translate some of these into draft requirements and low-fidelity prototypes for novel research tools." (CHI '09 Workshop)

Posted on August 12, 2009 | Permalink

Does Your Client Need a Consultant or an Agency?

"There are no hard-and-fast rules for judging whether a consultant or an agency is a better fit for any given project. Aside from time, money, and required skills, there are a variety of other factors to consider—for example, the stage of the product development process at which you're asked to come in, whether an engagement is one of strategic guidance or tactical execution, and the maturity and capacity of the client's team." (Whitney Hess - UXmatters)

Posted on August 04, 2009 | Permalink

The Spectrum of User Experience

This article is the first part of a series. - "As we all perfectly know, designers are narcissists; programmers are nerds, and whoever wears a tie must be a clueless jerk. Designers, programmers and business people love to hate each other." (Information Architects Japan) - courtesy of uxbooth

Posted on July 13, 2009 | Permalink

Finding Gold in Your User Research Results

"This article describes a funnel that starts with the product, progresses to the users, and finally, plumbs the depths of the user research itself. I'll attempt to show how each of these stages can inform the next stage and move us toward finding the gold." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters)

Posted on July 06, 2009 | Permalink

A Practical Guide to Capturing Creativity for UX

"This column explores a few low-tech and high-tech methods of stimulating UX professionals' creativity and capturing creativity when it happens. Codifying the creative process for the digital industry is difficult enough. It helps to have techniques that make our most elusive asset—our insights and inspiration—easier to manage." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on July 06, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience Evaluation Based on Values and Emotions

"In this paper, we explore a user experience evaluation possibility by combining the identification of person's personal values and evaluation of product emotions. By personal values we mean a type of user concern that is guiding his/her choices and evaluations of products or actions in order to reach the desired goal. By product emotions we mean emotions that a certain product evokes in the user. Theoretical reasoning for this user experience evaluation approach is given by reviewing the existing literature. In addition, possible applications of use are suggested." (Piia Nurkka - UXEM09)

Posted on July 03, 2009 | Permalink

Being an Experience-led organization

"We've heard it before: we should focus on designing for an experience; experiences are fundamentally different design challenges to a product or services; experiences are designed from the outside in. We're also told that we can apply this experience-centric perspective to tackle problems beyond the design of a product or piece of software. But we don't often see examples of these ideas being put into practice." (Steve Baty - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on July 01, 2009 | Permalink

Usability Engineers vs Designers: The Process Problem

"A Designer works on a conceptual design with the customer. Then he works out a detailed design into a prototype that can be tested. So far so good. But what goes wrong is that the Usability Engineer is often disconnected to either the design concept or the detailed design. The usability engineer ends up suggesting new designs that totally contradict the conceptual design. The designer is gone. The engineering team implements the changes and the result is a Frankenstein's monster that despite the best UX resources, fails in the marketplace." (Jonathan Arnowitz - User Experience in Arnoland)

Posted on June 30, 2009 | Permalink

Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word

"Crafting a set of experience principles has become standard for our projects, from web site redesigns to mapping multi-channel customer experiences. When done well, these statements have remarkable power in guiding teams to deliver coherent, cohesive, and appropriate experiences for their customers." (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business Review)

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

The Forces of User Experience

"It always bothered me a little that Jesse's 'planes' diagram could be interpreted to mean that only adjacent planes influenced each other. So here is my version, with some thoughts about the additional 'forces' acting from the strategy plane." (Richard Dalton - mauvyrussel) - thnx hansk

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media

"The emergence and rise of social media [1] have been nothing less than phenomenal. In the perennial battle between patterns of intellect and patterns of society, the rapidly spreading influence of social media has initiated the most significant shift toward dominance of intellect [2] in recent times. A groundswell [3] has unmistakably occurred. Social media’s rise has induced a paradigm shift and changed the way the common man perceives the Internet immensely. Social networking is now the number one reason people get online. [4] Getting the world out of the socioeconomic rut it was in required something of this magnitude to come along." (Junaid Asad - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

Reusing the User Experience

"Developers often report a sense of déjà vu when creating software—a sense they've already designed or coded a function. Of course, the feeling that he or she is doing unnecessary work is particularly frustrating when a developer is under pressure! The reuse of software components can help to address this problem. Components are proven, reusable units of design and code that meet a specific need. As such, they enable a developer to think about solving problems at a higher level of abstraction, making the development process more efficient. For example, rather than writing a function to print a file, a developer can find and reuse a pre-existing component that meets the requirement." (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

Innovation Workshops: Facilitating Product Innovation

"As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design. Often, though, UX designers and researchers get stuck with incrementalism—designing minor new features for which another functional group has provided the requirements, expecting UX to design them—regardless of whether the UX team agrees with the product direction. Perhaps we find ourselves immersed in organizations or work routines that do not provide space to think differently. This column reveals some tools that can help your team to innovate." (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Permalink

UX London: In Favour of Complexity

"Don Norman's In Favour of Complexity keynote at UX London 2009 made the case for complexity with order, lucidity and understandability." (notes from LukeW)

Posted on June 15, 2009 | Permalink

What the heck is the nature of UI design?

"In this article, I will offer an answer and then I will take a look at authority, power and weight of UXP on multimedia projects relating on the teams and how it could or should refer to for guidance in their work. I hope my answers to these questions will be helpful as well as provocative enough to drive some reactions and feedbacks from readers." (Holger Maassen - ux4dotcom)

Posted on June 09, 2009 | Permalink

What is an Experience Strategy?

"An experience strategy is that collection of activities that an organization chooses to undertake to deliver a series of (positive, exceptional) interactions which, when taken together, constitute an (product or service) offering that is superior in some meaningful, hard-to-replicate way; that is unique, distinct and distinguishable from that available from a competitor." (Steve Baty - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on June 04, 2009 | Permalink

Dear AmericanAirlines

"I'm a user interface designer. I travel sometimes. Recently, I had the horrific displeasure of booking a flight on your website, aa.com. The experience was so bad that I vowed never to fly your airline again. But before we part ways, I have a couple questions and three suggestions for you." - (Dustin Curtis) courtesy of rmoens

Posted on June 02, 2009 | Permalink

Is Design the Preeminent Protagonist in User Experience?

"We are gradually learning that user experience is a critical factor in customer satisfaction and loyalty. A positive experience means a happy customer who returns again. Designers of software systems and web services have been digging deeply into how they might generate a positive user experience. They are moving beyond anecdotes about excellent examples of user experiences and are developing design principles. Phillip Tobias gives us a fascinating account of the emerging design principles that will generate satisfied and loyal users." - (ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on May 26, 2009 | Permalink

Why define the UX Tribe?

"(...) there are no hard lines; there are folks who strictly do IA or IxD, but the majority of us lie somewhere in between- why not simplify our message to the industry and take advantage of the full extent of our value proposition. The irony that we UX Designers pride ourselves in solving contextual problems for the user (the marketplace in this case) is not lost on me." - (The User Experience Tribe)

Posted on May 26, 2009 | Permalink

UX Deliverables in Practice

"On May 17 2009, I delivered my invited presentation at the IA Konferenz 2009 in Hamburg, Germany. A first (slightly modified) version is now available. Given that my session was scheduled right after the lunch break on the last day, I had told the organizers that I would try to make it a bit of a show. Of course the real content -- a brief overview of theories of UX plus a wider look at some of the deliverables outside of the standard research-design-evaluation triad (which I summarized using a quiz) -- was there too." - (Peter Boersma)

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Permalink

User experience and web analytics

"(...) we would probably all benefit from a dashboard of reports that included the ones that we've come to expect from our analytics tools, but that also include other quantitative reports (such as from help desk logs) and, perhaps more importantly, qualitative reports from such sources as ongoing usability testing." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Bloug)

Posted on May 17, 2009 | Permalink

Using Verbs As Nouns in User Interfaces | UX Roles in Organizations

"What are your experience and wisdom on the use of verbs as nouns in naming software functionality? Do you have any other brilliant names for views? (...) We are looking to update our UX team to align with advanced needs, and I am having trouble finding an organizational view of UX roles. I am not sure where UX architects, art directors, information designers, visual designers, user researchers, usability testers, creative managers, interactive designers, and other UX roles fit into the big picture. Do you have any examples of organizational layouts?" - (UXmatters)

Posted on May 12, 2009 | Permalink

Refactoring the User Experience

"The ability to take a broad view of the world and incorporate lessons learned from other disciplines distinguishes the best practitioners in any field. As UX professionals, there is much we can learn from good software engineering practice, which maps a team’s understanding of a problem at a human level onto the implementation of a technical solution. The essence of good software engineering practice is effective user experience—from developing the high-level design documentation that describes how the main elements of a system interact to its implementation in clearly written code. Though the relationship between software engineering and user experience is not always an easy one, software engineers and UX professionals share some common goals. Both have a vested interest in producing systems that are useful and usable." - (Peter Hornsby - UXmatters)

Posted on May 12, 2009 | Permalink

Approaching Design: Advice on how to really rock in UI/UX design

"The longer I do this job, the more I think that there are certain qualities, or attitudes that can make a real difference to ones ability to get better designs implemented, and generally enjoy the job more. Here's my hopefully controversial list of qualities that will help you really rock." - (Jason Furnell - The Architecture of Everything)

Posted on May 08, 2009 | Permalink

Attention and awareness in stage magic: Turning tricks into research

"Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques." - (Nature Reviews Neuroscience)

Posted on May 07, 2009 | Permalink

Designing for experience: Arousing boredom to evoke predefined user behaviour

"In the light of Cultural Computing, this study influences user affect and behaviour by touching upon core values of Western culture. We created an augmented reality environment in which users experience a predefined sequence of emotional states and events. This study concerns two typically Western drives: boredom and curiosity. We specifically address the arousal of boredom, a mental state characterized by a heightened drive for exploration, making it easier to guide people in their decision making. Based on psychology literature, we introduce general design guidelines for arousing boredom. We report on the design of the augmented reality environment, the experiment effectively arousing boredom and on the redesign of the environment based on the experimental results." - (Matthias Rautenberg et al.)

Posted on May 03, 2009 | Permalink

IA Summit 09 (Day 3 Podcasts)

"These sessions were recorded on the third day of the conference." - (Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 24, 2009 | Permalink

Usability testing ≠ a good user experience

"Strategic user experience planning yields a unified and consistent user experience. And strategic design leads to great user experiences, ones that are characterized by delight, loyalty and stickiness. So how do you attain these? By designing the user experience for now, for next year... and for the year after that. And by designing the entire experience, not just your web site’s user interface, or your email campaign's HTML." - (Paul Sherman - Apogee)

Posted on April 22, 2009 | Permalink

In Defense of Eye Candy

"We've all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond." - (Stephen P. Anderson - A List Apart)

Posted on April 22, 2009 | Permalink

Understanding, scoping and defining user experience: A survey approach

"Despite the growing interest in user experience (UX), it has been hard to gain a common agreement on the nature and scope of UX. In this paper, we report a survey that gathered the views on UX of 275 researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. Most respondents agree that UX is dynamic, context-dependent, and subjective. With respect to the more controversial issues, the authors propose to delineate UX as something individual (instead of social) that emerges from interacting with a product, system, service or an object. The draft ISO definition on UX seems to be in line with the survey findings, although the issues of experiencing anticipated use and the object of UX will require further explication. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding, scoping, and defining the concept of user experience." - (Effie Lai-Chong Law, Virpi Roto, Marc Hassenzahl, Arnold P.O.S. Vermeeren, and Joke Kort - ACM CHI 2009 Proceedings)

Posted on April 07, 2009 | Permalink

IA Summit 09 - Plenary

"Jesse James Garrett is a noted figure in the IA community, not only for his ground breaking book Elements of User Experience, but for the essay that galvanized the community in 2002, IA Recon. In this IA Summit Closing Plenary, given without slides while wandering amidst the audience, Jesse examines what he has learned at the conference, he thoughts on the nature of the discipline and the practitioner, and gives bold, perhaps even shocking advice for the future direction of information architecture." - (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 06, 2009 | Permalink

Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport

"Most of today's design products and services are so complex they require input across silos. This leads to scattered departments where efforts are stitched together by a product manager. What's worse, each department has different measures of success. Marketing works to increase leads and brand perception; product managers strive to be on time and on budget; engineers want to meet requirements; manufacturers focus on minimizing defects; designers aim for useful, usable, and desirable products." - (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted on April 01, 2009 | Permalink

Wall of Deliverables

"(...) a companion site for the IA Summit Wall of Deliverables annual event and an ongoing repository of deliverables submitted from the community to share." Great initiative by Jacco et al. - (About WoD)

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Permalink

5 Universal Principles For Successful eCommerce-Sites

"When was the last time you called customer support because you were having problems checking out online? Probably never! Cart abandonment rate is at around 60%, and most of it happens before the user even begins the checkout process. Sometimes, convincing your customers to trust you is your biggest challenge. There is no "Consumer Trust for Dummies", but as eCommerce designers, we need to focus on some fundamentals. The following topics may seem as obvious as walking into a seven-foot Wookie, but rest assured you will find plenty of websites with a mouth full of fur." - (Smashing Magazine)

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Permalink

The UX of Enterprise Software Matters, Part 2: Strategic User Experience

"In this column, I'll provide a technology selection framework that can help enterprises better assess the usability and appropriateness of enterprise applications they're considering purchasing, with the goal of ensuring their Information Technology investments deliver fully on their value propositions." - (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on March 24, 2009 | Permalink

Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

"I want to start this discussion by proposing a model for collaboration1 that links the various elements of collaboration, comment on the so-called “collaboration software” currently available, and make some tentative suggestions about IA and UX requirements for a real collaboration platform." - (Matthew C. Clarke - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on March 13, 2009 | Permalink

The History and Evolution of User Experience Design

An 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

The Best Way to Understand Your Customers

"It's in difficult economic times that customer experience matters most -- you don't want to make it even easier for your customers to walk away because they've been so frustrated working with you." - (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted on March 10, 2009 | Permalink

Evangelizing UX Across An Entire Organization

"This edition of Ask UXmatters discusses how to communicate and sell the UX message across all levels of an organization. Our experts share what strategies and tactics for evangelizing UX have worked for them." - (Janet M. Six - UXmatters)

Posted on March 10, 2009 | Permalink

Brenda Laurel: Why didn't girls play videogames?

"A TED archive gem. At TED in 1998, Brenda Laurel asks: Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys? She spent two years researching the world of girls (and shares amazing interviews and photos) to create a game that girls would love." - (TED.com)

Posted on March 06, 2009 | Permalink

Marissa Mayer Gives Us An Insight Into How Google Works

"Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products & User Experience at Google recently delivered a fascinating Keynote at the Google I/O Developers Conference. She shares a heap of interesting nuggets, from the reason why they chose 10 search results as default, and why they chose a yellow background behind their ads as opposed to the industry favored blue." - (TheNextWeb)

Posted on March 02, 2009 | Permalink

It's Not Who Your Customers Are, It's How They Behave

"No department has a complete view of the customer, however, and so in place of true understanding are models and frameworks that attempt to describe the customer. Many companies don't go beyond demographics and market segmentation." - (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted on February 18, 2009 | Permalink

Engagement and stakeholding. And steak

"Whatever type of work we're doing, and whatever terms we use to describe it, when it comes to our hoped-for outcomes, aren't we all trying to get beyond experience, interaction, and design? Aren't we trying to create artifacts that ultimately engage? Isn't that the secret sauce?" - (Louis Rosenfeld - bloug)

Posted on February 11, 2009 | Permalink

Writing Usability Requirements and Metrics

"(..) our experts discuss how to write effective usability requirements and metrics for the redesign of a legacy public sector system." - (Janet M. Six - UXmatters)

Posted on February 10, 2009 | Permalink

Thriving in a Difficult Economy: A Tale of Ugly Babies and Sacred Cows

"The brutal fact is—we're in a difficult economy. Every day, we hear about another company that's laying off employees. Just yesterday, an article on Yahoo! News reported “Mass layoffs involving 50 or more workers increased sharply last year, and large cuts appear to be accelerating in 2009 at a furious pace. In fact, there were layoffs at Yahoo! itself in December. Letting people go is traumatic for everyone involved. It's traumatic for the employees who are laid off, whose relationships to their livelihoods—not to mention their friends and colleagues—are abruptly severed. It's painful to the remaining employees, whose friends and colleagues were so abruptly removed. Sometimes companies must make deep budget cuts to succeed, but it's painful, and those of us who have been through layoffs before agree that it seems to get harder every time we do it." - (Jim Nieters - UXmatters)

Posted on February 10, 2009 | Permalink

Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy?

"While there are indeed some UX professionals who—by either personal inclination or circumstance—resemble the specialists and generalists Jared describes, in my opinion, the ideal employee to hire for your UX team is neither a specialist nor a generalist." - (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on February 10, 2009 | Permalink

Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business

"(...) customer experience is an organizational mindset. It's not something a business buys, it's something a business becomes. Customer experience refers to the totality of experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints." - Thnx for being one of your favs. (Peter Merholz - Harvard Business)

Posted on February 05, 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

Touchscreens no substitute for good user experience

"Touch interactions are fundamentally different from those performed with keys or even a stylus, and will often require a completely revised user interface. Nokia, which has been busily skinning Series 60 in preparation for the introduction of touchscreen products, would do well to take note." (MEX) - courtesy of kicker

Posted on February 02, 2009 | Permalink

Interactions Jan/Feb '08: The Digital Version

"This issue marks a quiet milestone for us: the beginning of our second year as editors in chief. Year one was marked by six quality issues, a new look and feel, a new website, a new team of contributors and advisors, a presence at more than two dozen premier conferences, and greatly renewed and expanded respect for the magazine. Our second year begins with a bang, with a very strong January+February issue and several additions to the interactions team." (ACM Interactions Magazine)

Posted on January 28, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience Deliverables

"It's an exhilarating time for the user experience community. Rising awareness of our value plus emerging technologies and transmedia trends have created conditions for a step change in our practice." (Peter Morville)

Posted on January 27, 2009 | Permalink

Beyond Usability: Designing Web Sites for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust

"The next wave in Web site design is persuasive design, designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. While usability is still a fundamental requirement for effective Web site design, it is no longer enough to design sites that are simply easy to navigate and understand so users can complete transactions. As business mandates for Web site design have grown more strategic, complex, and demanding of accountability, good usability has become the price of competitive entry. So, while usability is important, it is no longer the key differentiator it once was." (Eric Schaffer - UXmatters)

Posted on January 27, 2009 | Permalink

Design Research Methods for Experience Design

"There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One reason for this change in terminology is that it lets us talk about a specific target audience in terms that resonate with business stakeholders more than the generic term user—for example, customer experience, patient experience, or member experience. The other reason for using the term experience design rather than user experience design is that it recognizes the fact that most customer interactions are multifaceted and complex and include all aspects of a customer’s interaction with a company or other organizational entity, including its people, services, and products. Customer interactions encompass much more than the usability of a particular user interface. They include all of the social and emotional consequences of a customer’s interaction with an organization or brand, including trust, motivation, relationships, and value." (Michael Hawley - UXmatters)

Posted on January 23, 2009 | Permalink

The UX Customer Experience: Communicating Effectively with Stakeholders and Clients

"User experience and its associated fields of expertise—such as usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user interface design—have expanded rapidly over the past decade to accommodate what seems like insatiable demand, as the world moves toward an increasingly digital existence." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on January 23, 2009 | Permalink

Researching Video Games the UX Way

"Video games are often overlooked in the scope of usability testing simply because, in a broad sense, their raison d'etre is so different than that of a typical functional interface: fun, engagement, and immersion, rather than usability and efficiency. Players are supposed to get a feeling of satisfaction and control from the interface itself, and in that sense, interaction is both a means and an end. The novelty and whimsy of the design occasionally comes at the expense of usability, which isn't always a bad thing—that said, video games still have interfaces in their own right, and designing one that is easy to-use and intuitive is critical for players to enjoy the game." (Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 22, 2009 | Permalink

User Experience (UX)

"How a person reacts to a Web site determines that user's experience with the product and can determine a return visit. The usability of a Web site, which usually refers to the elegance, flow-of-content & clarity with which the site is designed, can ensure a positive user experience. User Experience (UX) is part of Business Exchange, suggested by Michael Herman. This topic contains 790 news and 1,139 blog items. Read updated news, blogs, and resources about User Experience (UX). Find user-submitted articles and comments on User Experience (UX) from like-minded professionals." (Business Week Exchange) - courtesy of tvantongeren

Posted on January 20, 2009 | Permalink

Experience Design for Interactive Products 

Designing Technology Augmented Urban Playgrounds for Girls - "Recent technological developments have made it possible to apply experience design also in the field of highly interactive product design, an area where involvement of non-trivial technology traditionally made it impossible to implement quick design cycles. With the availability of modular sensor and actuator kits, designers are able to quickly build interactive prototypes and realize more design cycles. In this paper we present a design process that includes experience design for the design of interactive products. The design process was developed for a master level course in product design. In addition, we discuss several cases from this course, applying the process to designing engaging interactive urban playgrounds." (Aadjan van der Helm et al.)

Posted on January 16, 2009 | Permalink

Representing Artefacts as Media

Modelling the Relationship Between Designer Intent and Consumer Experience - "The design literature contains many diagrammatic models that represent the relationship between how designers intend artefacts to be experienced and how they are subsequently experienced by consumers, users and other stakeholders. Despite the prevalence of such models, they remain largely disconnected from each other, both within and across design disciplines, and also disconnected from the models of communication whose basic structure they share. The existing models are therefore difficult to locate and useful conceptual developments are often overlooked. The consequences of this are that unnecessary effort is expended in developing representations that duplicate those that already exist or new models are developed from inappropriate foundations. To address such issues, this article reviews many of the existing models that can be found in the different disciplines that comprise the fields of communication and design. The most pertinent features of these models are extracted and synthesised into a generic communication-based model of design. This acts as both a guide to what the existing models emphasise and an integrated foundation from which future models might be developed." (Nathan Crilly, Anja Maier, P John Clarkson - Int'l Journal of Design Dec.2008)

Posted on January 12, 2009 | Permalink

'Misconceptions about user experience design' by K. Instone

Whitney Hess writes: "I especially enjoyed the recap -- I think you hit the nail on the head." (Keith Instone - Experienceologist)

Posted on January 12, 2009 | Permalink

A definition of user experience

"User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone's mind following a series of interactions between people, devices, and events – or any combination thereof. (...) A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances." (Eric Reiss - FatDUX)

Posted on January 11, 2009 | Permalink

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

"The term 'user experience' or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it." (Whitney Hess - Mashable)

Posted on January 10, 2009 | Permalink

FoodUX: Gastronomic Inspiration for UX Designers

"FoodUX is a collection of inspirational web gems for user experience designers from the gastronomic and culinary arts." (Composing Cook)

Posted on January 07, 2009 | Permalink

The Client Experience

"User experience is all the rage. First impressions, consistent quality, matching online with offline, all that good stuff. Every year the same design conferences are full of the same talks. The slides might get shinier each year, but it's the same guys making the same comparisons." (Des Traynor - Contrast) - courtesy of lucraak

Posted on January 05, 2009 | Permalink

Jeffrey Zeldman: Understanding Web Design

"Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy - the ability to think about and empathize with your user - is by far the most important. Good useful education is hard to find, and within companies there is often no departmental standardization. Good graphic design is not the same as good user experience design, he explains. In fact, 'good web design is invisible' - it feels simple and authentic because it's about the character of the content, not the character of the designer." (AIGA Gain 2008)

Posted on December 23, 2008 | Permalink

What makes a 'User Experience Expert'?

"The reason I think this is important is that I'm seeing too many people buy into User Experience methodologies that are half-baked, if baked at all. User Experience, for most people, boils down to making pretty interfaces. Good color palettes, Flash for everything, and anything that sort of looks like a Mac interface are often presented as the whole of good User Experience. I'm not saying these things aren't good and very, very important; they're just one small piece of the much larger User Experience field." (RJ Owen - InsideRIA) - courtesy of thehotstrudel

Posted on December 18, 2008 | Permalink

The User Experience of Enterprise Software Matters

"Over the past twenty years, the field of user experience has been fortunate. Software and hardware product organizations increasingly have adopted user-centered design methods such as contextual user research, usability testing, and iterative interaction design. In large part, this has occurred because the market has demanded it. More than ever, good interaction design and high usability are part of the price of entry to markets." (Paul J. Sherman - UXmatters)

Posted on December 15, 2008 | Permalink

Communicating Customer and Business Value with a Value Matrix

"So, you've wrapped up your customer research, completed your personas, and have even written a few scenarios that show how users would want to interact with your brand new product. What's next? What happens to the personas and scenarios once you're ready to start requirements definition and design. Are you sure you've adequately communicated the type of system your users need to the Business Analyst and Interaction Designer on your team?" (Richard F. Cecil - UXmatters)

Posted on December 15, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience Design Is About Creating Good Theatre

"Creating exceptional experiences online, and developing efficient interactive marketing, is much about storytelling. We develop stories that excite and motivate people, and platforms where people can come create and edit their own stories. Interactive storytelling is in many ways more complex than traditional movies or theatre, but IAs can still learn a lot from scriptwriting techniques." (Karri Ojanen - Threeminds)

Posted on December 15, 2008 | Permalink

The Disciplines of User Experience

"This diagram also begs the question: what is user experience design by itself, those areas that aren't filled up with other bubbles?" (Dan Saffer - Kickerstudio)

Posted on December 05, 2008 | Permalink

The UX Designer's Place in the Ensemble: Directing the Vision

"I'm sitting in a conference room with a coworker and two clients. It's chaotic, hot, and a challenge just to walk around without tripping on the mess surrounding us. We are in the midst of designing and are buried in paper and sharpies and flipcharts. The walls around us are covered with consolidated data from requirements gathering and flipchart pages we've filled with our thought processes. Every few minutes, we need to retape some piece of paper that's in danger of falling into a crumpled heap on the floor. Then, suddenly, I'm gripped with the feeling of déjà vu. It seems like I'm working on the same design I've worked on a thousand times before—and I'm getting bogged down in the details to boot! It's at once disheartening and terrifying. But I'm the lead on this project, so I need to drive the team forward—which presents a challenge at this particular moment." (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted on December 01, 2008 | Permalink

Computers: Changing from power to experience

"(...) people are starting to make decisions based on other criteria than pure performance and that the overall user experience is becoming a bigger differentiator. - User experience is the primary battlefield and everything else is a distant second." (TG Daily) - courtesy of usabilitynews

Posted on November 28, 2008 | Permalink

Europeana User Inexperience

"(...) the Europeans should have known that if they put up a website about The Europeans, that lots of people would want to go look at it. That's just Lisa's common sense website visitor analysis." (Lisa Welchman)

Posted on November 27, 2008 | Permalink

Web 3.0, User Experience and Intelligent User Interfaces

"If Web 2.0 was all about fostering social interconnectivity, then the loosely termed Web 3.0, appears to be about the intelligent web. It’s about, amongst other things, contextually aware user interfaces (UI's), hyperconnectivity, the semantic web and intelligent agents. These are all concepts which have existed for a very long time." (Chris Khalil's Musings)

Posted on November 18, 2008 | Permalink

Does User Experience Need a Department?

"(...) user experience is not best thought of as an activity or function, but as a mindset. " (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on November 05, 2008 | Permalink

First Fictions and the Parable of the Palace

"Welcome to the inaugural installment of 'Everyware: Designing the Ubiquitous Experience", a column exploring user experience and design in the era of ubiquitous computing. Through this column, interested readers can investigate the expanding wavefront of the ubiquitous experience as it impacts design, covering topics ranging from ubiquitous computing to near-field communication, pervasive computing, The Internet of Things, spimes, ubicomp, locative media, and ambient informatics." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

Posted on November 05, 2008 | Permalink

Prototyping with XHTML

"While prototyping with XHTML isn't tied to a specific design process, iterative development seems to effectively leverage its strengths. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most significant is that in both cases the prototype, and later the application itself, doubles as a specification. We'll explore what that means in a bit, but first let’s walk through a suggested process for prototyping with XHTML." (Anders Ramsay and Leah Buley - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 31, 2008 | Permalink

Smart Ideas for Experience Designers

"(...) Greg's one-page list of theatrical tips are as good a guide to customer experience, service design or even presentation technique as you will find on any business bookshelf." (Work•Play•Experience)

Posted on October 28, 2008 | Permalink

Selling UX

"This article examines what works and what does not work well when selling UX within an organization, identifies barriers you might encounter to the adoption of UX methods in your organization, and discusses how to package and present UX to stakeholders. In this article, we'll try to avoid just being prescriptive. Rather, we'll pose questions along the way, regarding what has worked well for you. (...) As industry's adoption of UX broadens and more of us find ourselves in situations where we need to sell UX, we need to be prepared to do so effectively." (Daniel Szuc, Paul J. Sherman, and John S. Rhodes - UXmatters)

Posted on October 20, 2008 | Permalink

The Magic of Metaphor

"Metaphor teaches. Metaphor influences. Are you drawing on its power? Perhaps not, because many major works on writing for interactive products make little mention of it. To help encourage better use of metaphor, this column describes both the usefulness of shallow metaphors and the potential of deep metaphors, while offering tips and examples." (Colleen Jones - UXmatters)

Posted on October 20, 2008 | Permalink

How do UK banks' websites treat worried customers?

"I'm following the 'credit crisis' with my CXP hat on, and specifically look at how banks try to keep their customers calm, explain what is happening in simple language, and make it easy for worried customers to talk to someone at the bank. Because it is hard to find out what instructions employees are getting to comfort customers, or what mail is being sent to customers, I went to the homepages of the top 20 banks in the UK and checked the experience customers are receiving." (Tim van Tongeren - The Experience Design Scout)

Posted on October 08, 2008 | Permalink

In Search of Strategic Relevance for UX Teams

"To make UX strategically relevant - so UX is not an afterthought, but can contribute to strategy - you need to produce stunning results that blow away your stakeholders. Then, you'll be able to hire more world-class researchers and designers. Once you have truly great people onboard, work to build trust. Achieving this, in part, depends on your organizational structure, so demonstrate your thought-leadership by recommending the right model for the organization, not just the model that's right for you at the moment." (Jim Nieters and Laurie Pattison - UXmatters)

Posted on October 06, 2008 | Permalink

The Study of Visual Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction

"Given the evidence and potential for aesthetics' overarching effect on human-computer interaction, it would seem timely to explore the themes summarized above in more depth. While a lively debate is to be expected in this workshop, the overriding goal is to define and formulate a possible HCI research agenda on these topics. To achieve this, the seminar will bring together seasoned researchers who share a deep interest in aesthetics; prominent designers who are grappling with the concept theoretically and in practice; and graduate students who are likely to provide fresh perspectives." (Seminar site)

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Permalink

Is Your Organization Experienced?

"While the report is 4 years old, our experience is that the findings are relevant still today, and we use the models in this report often in our client work. It’s satisfying that Forrester's report seems to validate Janice and Scott's research, and we're happy to share it with you free of charge." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on September 23, 2008 | Permalink

What Place Does Theater Have in the Creative Process of Design?

"In a world where a focus on designing innovative, compelling, valuable, and engaging user experiences is becoming increasingly important, designers of user experiences endeavor to enhance and improve the way they work and achieve the desired outcome. As designers, to be truly innovative, we must open ourselves up to new ideas, surround ourselves with diverse inputs, and be willing to embark on a new journey—regardless of whether we know the destination. Actors and others who create theater would tell you this kind of mindset is part their everyday work culture. So, what can we learn from the way actors and other theatrical artists work that will help us be more innovative, too?" (Traci Lepore - UXmatters)

Posted on September 22, 2008 | Permalink

Aurora: Panel At UX Week

"Following the release of Aurora, a panel discussion about the project was hosted at UX Week by Leah Buley. The panelists included members of the Aurora team, Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs, and Jamais Cascio a futurist who worked with us at the beginning of the project. If you were unable to attend UX Week, you can see video of the discussion below in which the panelists discuss how the concepts shown in the video were identified, and what methods we used to bring them to life. The panelists also field some questions from Leah and the audience. Enjoy!" (Adaptive Path blog)

Posted on September 13, 2008 | Permalink

Bridging the Designer-User Gap with Empathy

"I believe the key here is empathy. It's not just about knowing what's wrong with the product, it's also about acknowledging that to users this is a serious issue, and about being motivated to fix that for them." (Jasper van Kuijk - uselog)

Posted on September 12, 2008 | Permalink

Experience Design Manifesto

"An experience designer must love and care about people and the world in which we all live. It's his mission in the world to proudly spread love and happiness through his creations." (Andrë Braz) - courtesy of katerutter

Posted on September 10, 2008 | Permalink

UX Week 2008 Session Slides

"Some of our presenters have posted slides for their main stage talks and/or their workshops. Here’s links to the slides that are currently available. All are in PDF format." (UX Week - Adaptive Path)

Posted on August 25, 2008 | Permalink

Work | Play | Experience

"The showbiz approach to customer experience design: What theatre, film and stand-up comedy can teach us about impressing customers." (Adam Lawrence)

Posted on August 19, 2008 | Permalink

Creating a Digital World: Data As Design Material

"The common wisdom is that we now live in the age of information; the freedom and access we have to data is unprecedented in history; and the efficiency and convenience of online commerce, research, and communication has already transformed our lives for the better." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on August 18, 2008 | Permalink

Managing User Experience Teams

"(...) aims to tap the collective expertise of the user experience community to develop a guide on how to manage UX teams. Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin - two seasoned user experience team managers - will be sharing their insights and facilitating the discussion as we create this guide."

Posted on August 15, 2008 | Permalink

Evaluating User Experiences in Games

Proceedings and papers of the CHI 2008 workshop on April 5, 2008 in Florenze (Italy)

Posted on August 11, 2008 | Permalink

Design for Emotion and Flow

"The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described focused attention as 'psychic energy'. Like energy in the traditional sense, no work can be done without it, and through work that energy is consumed. Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience. In this state of consciousness, people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance. Hours pass by in what seems like minutes. We tend to enter these states in environments with few interruptions, where our attention becomes focused by a challenge that we're confident we can handle with our existing skills. Feedback is instantaneous, so we can always judge how close we are to accomplishing our task and reaching our goal. The importance of the task influences our level of motivation and perceptions of how difficult the task will be." (Trevor van Gorp - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 07, 2008 | Permalink

Facial expressions: Reflections of user experience

"(...) Phillip Toledano, a photographer from New York who takes stunning portraits of real people playing video games. The immersive nature of videogames can engage users into user experiences which can almost be described as extreme. Toledano's portraits depict this rather clearly. He managed to capture the whole range of emotions: frustration, joy, fear, surprise, hatred..." (Pierre-Alexandre Lapointe - YuCentrik)

Posted on August 01, 2008 | Permalink

Designing a Different Kind of Intranet: An Intranet for a UX Team

"Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I'll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team." (Anirban Basu Mallik - UXmatters)

Posted on July 22, 2008 | Permalink

Now Let's Do It in Practice: UX Evaluation Methods in Product Development

UXEM workshop in CHI'08 (April 6th, 2008 in Florence, Italy) - "The aim of the workshop is to transfer knowledge from practitioners to academics about challenges with putting UX evaluation into practice, and from academics to practitioners to inform and inspire practical UX work with research findings of UX evaluation methods. Participants will gain an overview of the current state of practical approaches, tools, and methods for UX evaluation, as well as insights into the importance of UX evaluation in product development. The main outcomes of the workshop are a model of different UX evaluation methods across product development process and a list of UX evaluation challenges in product development. " (Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Virpi Roto, and Marc Hassenzahl)

Posted on July 02, 2008 | Permalink

Meaningful Measures: Valid User Experience Measurement 

Proceedings of the International Workshop (Reykjavik, Iceland June 18th 2008) - "The workshop VUUM brings together a group of experienced HCI researchers and practitioners to explore a long-standing research problem – the meaningfulness of measurable constructs and the measurability of nonmeasurable ones. One may argue that basically everything can be measured, but some things may be more 'measurable' than the others; how to estimate the threshold of measurability remains unclear. The sixteen interesting submissions in this volume touch upon the basic issue of the formal-empirical dichotomy. Many arguments can be boiled down to the fundamental problem that our understanding of how people think and feel is still rather limited, which is essentially inferred from people's behaviours. Psycho-physiological and neuro-psychological data seem promising, but the issue of calibration and integration is a big hurdle to overcome. Nonetheless, we are convinced about the value, meaningfulness and usefulness of this research endeavour." (Effie Law et al. - MAUSE COST Action 294)

Posted on July 02, 2008 | Permalink

Twelve emerging best practices for adding UX work to Agile development

"If the user experience practice in your company was weak before Agile, Agile development isn't going to help things. If your user experience practice was strong before Agile, it'll remain strong after Agile, and evolve to adapt." (Jeff Patton - Agile Product Design) - courtesy of thehotstrudel

Posted on July 01, 2008 | Permalink

My Manifesto: Great Customer Experience Is Free

"Here's my new quest: To dramatically increase the focus on customer experience within companies by getting everyone to understand that great customer experience is really good business." (Bruce D. Temkin - Customer Experience Matters)

Posted on June 25, 2008 | Permalink

New York Times Redesign: A Case Study

"How do you redesign the website for a venerable news brand with a distinct identity and a loyal readership? What's more, how do you face challenges like the commoditization of online news, the rise of user-generated content, and other emerging technology trends, while still upholding journalistic standards? In this seminar, we will discuss the process we followed during the recent redesign of The New York Times, including research we conducted, forward-looking concepts we developed, and prototypes we created and refined." (Karen McGrane and Kevin Kearney - Businesstobuttons)

Posted on June 24, 2008 | Permalink

MX San Francisco videos and presentations

"As the business value of design becomes clearer, creative managers building the next generation of products and services are confronted with an increasingly demanding set of challenges. MX brings thought leaders from IDEO, Google, The Mayo Clinic, Cisco, and many others, to show you what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. MX goes beyond typical design management discussions that remain focused on traditional concerns of print and brand, toward a new frontier of innovative products and service-oriented experiences." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on June 24, 2008 | Permalink

The State of the UX Community

"Over the past three decades of computer/human interaction, we’ve seen digital technology evolve from a curiosity to a convenience to an integral part of our everyday lives. For UX professionals, the demand for our skill sets and the opportunities to practice seem only to grow, whether we be designers or developers, usability specialists or information architects, working in fields as diverse as Web, mobile, desktop, and embedded software systems. The UX professions are at a stage that could very well be a tipping point—where the rapid rise of digital devices, services, and connectivity converge to create a massive need for UX professionals. The mobile space alone could generate demand that we can only begin to imagine." (Jonathan Follett - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2008 | Permalink

Designing Ethical Experiences: Understanding Juicy Rationalizations

"Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone." (Joe Lamantia - UXmatters)

Posted on June 23, 2008 | Permalink

The User Experience Iceberg

"But when the User Experience Iceberg is used to add context to the Elements, it illuminates the dark, unknown depths for project stakeholders who are new to UX. Because in the end, the unseen elements of user experience are the parts of the iceberg that will sink your project, while your stakeholders are busy focusing on the 'tip'." (Trevor van Gorp - Affective Design)

Posted on June 16, 2008 | Permalink

Experience Hierarchy of Needs

"Use this model to guide your thinking, processes, and approaches when making things for people on behalf of your clients. Its an hierarchy. Each level of need is only meaningful if the previous levels have been met. If you solve for the top of the pyramid your clients will be successful and their customers will be happy." (Challis Hodge's UXBlog)

Posted on June 09, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience Design: The Evolution of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach

"Recently, I have discovered a new emerging type of user experience specialist: the 'persuasion architect'. This specialist has a marketing and sales background, and focuses on aspects of a Web site user experience design that contribute to 'conversions', that is, to the number or percentage of site visitors that ultimately contribute directly to the business goals of the site, such as buying a product, signing up for a newsletter, registering, using the site for support, etc. The design aspects that contribute to converting visitors into customers are quite different than aspects that contribute to making task completion easy and fast, making a site visually appealing, or architecting the site information or functionality in the most natural way." (Deborah J. Mayhew - Journal of Usability Studies 3.3) - courtesy of markvanderbeeken

Posted on June 06, 2008 | Permalink

Leading the Rebellion Inside Large Organizations

"What are the stories behind the truly great ideas? What are the obstacles that got in the way of these ideas? And, what’s the real story behind visionary products that do manage to make it through otherwise hostile environments? From sticky notes to the RAZR phone, the stories of how these things came to be typically includes some form 'rebellion' against business as usual— which in large organizations has a tendency to be about power, position, predictability, and a score of other concerns fairly well-removed from the idea itself." (Stephen P. Anderson - poetpainter)

Posted on May 30, 2008 | Permalink

UX Social Interviews from IA Summit 2008

Interviews with Chris Fahey, Peter van Dijck, Anders Ramsay, and John Ferrera. (About UX Social)

Posted on May 29, 2008 | Permalink

Book Review: Subject To Change

"This is an excellent, well-written book packed with great advice from veterans in the field. It’s highly recommended and essential for anyone currently trying to innovate products and services in just about any field." (James Kalbach - Experiencing Information)

Posted on May 26, 2008 | Permalink

UX Design-Planning Not One-man Show

"Suppliers sell. Customers buy. Various people discuss UX, but don't really identify what it is. Agencies search for ways to offer this line of work to clients and seek best practises to develop UX. Holger Maassen posits his ideas about the process of planning and designing for User Experience Design-Planning (UXD-P) as Expectation Design." (Holger Maassen - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on May 21, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience is Everyone's Responsibility

"Focusing on the connective tissue between disciplines makes products holistic. This is the essence of experience design." (Dan Saffer - Adaptive Path blog)

Posted on May 21, 2008 | Permalink

Everything in Moderation: Using Content Units to Manage UX

"The Roman philosopher Cicero stated, 'Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.' The trouble is, even though people have repeated this particular quotation over the past couple of millennia, our clients often push the limits excessively—beyond moderation—for both content and presentation. As a UX professional, how do you demonstrate to your clients the benefits of moderation in user experience? You show them." (Keith LaFerriere - UXmatters)

Posted on May 20, 2008 | Permalink

Breaking Down the Silos: Usability Practitioners Meet Marketing Researchers

"Being a consultant with experience in both traditional marketing research and user experience and usability gives me a unique perspective on a broad range of issues relating to customer experience. Not only do I have a good idea of what the other discipline does, I am a practitioner of the other discipline. However, in attempting to play both roles at once, I often find that client companies keep these two disciplines locked up in separate silos—usability research within IT and marketing research within the Marketing Services department. This can have a serious impact on the sharing of information relating to customer experience." (David Kozatch - UXmatters)

Posted on May 20, 2008 | Permalink

Subject To Change: The Movie

"Well, not exactly ... but two of my co-authors, Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change at Google and it was recorded on video. It's a good overview of the main points of the book so we thought it would be good to share as a way to learn more about what the book has too say. Sit back, grab some popcorn, and enjoy." (Todd Wilkens - Adaptive Path Blog) - courtesy of marcfonteijn

Posted on May 19, 2008 | Permalink

Document Engineering and User Experience Design

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

Posted on May 13, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience Evaluation in Nokia 

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

Posted on May 05, 2008 | Permalink

So You Want to Be a UX Manager—Seriously?

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

Posted on April 23, 2008 | Permalink

Swimlanes for the Win!

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

Posted on April 17, 2008 | Permalink

Experience Partners: Giving Center Stage to Customer Delight

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

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Permalink

Defining Experience: Clarity Amidst the Jargon

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

Posted on April 14, 2008 | Permalink

Do Real People Really Use Tag Clouds?

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

Posted on April 11, 2008 | Permalink

Sharing Your Experience about User eXperience 

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

Posted on April 11, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on April 03, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on April 01, 2008 | Permalink

Placing Value on User Assistance

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

Posted on March 25, 2008 | Permalink

Closing the Communication Loop

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

Posted on March 17, 2008 | Permalink

Creating Killer Services

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

Posted on March 07, 2008 | Permalink

Enhancing Dashboard Value and User Experience

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

Posted on March 05, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on February 26, 2008 | Permalink

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Human Needs and Desires

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

Posted on February 26, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on February 20, 2008 | Permalink

Konigi

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

Posted on February 19, 2008 | Permalink

Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future

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

Posted on February 14, 2008 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on February 05, 2008 | Permalink

Richard Buchanan Keynote - Emergence 2007

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

Posted on February 05, 2008 | Permalink

What does experience design have to do with sustainability?

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

Posted on January 30, 2008 | Permalink

The Prism of User Experience Design

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

Posted on January 28, 2008 | Permalink

User Experience in India

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

Posted on January 23, 2008 | Permalink

How Direct Marketing and User Experience Are the Same

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

Posted on January 10, 2008 | Permalink

Engagement: Should We Care?

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

Posted on January 07, 2008 | Permalink

Motorcycle UX: Riding in the Fast Lane

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

Posted on January 07, 2008 | Permalink

The Coming Age of Magic

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

Posted on January 03, 2008 | Permalink

Engaging User Creativity

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

Posted on December 19, 2007 | Permalink

Flow Online: Lessons Learned and Future Prospects

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

Posted on December 13, 2007 | Permalink

A Moment of Truth for Digital Agencies

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

Posted on December 07, 2007 | Permalink

Towards a UX Manifesto 

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

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

The Perpetual Super-Novice

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

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on December 03, 2007 | Permalink

Building the UX Dreamteam

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

Posted on November 28, 2007 | Permalink

Assessing the Quality of User Experience

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

Posted on November 23, 2007 | Permalink

Personalized Museum Experience: The Rijksmuseum Use Case

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

Posted on November 22, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on November 21, 2007 | Permalink

Trust in the Little Things

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

Posted on November 21, 2007 | Permalink

UXnet: The User Experience Network

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

Posted on November 15, 2007 | Permalink

Designing for Nonprofits

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

Posted on November 15, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on November 13, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on November 06, 2007 | Permalink

The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

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

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

From ID to Designing for XP

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

Posted on November 05, 2007 | Permalink

Presence and the design of trust

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

Posted on October 25, 2007 | Permalink

Marketing Isn't a Dirty Word

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

Posted on October 24, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience 101: How to create a great online experience

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

Posted on October 16, 2007 | Permalink

Who includes user experiences in large companies?

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

Posted on October 11, 2007 | Permalink

Interaction Experience: Pliability, Fluency and Other Experiential Qualities

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

Posted on October 03, 2007 | Permalink

SlideShare UX Presentations

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

Posted on September 25, 2007 | Permalink

UX Design as Communities of Practice

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

Posted on September 20, 2007 | Permalink

Virtuosos of the Experience Domain 

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

Posted on September 19, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience: Towards a Unified View 

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

Posted on August 29, 2007 | Permalink

XcD

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

Posted on August 27, 2007 | Permalink

Design for the Dream Economy

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

Posted on August 24, 2007 | Permalink

An Audience of One: Creating Products for Very Small Workgroups

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

Posted on August 21, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience and the Analysts

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

Posted on August 16, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience Strategy

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

Posted on July 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Market Maturity Framework is Still Important

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

Posted on July 18, 2007 | Permalink

Comparing UXD Business Models

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

Posted on July 12, 2007 | Permalink

On the ground running: Lessons from experience design

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

Posted on June 29, 2007 | Permalink

Audio and the User Experience

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

Posted on June 26, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink

Interview with Marc Hassenzahl

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

Posted on June 25, 2007 | Permalink

What Does Rich Mean?

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

Posted on June 06, 2007 | Permalink

12 Theatrical Tools

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

Posted on June 01, 2007 | Permalink

Sharing Ownership of UX

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

Posted on May 29, 2007 | Permalink

Catalyze: Creative People Designing Extraordinary Software (beta)

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

Posted on May 29, 2007 | Permalink

What is experience?

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

Posted on May 23, 2007 | Permalink

What Is Holding User Experience Back Where You Work?

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

Posted on May 22, 2007 | Permalink

How chopsticks came to symbolize user experience design

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

Posted on May 21, 2007 | Permalink

Towards Experience-Focused HCI

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

Posted on May 18, 2007 | Permalink

The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision

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

Posted on May 15, 2007 | Permalink

Different

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

Posted on May 08, 2007 | Permalink

UX Pioneers

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

Posted on May 03, 2007 | Permalink

Envisioning the Future of User Experience

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

Posted on April 10, 2007 | Permalink

Using Technical Communication Skills in User Experience

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

Posted on April 10, 2007 | Permalink

Framework of Product Experience

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

Posted on April 04, 2007 | Permalink

Ruining the User Experience

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

Posted on March 29, 2007 | Permalink

LEMTool: Measuring emotions during interaction

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

Posted on March 23, 2007 | Permalink

Experiencing and Experience

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

Posted on March 23, 2007 | Permalink

The Experience Evolution: Developments in Design Practice 

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

Posted on March 19, 2007 | Permalink

Tools for Experience Design

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

Posted on March 19, 2007 | Permalink

The Difference Between Usability and User Experience

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

Posted on March 16, 2007 | Permalink

UX Zeitgeist

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

Posted on March 10, 2007 | Permalink

Marc Hassenzahl on User Experience

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

Posted on March 09, 2007 | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 2

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

Posted on February 26, 2007 | Permalink

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management: Part 1

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

Posted on February 14, 2007 | Permalink

The human factor in gadget, Web design

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

Posted on February 13, 2007 | Permalink

User Experience Teams & Information Architects

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

Posted on January 29, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on January 21, 2007 | Permalink

The iPhone User Experience: A First Look

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

Posted on January 17, 2007 | Permalink

Experience design is not about brands

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

Posted on January 04, 2007 | Permalink

Pervasive fun

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

Posted on January 04, 2007 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on December 14, 2006 | Permalink

We need theories of experience design

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

Posted on December 10, 2006 | Permalink

Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience

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

Posted on December 07, 2006 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on December 06, 2006 | Permalink

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

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

Posted on December 04, 2006 | Permalink

Creating Pleasurable Interfaces

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

Posted on November 26, 2006 | Permalink

Teehan+Lax UX Fund

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

Posted on November 14, 2006 | Permalink

User Experience Research

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

Posted on November 07, 2006 | Permalink

The Web and Beyond: SIGCHI Conference in Amsterdam

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

Posted on October 25, 2006 | Permalink

Conference Report: The Web and Beyond

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

Posted on October 24, 2006 | Permalink

Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience 2/2

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

Posted on October 19, 2006 | Permalink

The Coming Age of Magic

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

Posted on October 15, 2006 | Permalink

Experiencing Experience

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

Posted on October 15, 2006 | Permalink

What Is User Experience Design?

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

Posted on October 13, 2006 | Permalink

Designing Breakthrough Products: Going Where No User Has Gone Before

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

Posted on October 11, 2006 | Permalink

Design and Emotion 2006 Conference Proceedings

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

Posted on October 05, 2006 | Permalink

Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience

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

Posted on October 02, 2006 | Permalink

Strategy06: A UX Professional's Experience of the Conference

"Strategy06, the second annual IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) Institute of Design Strategy Conference, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA), Illinois, on May 17 and 18, 2006. The organizers characterized this conference as 'an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage'." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on September 26, 2006 | Permalink

Masters of Design: Is design a craft, a tool, or an obsession?

"These days, it's a bit of all three. But it's also starting to look a lot like a business fad: Declare you're a design-centric organization and - voila! - you're the next Apple. We know it isn't that simple. So here's our annual roundup of the creative businesspeople dialing in to the power of design. The final cut: the CEO who rescued Puma, the architect who imagined Google 's stunning new offices, the graphic artist behind some of America's best-known brands, and the product designer who predicts our appetites - and satisfies them. You'll also meet five talents on the fast track to bigger things, hear sage advice on what design can (and can't) do for your bottom line, and get an eyeful of some amazing examples of the craft. Tool. Obsession. You get the idea." (Fast Company) - courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Posted on September 25, 2006 | Permalink

engageID with Mark Vanderbeeken

"Experience design is based on the idea of giving people a role in the design of the products and services that matter to them. Both in the US and in Europe, it is believed that this approach will lead to better products and services and therefore to better economic returns. However, in Europe there is perhaps a more explicit social or ethical drive: by giving people this co-creative role we can establish to a more socially inclusive society. A lot of innovation in Europe comes from public institutions, from the European Commission on down. (...) Design and participatory co-creation for social renewal is a complex challenge, but one that fits very well with the European way of doing things." (Enric Gili Fort - engageID) - great interview Mark!

Posted on September 22, 2006 | Permalink

Intro to UXD

"On Saturday the 16th I gave a presentation, 'Introduction to User Experience Design' to the Society for Technical Communication at Ktech in Albuquerque." (Chris Rivard - Clearwired)

Posted on September 21, 2006 | Permalink

Understanding Business and Design Through Casino Poker

A four part series - "Business shares a lot in common with poker. The goal in both is to make as much money as possible—either over the long or short-term—to win. You are competing against other people with similar objectives, with a finite amount of potential returns available. In order to be successful, you must observe and understand people and situations, devise strategies based on those observations, and use skill to successfully execute the strategy and accomplish your objectives. In gambling, it's called play; in business it's called design." (Dirk Knemeyer - Core77)

Posted on September 12, 2006 | Permalink

The Experience Design Institute

"The purpose of the Institute would be to give us a place to really get into these issues, other than the workplace, where real sharing across disciplines and approaches could take place on a regular, continuous basis." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience) - courtesy of experientia

Posted on September 11, 2006 | Permalink

Gel Video Clips

"Short for 'Good Experience Live', Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms - in business, art, society, technology, and life." (Good Experience Live Conference)

Posted on September 07, 2006 | Permalink

User Experience 2.0

"The remixability of content and applications, paired with the rapid speed of development, form the foundation of a collaborative architecture that promises to result in richer user experiences. However, a richer user experience isn’t necessarily a usable experience. In order for Web 2.0 to deliver on its promise, it must provide richer, usable experiences." (TechSmith)

Posted on August 29, 2006 | Permalink

Give users a Hollywood ending

"We can all take a lesson from filmmakers: endings matter. The way we end a conversation, blog post, user experience, presentation, tech support session, chapter, church service, song, whatever... is what they'll remember most. The end can matter more to users than everything we did before. And the feeling they leave with is the one they might have forever." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on August 20, 2006 | Permalink

Experience Design

"(...) the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, and environments -- each of which is a human experience -- based on the holistic consideration of an individual's or group's needs, desires, beliefs, knowledge, skills, experiences, and perceptions." (according to Wikipedia)

Posted on August 10, 2006 | Permalink

Experience Design: Principles & Practices 

A course taught at the IIID Summer Academy in Chicago (July 18-19, 2006) "What characterizes Experience Design as a distinct field of professional endeavour is the holistic focus on all of the myriad elements that encompass an experience which disruptively cross traditionally perceived barriers between artifacts and disciplines." (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on July 27, 2006 | Permalink

Brand Experience in User Experience Design

"Much has been written in the past decade about the importance of usability and the user experience to customers’ perception of an organization’s brand. Jared Spool's 1996 article 'Branding and Usability' correctly identifies the importance of Web site usability to brand experience and provides evidence that a positive user experience has a direct correlation to positive brand perception. More recently, authors such as Dirk Knemeyer have expanded on this theme." (Steve Baty - UXmatters)

Posted on July 25, 2006 | Permalink

Usability through Fun

"Never underestimate the power of fun, (...) you can still have 'fun' without 'funny'. It's about the user's experience (i.e. cognitive seduction). And even if you aren't in a position to introduce more fun into your actual product, you can still add it to documentation and support!" (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on July 21, 2006 | Permalink

A new framework

"Every field of social science has been integrating culture and meaning into their theories and methods - some more than others - and we as designers should be doing the same. To do that, we need a framework that takes these things into account as well." (Todd Wilkens - Adaptive Path blog)

Posted on July 16, 2006 | Permalink

Building and Managing a Successful User Experience Team

"Teams need to avoid the role of evangelist for user centered design." (Christine Perfetti - UI11: Enriching the Experience)

Posted on July 12, 2006 | Permalink

Stories are the human experience

"Stories are a way of communicating that goes back to before recorded history–and are just as important in modern culture. They are how we put information into a memorable and compelling form. Every culture has its stories–some say that a culture is a group of people who share a common set of stories about who they are and how they live." (Whitney Quesenbery - uiGarden.net)

Posted on July 10, 2006 | Permalink

Designing for Bridge Experiences

"The practice of user experience lacks the historical pedigree of many of its constituent elements, including human/computer interaction, library science, social-science research methods, product-development methodology, and, most of all, design. What it does enjoy, however, is a pragmatic, multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the intertwined social, economic, and technological forces it engages. It's a contingent amalgamation - an assembly of what works - and a set of perspectives and problem-solving techniques that define how we, as practitioners, think about creating products and services." (Joel Grossman - UXmatters)

Posted on July 02, 2006 | Permalink

Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design (I)

"This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products." (L. Ravi Krishnan and Venkatesh Rajamanickam - uiGarden.net)

Posted on July 02, 2006 | Permalink

Definition of User Experience Revisited

"(...) I like the tight coupling between user experience and the organization (the sender, the product). But then, it's not really a tangible, easy-to-use definition. I want something that everybody can understand. Users, web developers, designers, business analysts, clients must all be able to agree on the same definition and understand the definition in the same way. In my opinion this tends toward being too philosophical." (Jesper Rønn-Jensen - justaddwater.dk)

Posted on June 28, 2006 | Permalink

UXnet incorporates

"(...) we are honored and motivated to be providing the leadership for UXnet in these formative years." (UXnet) - congrats to dirk et al.

Posted on June 21, 2006 | Permalink

2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science

"(...) awarded to Donald Norman for the development of the field of user-centered design, which utilizes our understanding of how people think to develop technologies designed to be easily usable." (The Franklin Institute)

Posted on June 19, 2006 | Permalink

Partial Bibliography of Magic in User Experience Design

"Magic as an alternative UI metaphor has appeared a number of times in HCI writing in the last 20 years, talked-about by many of the greats in the field. Now we can actually implement some of it, I figured it may be useful to go back and see what has been written about it in the past. Here is a list of publications that have talked about magic or enchantment in HCI contexts." (Mike Kuniavsky - Orange Cone) - courtesy of boingboing

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

Experience Economy Download Area

Free registration required - "This area of our web site offers many articles, video's and presentations for downloading for personal, non-commercial use. We hope the material will be of inspiration to you!" (European Centre for the Experience Economy)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

SIGCHI.nl 2006 conference

"(...) every 'new' Web 2.0 aspect was already thought of much earlier, but that at that time, the concepts weren't recognized as being very distinguished." (Ferry den Dopper - Tam Tam)

Posted on June 09, 2006 | Permalink

User Experience & Cognitive Pleasures

"User experience and usability are two different things. And usability does not always imply a system or interface that does not require any learning, or any enquiry, or any challenge on the part of the user." (Leisa Reichelt - disambiguity)

Posted on June 02, 2006 | Permalink

Where should 'User Experience' be positioned in your company?

"Should User Experience stand alone? If standing alone, User Experience can still risk being treated as a resource. But, the above-referenced VP of Customer Experience Research & Design thinks his group should stand alone. And in some companies, it does stand alone." (Richard Anderson - riander)

Posted on May 28, 2006 | Permalink

Information Experience Labs

"It is an interesting mix of 'information' (information architecture, information science, ...) and ' experience' (user experience, experience design, ...). A few years ago I proposed the term as a way to describe an industry, but the idea did not stick." (Keith Instone)

Posted on May 14, 2006 | Permalink

The Role of Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction

Position papers of the workshop - "On 6 September 2005 twenty participants from England, Scotland, Wales, Northen Ireland, the United States, Sweden, and Germany met to discuss about emotion and their role in HCI. We actually found that there are so many aspects of HCI related to emotion, and of emotion related to HCI, that we won't be able to discuss them all on one day (what surprise!)." (Emotion in HCI)

Posted on May 10, 2006 | Permalink

Cross-Cultural User Experience Design 

"Modern technology and commerce permit global distribution of products and services; User diversity: Ever increasing variety of group demographics and individual needs/wants; Traditional user interface design and usability disciplines (to improve performance and productivity); User experience design issues: Even more complex and challenging; Cultural analysis offers a way to understand, even measure, differences and similarities of UX." (Aaron Marcus)

Posted on May 09, 2006 | Permalink

Sphere: Balancing Power and Simplicity

"Part of the challenge of this project was the relative universality of search. For many users, search has become so familiar that it's a de facto means of navigation. Meanwhile algorithms have become more advanced, and the number of indexed pages has grown exponentially. There's potential to do so much more with search, but there are relatively few standards for how to present users with more options." (Ryan Freitas - Adaptive Path)

Posted on May 03, 2006 | Permalink

Understanding Experience in Interactive Systems 

In: DIS04 Conference Proceedings, Cambridge, MA, August 2004 - "Understanding experience is complex. Designing the user experience for interactive systems is even more complex, particularly when conducted by a team of multidisciplinary experts. (...) In this paper, we argue that an interaction-centered view is the most valuable for understanding how a user experiences a designed product." (Jodi Forlizzi and Katja Battarbee)

Posted on May 02, 2006 | Permalink

User experience: A research agenda 

"Over the last decade, 'user experience' (UX) became a buzzword in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design. As technology matured, interactive products became not only more useful and usable, but also fashionable, fascinating things to desire. Driven by the impression that a narrow focus on interactive products as tools does not capture the variety and emerging aspects of technology use, practitioners and researchers alike, seem to readily embrace the notion of UX as a viable alternative to traditional HCI. And, indeed, the term promises change and a fresh look, without being too specific about its definite meaning. The present introduction to the special issue on 'Empiral studies of the user experience' attempts to give a provisional answer to the question of what is meant by 'the user experience'. It provides a cursory sketch of UX and how we think UX research will look like in the future. It is not so much meant as a forecast of the future, but as a proposal - a stimulus for further UX research." (Marc Hassenzahl and Noam Tractinsky)

Posted on May 01, 2006 | Permalink

How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience?

"The purpose of this article is to provide you with a way to measure the level of effort required to successfully complete a project in respect to user experience. This is a powerful merging of project management, user experience, requirements and best practices. And, it is simple enough for a little monkey to use. More accurately, it is simple enough for me to use." (John Rhodes - Apogee)

Posted on April 25, 2006 | Permalink

The Experience of... Experience

"Different traditions have different ways of categorizing experience. For the spiritual and the formally religious, it's the peregrinations of the soul. Professionals of a more scientific bent situate experience in the same realm as perception and cognition, physical and psychic processes built into human beings and other living things that are, even to the scientistis, frankly still a mystery. Then there are the opportunists who take experience for granted and forge ahead with the project of altering minds by tripping people out with 'new' and 'better' experiences (at least in their own estimation)." (Bob Jakobson - Total Experience)

Posted on April 23, 2006 | Permalink

Emotionally-centered design

"We are moving from static pages with their clunky, slow repainting of the page to fluid, dynamic displays, where the movement is a major part of the charm. We are moving from behaviorally effective designs to ones that add emotional engagement." (Don Norman)

Posted on April 13, 2006 | Permalink

User experience work offshore/offshoring

"Offshore, and the offshoring of, user experience work is a reality that will increasingly affect us all." (riander)

Posted on March 23, 2006 | Permalink

Open Sesame! Selling UX Services

"For some UX professionals, selling consulting services is as difficult as opening a magic door without a secret password. There is no simple password that can magically open prospective customers’ minds so they can see what you can do for them. However, there are a few strategies you can use when opening a dialogue with new customers that will lead to your sales success." (Maura Schreier-Fleming and Janet M. Six - UXmatters)

Posted on March 20, 2006 | Permalink

Visceral design: Do looks matter?

"A master chef labors to make the food delicious, but also takes great care to make the visual beautifully appealing. Norman argues in his book that the emotional aspects of a design may often be more important to the design's ultimate success than the practical elements." (Garr Reynolds - Presentation Zen)

Posted on March 08, 2006 | Permalink

Why UX Should Matter to Software Companies

"(...) user experience is a core competency within today's software companies, and an expert in UX strategy and design is an indispensable part of a software product team—just as the product manager and software architect are—particularly if a team is working on a new product." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on March 06, 2006 | Permalink

User Experience: The next step for IA’s?

"IA's have always wondered how to define information architecture in relation to other fields. Starting with the early days of library science, through the 'discovery' of other fields and the times when experienced IA's called themselves Big IA's, to modern days of business design and experience design, the borders have been fuzzy. I hope to show that, despite the fact that most of us are proud to wear the label Information Architect, we are all User Experience practitioners who practice IA from time to time. Finally, I would like to show the next steps for IA’s, which includes a call for international networks, and national events (...)." (Peter Boersma - Italian IA Summit)

Posted on February 27, 2006 | Permalink

Why Features Don't Matter Anymore: The New Laws of Digital Technology

"Feature overload is becoming a real issue. The last thing a customer wants is confusion-and what's more confusing than comparing technical specifications, unless you are en expert? Only nerds get a kick out of reading feature lists." (Andreas Pfeiffer - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on February 21, 2006 | Permalink

Rettig & Goel at UX Week

"This page offers slides from Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel's presentation at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week 2005 in Washington, D.C. There are now two versions of the presentation available." (Marc Rettig)

Posted on February 12, 2006 | Permalink

Making changes to a company's culture

"Since the skill of design is not well understood, everybody is an expert, and they all have an equal vote." (Richard Anderson - Riander)

Posted on February 06, 2006 | Permalink

A New Perspective on the Experience Economy

"The main questions we will discuss in the sections of this paper are: (1) What is the nature of human experience? (2) What is the process of creating meaning? (3) What are the characteristics of meaningful experiences? (4) What are the starting points in bringing about meaningful experiences? (5) What are the design principles of meaningful experiences (6) What are the stages in designing and developing meaningful experiences?" (Albert Boswijk et al. - European Centre for the Experience Economy)

Posted on January 25, 2006 | Permalink

UX Magazine (beta)

"UX Magazine was created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience. Extraordinary user experiences should be the goal of every interaction you deliver to your users at any level. All too often, businesses (large and small) get it horribly wrong. It’s painful to watch and even worse when it happens to you." (About UXMag) - courtesy of nickfinck

Posted on January 18, 2006 | Permalink

Defining the User Experience

"The definition I came up with is that, in a nutshell, the user experience of a product is everything that's not human-computer interaction. It's everything that affects how someone interacts with a tool--whether it's software, hardware, a service, or whatever. To me, this meant that I had to deal with all of the squishy, abstract things that good cognitive psychology and computer science-trained designers like me try not to deal with: business goals, emotions, relationships, branding, etc." (Mike Kuniavsky - Orange Cone) - courtesy of vuk

Posted on January 12, 2006 | Permalink

Designing User Experiences for Applications Versus Information Resources on the Web

"The relatively recent adoption of user-focused design practices by the Web design and development community—including personas, participatory design, paper prototyping, and the like—highlights important distinctions between the user experiences of desktop applications and those of information spaces. With the growing desire for usable Web applications, these distinctions become more topical and important to understand. Though the process of designing and creating application and information space user experiences for the Web is virtually the same—even if the deliverable design documents may differ—their user experiences are fundamentally and profoundly different. For designers, business analysts, marketing consultants, and others who are sincerely interested in delivering the best user experiences online, understanding these distinctions can reduce the cost of design and improve the likelihood of user acceptance." (Leo Frishberg - UXmatters)

Posted on January 10, 2006 | Permalink

Web Presence as Architectural Planning 

Presentation from the International Institute for Information Design Conference on 'Designing, Delivering, and Explaining Financial Information' - Boston, USA: April 27, 2005 (Ruurd Priester - IIID Blurred Boundaries)

Posted on December 13, 2005 | Permalink

Passionate Users Talk Different

"(...) there's a world of difference between a specialized lexicon of domain-specific terms and buzzwords. Domain-specific terms compress information, while buzzwords often masquerade as information. Buzzwords are often (not always) semantically empty while specialized domain lexicons are semantically dense." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on December 12, 2005 | Permalink

Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0

"The industry has spent a lot of time defining Web 2.0 and mapping its DNA. But as we attempt to emulate the fast-growth success of the Web 2.0 darlings, we need to zero in on the parts of the DNA that actually create this noteworthy new value." (Brandon Schauer - Adaptive Path)

Posted on December 04, 2005 | Permalink

DUX2005 Impressions: One Person's Journey and Another Perspective

"People from the UX community came together at DUX2005. I had eagerly awaited this second Conference on Designing for User eXperience, which was held November 2–5 at Fort Mason, in San Francisco, especially since I’d had miss the first DUX Conference in 2003. The conference lived up to my high expectations, providing fun and insight in equal measure. The surprising blue skies and sparkling vistas of the Golden Gate bridge didn’t hurt the experience either." - "The DUX Conference attracts just the right mix of people, representing the diversity of UX professionals. With a format that encourages interaction and dialogue among attendees, DUX provides a great opportunity for meeting professional colleagues and online acquaintances face to face. Kudos to the organizers of DUX for the many things they’re doing well." (Elizabeth Bacon / Pabini Gabriel-Petit - UXmatters)

Posted on November 22, 2005 | Permalink

The Enterprise User Experience - Bridging the IT/Marketing Divide

"User experience is a deliberately broader concept than GUI. It may take some time for it to fully penetrate the product design and development world. But it’s the right term to help create an approach to product design and development that incorporates the way people really perceive design, use products, and make decisions." (Bob Goodman - UXmatters)

Posted on November 22, 2005 | Permalink

Edification and Commutation: Canons for Experience Design

"Experience design is a transactive process. Commutation leads to edification, and edification makes possible commutation." - (Bob Jakobson - Corante Total Experience)

Posted on November 09, 2005 | Permalink

UXmatters: Insights and inspiration for the user experience community

"We are very pleased to welcome you to UXmatters - a Web magazine created by and for UX professionals. Together we can create the premiere source of information and inspiration for UX professionals. (...) If you're a business person who wants to learn what user experience professionals can do for your company or a consumer who wants to know how to choose products that are both useful and usable, we hope you'll both enjoy and benefit from reading UXmatters." - (Pabini Gabriel-Petit et al. - About UXmatters) - Congrats to all who made this possible.

Posted on November 04, 2005 | Permalink

The Games People Play: A more intimate way to understand users 

A presentation from About, With & For (Oct. 29, 2005) - "Games provide memorable and transcendent experiences, are changing the way people think and behave, and represent the future of education." (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on November 04, 2005 | Permalink

Co-Experience

"This dissertation introduces an approach to understanding user experience that departs from the more traditional user or product centric approaches. This approach, co-experience, builds on an understanding of experience as social interaction. It focuses on how in and through social interaction experiences and their products come to find their place in people's lives." (Katja Battarbee - University of Art and Design Helsinki Dissertations)

Posted on October 10, 2005 | Permalink

Is 'user' the best word?

"(...) design is often inappropriately framed in terms of efficiency and ease-of-use rather than the total experience." (Richard I. Anderson - Riander)

Posted on September 15, 2005 | Permalink

Designing for Experience: Frameworks and Project Stories 

"To accomplish our work, we must first understand the forces as best we can, then begin attempts to make something that fits the shape they suggest. A good process helps manage this difficult work: refine understanding, attempt to fit within their pressures." (Marc Rettig and Aradhana Goel) - courtesy of jasonkottke

Posted on September 01, 2005 | Permalink

Adaptive Path || User Experience Week Wiki

"Welcome to the UX Week Wiki - Feel free to change any page, that's the point of a wiki." (SocialText) - courtesy of jeffveen and peterme

Posted on August 28, 2005 | Permalink

Tutorial Review: Creating Passionate Users

"An industry that Kathy believes that we can learn from is the gaming industry. Game designers use two key techniques to keep players engaged in a game. First, they produce a state of flow. (...) flow is defined as the feeling of complete and energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. One situation that demonstrates flow is when we become so engrossed with something we are doing, we loose track of time. Secondly, game designers provide an experience spiral. Basically this involves using a compelling benefit to motivate players to complete the loop (the level)." (Kevin Shockey - ONLamp.com)

Posted on August 11, 2005 | Permalink

Making Meaning: The Business of Experience Design

by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Darrel Rhea - "A book about how people make meaning in their lives and how companies can use this understanding to create more meaningful and successful products and services. (...) The biggest driver for experience is innovation." (Making Meaning) - courtesy of cph127

Posted on August 06, 2005 | Permalink

Designing From the User’s Experience

"Innovation emerges from truly understanding the fit between product and person. The understanding of real experience with a product and its fit to a lifestyle, affords insight into product and interaction design, feature priorities, and adoption cycles." (Peter H. Jones - DMI) - courtesy of uxnet

Posted on August 03, 2005 | Permalink

User Experience Strategy

"A design-focused approach to product strategy (...) employs direct customer observation, cross-disciplinary perspectives, and a willingness to rapidly build, iterate on and tear-down prototypes. One could argue it is the essence of trial and error problem solving." (LukeW - Functioning Form)

Posted on August 01, 2005 | Permalink

Designer's Challenge 

Presentation from Spring 2005 Info Tech Conference - "The difference between a good website and a great website happens before you begin coding." (Keith Instone)

Posted on June 29, 2005 | Permalink

Beyond the pixels: Consider the entire experience

"As a designer, I would love to be able to control more of the environment and experiences of my customers. Identically, as a business person, I would love to be able to control more of the environment and experiences of my customers. After all, the user experience is influenced by far more than the applications we are creating. And in order to best do our jobs, we must reach beyond our limited charge and traditional thinking to look at the problem in a more holistic way. It is what we get paid to do; it is part of what makes us designers." (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on June 05, 2005 | Permalink

Give up Control or You'll Lose it Forever

"Whether you know it or not, we're shifting control away from our own interface to the interface of others.(...) For the most part, designers can't control experiences because experiences are subject to the user." (Joshua Porter - Bokardo)

Posted on May 26, 2005 | Permalink

Gel Conference 2005 Recap

Attendee blog posts, photos and attendee comments from Gel Conference 2005 (April 28-29, 2005 - New York City) (Gel 2005 - Good Experience)

Posted on May 24, 2005 | Permalink

The Vision of Good User Experience

"There has been much discussion among organizations and practitioners lately about the ownership of the user experience. So, who owns it? Or to put it another way, who is responsible for the user experience and who makes it work? (...)" - (David Hawdale)

Posted on May 13, 2005 | Permalink

Dirk Knemeyer Presentations

Dirk's presentation slides from User Experience and Usability 2005 (March 3, 2005), SXSW Interactive 2005 (March 14, 2005), DevGroup NW (April 1, 2005), and Blurred Boundaries/Focused Solutions (May 10, 2005) - (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on May 11, 2005 | Permalink

<interactions>: Whose profession is it anyway?

"The May + June issue of <interactions> is a special issue on 'Whose profession is it anyway?' - in part a reaction to some of the collaboration and cooperation discussions UXnet has been encouraging. This issue should be arriving in your mailbox any day now - it is also available in the ACM digital library where subscribers can download articles and non-subscribers can purchase items." (UXnet) - my first pub in print.

Posted on April 28, 2005 | Permalink

The State of User Experience

"It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that so much focus, attention, and energy are given to the opinions of critics and analysts, who sit detached, off to the side, choosing to criticize the efforts of others for seemingly no reason other than to make a bold statement." (Dirk Knemeyer)

Posted on April 21, 2005 | Permalink

User Experience is a Quality, Not A Discipline

"We should never talk about 'user experience design' -- there is no customer or user-facing design that doesn't involve a user's experience. But we can talk about how our methods, processes, approaches, mindsets, and understandings can contribute to improving the user experiences of the products and services people deal with." (Peter Merholz)

Posted on April 21, 2005 | Permalink

CHI 2005 Development Consortium

"This two-day meeting brought together people from many different user experience organizations to talk about how practitioners and organizations can work together." (UXnet) - courtesy of digitalwebmag

Posted on April 20, 2005 | Permalink

The importance of seduction and curiosity

"The brain is tuned to mirror the behavior of others, so if your passionate curiosity is stronger than the other person's passive disinterest, you have a chance to 'infect' the other person. It's not just that you know what's exciting, wonderful, fascinating about a topic -- it's that you genuinely feel it, and this is reflected in the way you talk about it, not just the actual content of your words. Passion breaks through." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users)

Posted on March 31, 2005 | Permalink

Getting Your Design Built

"Kim Goodwin spoke about a subject that is of great importance to all digital product designers—getting buy-in for our designs and ensuring that they get built. First, she enumerated various reasons why a product might not get built as designed or even get built at all—some of which are beyond our control—like shifting corporate priorities. However, the substance of her talk was about the many things that we can do to help set the proper scope for our projects and get buy-in for our designs." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit - BayDUX)

Posted on March 07, 2005 | Permalink

User Experience and the Future of Usability 

A presentation for Usability and User Experience 2005 - "Companies are aggressively trying to seize the minds, hearts, and spirits of people by innovating their products through basic listening and responding." (Dirk Knemeyer - Involution Studios)

Posted on March 06, 2005 | Permalink

User Experience Diagrams

"In the spirit of convergence, the user experience diagram rationalization brings together the goals, processes, and disciplines that are responsible for great products." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on February 27, 2005 | Permalink

UX Curriculum Content Map

"Imagine teaching User Experience? What would a UX curriculum feel like? What would you want them to know at the end of it? Good UX crosses, technical (information and technology), reflective (testing and pyschological) stuff, creative (design and emotion), sales (marketing and business) and social network boundaries without even trying, before breakfast. Here is one of those thinking-out-loud diagrams, packed full with my pet hobby horses." (Tom Smith)

Posted on February 25, 2005 | Permalink

Stop the Presses! User Experience Owner Found!

"For years the question of 'Who owns user experience?' has been a topic of serious debate in our field. Frankly, it's getting to be a bit silly, so this week I've decided to end the debate by just answering the question. And in the interest of making the answer understandable to all, I've decided to explain it in the simplest way I know how... this of course would be through the use of N-dimensional optimization theory." (Tom Chi - OK/Cancel)

Posted on February 20, 2005 | Permalink

Involution Studios: Innovating The Digital World

"(...) organized around our principals. We're industry-leading design professionals who work directly with you to provide the innovative design solutions you need to maximize your business success." (Dirk Knemeyer & Andrei Michael Herasimchuk) - best of luck

Posted on February 10, 2005 | Permalink

Creating the Ultimate Online Shopping Experience: User Behavior and Purchase Decisions in E-Commerce

Presentation slides included - "Companies are slowly beginning to understand that 'it's all about the experience'. But too many companies stumble by trying to replicate the retail experience online, rather than focus on ways to deliver a better online experience." (Kevin Kearney - New York City Chapter Usability Professionals' Association) - courtesy of noisebetweenstations

Posted on February 08, 2005 | Permalink

Points of View

"In our Points of View papers, we offer our insights on topics related to our solutions and client projects. We examine current technologies or marketing approaches, share best practices and explore emerging trends. Our Points of View are based on analyst and industry research, as well as on-the-ground experience with our clients." (Avenue A | Razorfish)

Posted on February 08, 2005 | Permalink

Emotional Design: People and Things

"(...) I proposed a framework for analyzing products in a holistic way to include their attractiveness, their behavior, and the image they present to the user -- and of the owner. In this work on design, these different aspects of a product were identified with different levels of processing by people: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. These three levels translate into three different kinds of design. Visceral design refers primarily to that initial impact, to its appearance. Behavioral design is about look and feel -- the total experience of using a product. And reflection is about ones thoughts afterwards, how it makes one feel, the image it portrays, the message it tells others about the owner's taste." (Donald Norman)

Posted on February 07, 2005 | Permalink

Creating Playful Users

"Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone's life, and you might just end up with a fan. (...) Brains evolved to play, and apparently the bigger the brain, the more likely it is to play. Play turns the brain on." (Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users) - courtesy of theotherblog

Posted on January 27, 2005 | Permalink

User Experience: the Google Way

"Google has found that competing sites have a hard time maintaining the level of feature restraint that Google adheres to. (...) it is quite difficult to remove something once you have added it. This is especially true in large organizations with pronounced vertical structures and vertically based incentive systems." (LukeW - Functioning Form)

Posted on January 14, 2005 | Permalink

Web Design for All the Senses

"Experience design requires that we design for all five senses. It is safe to say that over 99% of what is happening on the Web relates only to our sense of sight. On the surface, this might seem a logical and obvious state of affairs. In reality, it is a reflection of some mental laziness and of not thinking outside the computer screen." (Dirk Knemeyer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on January 13, 2005 | Permalink

2004 Salary Survey for User Experience Design and Usability Professionals

"In the Spring of 2004, Spirit Softworks and Peak Usability conducted an international online survey of salaries for user experience design and usability professionals. World wide, 821 respondents completed the survey. This report documents the results of that survey, breaking down salaries by type of employer, geographical region, role, project focus, education, years of experience, and gender." (Spirit Softworks & Peak Usability)

Posted on January 11, 2005 | Permalink

What Makes a Design Seem 'Intuitive'?

"An intuitive interface doesn't happen by accident. It happens when one of two specific conditions are met. In this article, Jared describes the critical relationship between current knowledge (what the user knows when they encounter the design) and target knowledge (what the user needs to know to accomplish their goal), showing the two conditions that lead to an interface users will perceive as intuitive." (Jared Spool - User Interface Engineering)

Posted on January 11, 2005 | Permalink

Designing Emotions

"In 2002 the dissertation 'Designing Emotions' was published. This book, in which five years of research is reported and discussed, should appeal designers and researchers who are interested in the emotional responses evoked by products. In the book it is discussed what an emotion is, how products evoke emotions, an how these emotions can be measured and influenced. On this page you can view the table of contents and download the introduction and summary." (Pieter Desmet - ID Studio Lab)

Posted on January 10, 2005 | Permalink

Crafting a User Experience Curriculum

"What user experience information is most essential? What core user experience concepts and skills should be conveyed to every member of a web development team? As I pondered these questions, it occurred to me that I was missing something important. I was forgetting that user experience is not just about concepts and skills, it is also about perspective. I needed to teach the students to think like user experience professionals. In fact, I needed to do that first, because this would make it easier for the students to acquire the necessary concepts and skills." (Jason Withrow - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 03, 2005 | Permalink

What The User Experience Community Thinks

"It's hard to break into the user experience community unless you were born wearing their official T-shirt. (...) Who are these user design people, I often wonder, and why do they sound so angry about their work and each other?" (Kimberly Krause Berg)

Posted on December 21, 2004 | Permalink

From Interactions to Transactions: Designing the Trust Experience for Business-to-Consumer e-Commerce

"Business-to-consumer electronic commerce on the Internet has revolutionised the purchase of products and services by giving consumers round the clock access to worldwide providers. However, B2C e-commerce has also shown to be associated with a myriad of factors hindering adoption and usage by private customers. Such factors include concerns regarding security and privacy, the unfamiliarity of some online services, lack of direct interaction with products, salespeople and fellow shoppers and the generally low credibility of online information. These factors were collectively defined as 'trust issues', as they refer to a purchase decision customers have to make in a situation of uncertainty and risk." (Florian N. Egger - ecommuse)

Posted on December 19, 2004 | Permalink

The User Experience Community to Thinking Too Small

"It's done people -- read Business Week instead of Alertbox for a change, and you'll see everyone is already on board! Hass and Standford are adding design to their curriculum, the MFA is the new MBA, and so on and so on... They are sold on what you do: now you have to actually live up to their expectations. Scared yet?" (Christina Wodtke)

Posted on December 19, 2004 | Permalink

The User Experience Community is Thinking Too Big

"One could argue that user experience is just as, if not more, important than say development but at the moment, we don't have the understanding and penetration that the staffing reflects this. If anything, UX staffing is one tenth or even one hundredth of development." (Kevin Cheng - OK/Cancel) - courtesy of nick finck

Posted on December 19, 2004 | Permalink

The Future of Digital Product Design 

Dirks presentation from BayDUX on December 8, 2004 - "The term 'user' is outdated and dehumanizing, but it is understood and accepted by most organizations in our industry. (...) Every member of a UX Design team should be involved in different types and levels of research. It should be hard-coded into every function. Research is the most important part of good design." (Dirk Knemeyer - Involution Studios LLC)

Posted on December 09, 2004 | Permalink

Funding Enterprise Design Functions

"(...) I encourage placing enterprise design functions in the hands of a central, stand-alone team or business unit. Such a group has a broad perspective that counterbalances the localized goals of autonomous business units. But our new team will be a cost center; how do we pay for it?" (Louis Rosenfeld)

Posted on December 08, 2004 | Permalink

On User Experience: Part I

"Here I'll discuss my theories on user interaction, ergonomics, communication systems, and other fun stuff just cause I find it difficult to find good information on these topics." (Mike Rundle)

Posted on December 02, 2004 | Permalink

The Future of Digital Product Design

"Dirk Knemeyer will speak about the present and future of digital product design. Following Dirk's presentation, Dirk, Neil Day, Pabini Gabriel-Petit, James Leftwich, and Luke Wroblewski will participate in what should be a lively panel discussion on this topic. Frank Ramirez will moderate. In addition, every attendee will receive a free copy of the newly published book 'The Dictionary of Brand' from the AIGA Center for Brand Experience." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on November 23, 2004 | Permalink

Kano Analysis: A Little Something Extra Can Have Big Results

"Our experience illustrates how the simple, but powerful Kano Model is useful in helping teams understand the difference between Basic, Performance, and Delighter features. By designing in and focusing improvement efforts on those features that create customer delight, there is a much greater chance of keeping your current customers and gaining new ones." (Kathy Parker - i Six Sigma) - courtesy of brett lider

Posted on November 22, 2004 | Permalink

Design as Communication

"Each placement of an object, the choice of materials, the addition of hooks, handles, knobs, and switches, is both for utility and for communication. The physical placement and the perceptual appearance, sound, and touch all talk to the users, suggesting actions to be taken. Sometimes this conversation is accidental, but in the hands of good designers, the communication is intentional. Design is a conversation between designer and user, one that can go both ways, even though the designer is no longer present once the user enters the scene." (Donald Norman) courtesy of ui designer

Posted on November 17, 2004 | Permalink

Being in the World 

Presentation from Design Engaged 2004 in Amsterdam. (Matt Jones)

Posted on November 15, 2004 | Permalink

User Experience Comes in Threes

"The two or more overlapping circles that make up a Venn diagram are often used in mathematics to show relationships between sets. In the context of User Experience, however, Venn diagrams are frequently used to 'quickly convey a message or vision, as a visual reminder to support change/focus, and to easily identify the cause or source of something.'" (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on November 11, 2004 | Permalink

T-model: Big IA is now UX

"(...) it is time we re-label the field of Big IA into User Experience." (Peter Boersma)

Posted on November 06, 2004 | Permalink

Online Retail User Experience Benchmarks 2004

"This pioneering study on the user experience of retail sites is invaluable for any company processing sales online. It will demonstrate beyond doubt that improvements to Search, Promotion and Support will lead to increased sales and happier users." (E-consultancy.com)

Posted on November 05, 2004 | Permalink

User Experience Diagram Rationalization

"In the spirit of convergence, the user experience diagram rationalization brings together the goals, processes, and disciplines that are responsible for great products. It also draws on the diagrammatic work of two information architects, one experience designer, and a cantankerous visionary." (Luke Wroblewski - Functioning Form)

Posted on November 01, 2004 | Permalink

All watched over by machines of loving grace

"Ubiquitous computing is coming. It is coming because there are too many too powerful institutions vested in its coming; it is coming because it is a 'technically sweet' challenge; it is coming because it represents the eventual convergence of devices, tools and services that became inevitable the moment they each began to be expressed in ones and zeroes." (Adam Greenfield - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 29, 2004 | Permalink

Use of Narrative in Interactive Design

"By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build." (Nancy Broden, Marisa Gallagher, and Jonathan Woyte - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on October 29, 2004 | Permalink

Introducing the Customer-Centric Worldview

"(1) Business revolves around the customer. - (2) Companies that focus on creating a good customer experience will succeed far above those that do not. - (3) This is the primary determinant of business success over the next several decades." - (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of asterisk

Posted on October 27, 2004 | Permalink

Review of 'User Experience: Why Do So Many Organizations Believe They Own It?'

"One consequence of bringing together all of the design groups was that experience design could appear as a kaleidoscope, twirling wildly, or a mosaic, cementing every one in his or her place. It remains to be seen whether synergy or separation is the result, and the ultimate outcome for experience design as a unified practice." (Bob Jakobson - Corante Total Experience)

Posted on October 18, 2004 | Permalink

BayDUX

"The emerging field of user experience (UX) design is inherently interdisciplinary and synthesizes the methods, techniques, and wisdom of many design disciplines. UXnet (User Experience Network) is a new organization whose mission is fostering cooperation and collaboration among the many organizations that serve the international user experience design community. BayDUX is a coalition of San Francisco Bay Area professional organizations that grew out of our joint participation in the DUX2003 (Designing for User Experiences) conference. Since UXnet and BayDUX share a common purpose, BayDUX is now the local presence for UXnet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our co-chairs also serve as UXnet Local Ambassadors." (About BayDUX)

Posted on September 28, 2004 | Permalink

The Pattern Which Connects

"How we perceive our experiences, indeed how we learn to think, are significantly shaped by years of education. These patterns of perceiving and thinking are deeply influenced by the underlying structure of education, or the assumptions embedded in the design of curriculum, instruction and evaluation. And this underlying structure originates largely in analysis, or the breaking down of information into a variety of parts we refer to as subjects, disciplines, courses and the like." (Brian Alger - Experience Designer Network)

Posted on September 27, 2004 | Permalink

User Experience Resource Collection

"An annotated collection of links to articles, tools, templates, guidelines and other resources for user experience designers." (Dey Alexander)

Posted on September 20, 2004 | Permalink

Organization in the Way: How decentralization hobbles the user experience

"Contrary to all the books, articles, Web sites, and workshops that suggest otherwise, the biggest problem in user experience design today is not one of practice. Any competent practitioner can dip into the current toolbox of methods and create a satisfactory product." (Peter Merholz - Adaptive Path)

Posted on September 06, 2004 | Permalink

How to Become the VP of Customer Experience

"Don't leave the company to get a degree in usability or human factors. Instead, start your customer experience career in the organization where you are, in your current position." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of uidesigner

Posted on September 03, 2004 | Permalink

Interfaces for Staying in the Flow

"Psychologists have studied 'optimal human experience' for many years, often called 'being in the flow'. Through years of study, the basic characteristics of flow have been identified. This paper reviews the literature, and interprets the characteristics of flow within the context of interface design with the goal of understanding what kinds of interfaces are most conducive to supporting users being in the flow. Several examples to demonstrate the connection to flow are given." (Benjamin B. Bederson - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on September 01, 2004 | Permalink

Build Sales Intelligence with Passive Customer Profiling 

"Companies understand that their customers want to do business with companies that understand their needs. Detailed user profiles are crucial to helping companies to make customers feel understood. Without knowing the customer, a company cannot engage the customer in the conversation that leads to personalized transactions and long business relationships." (Brett Lider - Avenue A | Razorfish White Papers)

Posted on August 31, 2004 | Permalink

Information Architecture and User Experience in Belgium

"(...) Belgium IA beer hour was a great success." (Peter Van Dijck)

Posted on August 26, 2004 | Permalink

Interactive Experience Group

"The goal of the Interactive Experience research group is to radically rethink the human-machine interactive experience. By designing interfaces that are more immersive, more intelligent, and more interactive we are changing the human-machine relationship and creating systems that are more responsive to people's needs and actions, and that become true 'accessories' for expanding our minds." (MIT Media Laboratory)

Posted on August 23, 2004 | Permalink

The Bill Gates speech from the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit 2004 in Redmond

"One of the things that's really been a big deal to us over the last several years is connecting up with the user experience, seeing exactly when the user is having a problem, when does the system crash or hang, when is it not giving them what they want." (Bill Gates - Microsoft) - courtesy of reloade

Posted on August 06, 2004 | Permalink

ROI Is Not a Silver Bullet: Five Actionable Steps for Valuing User Experience Design

"For years now, the 'ROI of User Experience' has been sought as a means to justify larger corporate investments in web design. Although ROI methodology can be a useful tool for prioritizing possible web development projects, by itself ROI is not the answer to building a stronger user experience design competency." (Scott Hirsch - Adaptive Path)

Posted on July 21, 2004 | Permalink

Brand Experience and the World Wide Web 

"Brand experience is the strategic, holistic business approach to the application of various design and media. It represents the upward growth and convergence for designers of all types." - Presentation WebVisions 2004 (Dirk Knemeyer - Involution Studios)

Posted on July 20, 2004 | Permalink

Brand Experience and the Web

"There is far more to the Web than 'just' being the Web. Indeed, the Web is only one component of a ubiquitous network of communication, interaction and information. While each of us are tacitly aware of the bigger picture, we often do not truly recognize and understand how it all fits together, or just what the Web means to business. This is particularly important for those of us who are involved in Web design and development. While we might seem to be hotshots in the work we do on the Web, we will ultimately be doing a disservice to our employers or clients if we are not working fluidly as part of the larger operating dynamics." (Dirk Knemeyer - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on July 18, 2004 | Permalink

Brand Value and the User Experience

"When designing a good user experience, it's important to remember these four principles (e.g. comfortable, intuitive, consistent, trustworthy), which should be a part of any usability or user experience specialist's toolkit. While these are not the only components of a complete experience, these principles form a solid structure upon which to build a foundation of usability, information design and brand application." (Kelly Goto - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on July 15, 2004 | Permalink

Six Design Lessons From the Apple Store

"There's a lot about the Apple Store experience that we can apply to the design of many other kinds of products - and a few lessons we can take from Apple's missteps as well." (Jesse James Garrett - Adaptive Path)

Posted on July 12, 2004 | Permalink

Web User Experience: Where the technology fits in 

"(...) introduction of user experience as a broad concept. Presentation: March 25, 2004 at Spring info tech conference." (Keith Instone)

Posted on July 04, 2004 | Permalink

UXnet Soft Launch

"User Experience (UX) is an emerging field concerned with improving the design of anything people experience: a web site, a toy, or a museum. UX is inherently interdisciplinary, synthesizing methods, techniques, and wisdom from many fields, ranging from brand design to ethnography to library science to architecture and more. (...) UXnet is dedicated to exploring opportunities for cooperation and collaboration among UX-related organizations and individuals." (UXnet Mission)

Posted on June 23, 2004 | Permalink

User Experience Honeycomb

"For me, user experience design is a big hive: a dynamic, multi-dimensional space where there's still plenty of room to build new boxes and draw new arrows, at least for the next ten years." (Peter Morville - Semantic Studios)

Posted on June 22, 2004 | Permalink

7 Things to Know about Building a User Experience Team

"1 - Make sure each team member clearly understands the underlying business case for the user experience, and the measures of success. 2 - Executives and managers should set the standard for "customer-centric" behavior. 3 - Hire only team members who are driven to develop the best customer experience - for the customer. 4 - Make ongoing conversation about user experience a part of the company culture. 5 - Be fluent in the analysis of customer experience data. 6 - Understand the impact of integration - or lack thereof - on the user experience. 7 - Encourage team members to continually learn about new techniques, practices and technologies to enhance their skills in developing better customer experiences." (Karen Donoghue in Built for Use) - courtesy of elegant hack

Posted on June 08, 2004 | Permalink

Beyond Web usability: Web credibility

"Now that usable websites have become so commonplace, especially among the major web players, it's time to start looking to the future. Suddenly, a usable website isn't going to be enough to separate us from our competitors (apart from those using the developers who've been based on Mars). There is a solution. It's two words long. Enter our new best friend ... Web credibility." (WebDevTips) - courtesy of andrew fernandez

Posted on June 01, 2004 | Permalink

Experience-Enabling Design: An approach to elearning design

"This paper draws inspiration from diverse media to understand what constitutes experience. In doing so, it seeks directions for building experience into design of elearning products." (L. Ravi Krishnan and Venkatesh Rajamanickam - elearningpost)

Posted on May 28, 2004 | Permalink

GEL Conference Write-ups

"Some of the sessions at Good Experience Live 2004 were difficult to transcribe because of the mode of presentation. The following sessions, while not fully documented, were still worthwhile, communicating useful ideas and advice." (Heath Row - Fast Company) - courtesy of vanderwal

Posted on May 04, 2004 | Permalink

How To Quantify The User Experience

"Many look to the user experience as an overall indicator of Website success. Analyzing how effectively a Website provides for a net positive user experience can often turn into a subjective affair, rife with opinion and short on objectivity." (Robert Rubinoff - sitepoint) - courtesy of column two

Posted on April 22, 2004 | Permalink

What is Experience Design?

"Eventually, thinking about experience design will lead us into the realm of narrative - those stories that inform our lives and create our private and public identity." (Experience Designer Network) - courtesy of brian alger

Posted on April 16, 2004 | Permalink

The Designer Is Dead, Long Live The Designer!

"I strongly believe that design, not usability, is the main driver in shaping user experience. That is, aesthetics, thus attractiveness, directly affects perceived ease-of-use, usefulness and enjoyment." (Didier P. Hilhorst - Digital Web Magazine)

Posted on April 08, 2004 | Permalink

Designing the User Experience: An Evolving Partnership for Collaborative Research and Development

"This paper describes a collaborative partnership between the University of Central England and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The project evolved out of the University's mission to serve local and regional communities and the needs of Birmingham Museums Service to improve its provision in line with local and national directives on social inclusion, audience development and lifelong learning. This paper describes the evolution of the relationship from a series of collaborative MA design projects to user-centered design research and the creation of a jointly supervised full time PhD studentship looking at the role and future development of on-line collections." (Marie Jefsioutine et al. - Museums and the Web 2004 Papers)

Posted on April 03, 2004 | Permalink

Why Consumer Products Have Inferior User Experience

"Physical products, from consumer electronics to cars, are needlessly complex because they're developed by insular companies that continue to ignore the growing usability trend." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox)

Posted on March 15, 2004 | Permalink

User Experience in India: State of the Profession 2004

"Overall, the survey reveals the picture of a profession that is rapidly maturing. Many practitioners have more than four years experience. Some institutes are playing a key role in educating students in the field. Practitioners have knowledge of many of the techniques and methods of the field. Practitioners face a number of constraints in their work which seem very similar to those faced by practitioners in other countries and regions. In short, User Experience in India has arrived!" (Uzanto Consulting)

Posted on March 12, 2004 | Permalink

Experience Design and the Design of Experience

"(...) we enter the era of what I’m calling Experience Design. A quick scan of our sociocultural landscape suggests that, in terms of artistic practices, mass entertainment, sports, and emerging technologies of pleasure, productive forces are increasingly targeting experience itself - that evanescent flux of sensation and perception that is, in some sense, all we have and all we are." (Erik Davis - techgnosis) - courtesy of brad lauster

Posted on March 07, 2004 | Permalink

From Brick to Click - Bridging the Divide 5/7: Providing Immediate Gratification

"(...) there are some scenarios, products and situations that eCommerce providers realistically will not be able to match traditional stores on. But in many cases, by re-framing the problem and innovating solutions that are thoughtfully engineered for the needs and desires of our customers, we can not only make our personal eBusinesses prosperous, but completely re-define categories and change what people are buying, and how." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread, Inc.)

Posted on February 16, 2004 | Permalink

Don Norman on Emotion Design @EtCon04

"(...) beauty is skin deep, and so is our evolutionary response... nothing wrong with that... it's a layer of decision making we need. If you make something everyone loves, that's a mark of mediocre design, not great design." (Black Belt Jones)

Posted on February 13, 2004 | Permalink

Presidential Campaign Sites: User Experience Analysis

"An in-depth analysis of the nine major Democratic candidates' Websites. Find out how Dean compares to Kerry, Sharpton, and the rest. Learn best practices for supporting grass-roots campaigns, swaying undecided voters, and keeping your core constituents informed." (Adaptive Path Reports)

Posted on January 27, 2004 | Permalink

The User Experience Cosmos

"Some time ago, as a result of my conversations with my friend and colleague, I came up with the idea of appliying the cartesian model to this User Experience world of us: what if we could use a north-south axis to represent the duality between the digital and the analog, and also use an east-west axis to articulate the the duality between the emotional and the rational? Once represented, we could place in this territory anything we could come up with: people, resources, disciplines, webs or products. The experiment became a document named 'The User Experience Cosmos'. As in ancient maps, this is a rather subjective and personal representation of the territory. Therefore, next would be to invite anyone to create its own representation. Even thou this is an idea with a signature, anyone is free to use this model for his own purposes if the original version and his author are refered." ((Javier Cañada - terremoto.net)

Posted on January 15, 2004 | Permalink

Emotion Design

"Beauty is important for our lives: beauty in our environment, in our surroundings, in our actions, and yes, in the products we buy and use. Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability - they should go hand in hand. That's the message of 'Emotional Design'." (Donald Norman - ACM Ubiquity)

Posted on January 14, 2004 | Permalink

Personalization is not Technology: Using Web Personalization to Promote your Business Goal

"Web personalization is a strategy, a marketing tool, and an art. Personalization requires implicitly or explicitly collecting visitor information and leveraging that knowledge in your content delivery framework to manipulate what information you present to your users and how you present it." (Christian Ricci - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on January 13, 2004 | Permalink

Seven Resolutions for 2004

"In those inevitable moments when my enthusiasm wanes, I'll remember how much I love this field of work—that it’s important, and meaningful, and fun." (Adaptive Path)

Posted on January 08, 2004 | Permalink

Creating patient-centered healthcare through ambient experience design

"Thanks to greater education and access to information, the Internet, and the growing awareness about well-being related issues, they know more and care more about their health than any generation before. So when they seek professional assistance and don't find what they want, or feel it doesn't meet their needs, they simply go elsewhere." (Stefano Marzano - Philips Design) - courtesy of uxblog

Posted on December 12, 2003 | Permalink

Understanding brand experience 

Presentation given at AIGA Houston (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Archive)

Posted on December 11, 2003 | Permalink

The total user experience: How to make it positive in future wireless systems and services

"In this paper, we focus on the total user experience that extends the goal of good usability to cover all the factors summarized by a user in her/his user experience." (Mikko Kerttula & Timo Tokkonen - Nokia Research Projects) - courtesy of reloade

Posted on December 07, 2003 | Permalink

User experience accountability: Assessing your impact on business results

"So often, user-experience designers are held accountable for process objectives. A successful project is one that meets budgets, deadlines, and specifications." (Scott Hirsch - Adaptive Path)

Posted on November 16, 2003 | Permalink

Technology and trust: The evolution of e-commerce

"For every Amazon.com that gets things right (...), there are various other companies that struggle to provide a successful solution." (Dirk Knemeyer - Thread Inc.)

Posted on November 14, 2003 | Permalink

Visitor experience design

"This model moves away from the solely content or task-oriented approach as this tends to lead to system-centric designs. What is important here is that this model supports the content and task-oriented perspectives, as well as integrating research and immersion. The inclusion of a research perspective provides insights leading to the understanding of motivations and emotions of visitors." (Clifton Evans - infostyling.com) - courtesy of iawiki

Posted on November 07, 2003 | Permalink

Acquiring Goods And Services Via The Internet: Consumer Shopping Perceptions

"(...) the largest number of items being purchased via the Internet is to fill love and affiliation needs, with physical needs being second. The Internet is also considered to be convenient and flexible, but less reliable and secure. Finally, the Internet is perceived to be least similar to purchasing from a store. These findings will help organizations conducting business via the Internet to better address the needs and wants of consumers, and system designers, marketers, managers, etc. can use these findings when assessing their organizationís Web transaction activity." (Lori N.K. Leonard - First Monday 8.11)

Posted on November 04, 2003 | Permalink

eXperience People

"(...) a specialty recruitment firm with a laser focus on recruiting Experience Design and User Experience professionals for intermediate to senior level executive positons" (Challis Hodge) - courtesy of louis rosenfeld

Posted on October 27, 2003 | Permalink

SBI White Papers

"Our white papers (...) provide points of view on topics relevant to our client projects and to the industry overall. SBI Perspectives can examine a current technology or approach, share best practices, or explore emerging trends. Our white papers are based on analyist and industry learning, as well as our fisthand experience with clients." (SBI & Company)

Posted on October 13, 2003 | Permalink

Experience Design: An Interview with Nathan Shedroff

"Experience Design considers elements that are beyond the expected boundaries to ensure that designers attack the problem at its most important points. In my work, I focus on helping designers create a full-sensory design solution that takes into account rich interactions like user emotion, personality, attention, and meaning." (David Poteet - UIConf 8)

Posted on October 08, 2003 | Permalink

Compassion and The Crafting of User Experience

"In trying to teach my students and junior employees how to manifest this quality of compassion in their work, I haven't had an authoritative reference to point them at. How to set up a usability lab, how to produce impressive deliverables, how to categorize and prioritize options: volumes have been written on each of these more concrete facets of the work. But historically I've found that the proper mindset is much harder to convey than the toolset, and regarding this question the gurus are largely mute." (Adam Greenfield - v-2)

Posted on October 02, 2003 | Permalink

The Business Value of Web Standards

"These aren't formulas for determining the ROI of migrating to standards, but they are some pretty good financial justifications. 'It's what all the cool sites are doing' shouldn't be your only point when arguing for a switch to XHTML and CSS. The economic benefits of standardization are tangible. Once we can quantify them, businesses will begin realize the true promise of the Web - interoperable content freely shared." (Jeffrey Veen - Adaptive Path) - courtesy of lawrence lee

Posted on September 19, 2003 | Permalink

User Experience and Human Learning: The underlying thinking of how people learn, acquire knowledge, and understand

"The field of instructional design and technology is also valuable to the UX community, providing theories and knowledge on important aspects of humans behaviour and the role technology plays influencing that behaviour." (Peter J. Bogaards - BogieLand)

Posted on September 01, 2003 | Permalink

The New Frontier of Experience Innovation

Abstract: "The intent of experience innovation is not to improve a product or service, per se, but to enable the co-creation of an environment in which personalized, evolvable experiences are the goal, and products and services are a means to that end. Profitable company growth will then result from individual consumers co-creating their own unique value, supported by a network of companies and consumer communities." (C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy - MIT Sloan Management Review) - courtesy of shiv singh

Posted on August 26, 2003 | Permalink

Web Traffic Analytics and User Experience

"Web Traffic Analytics not only keeps us honest, it can, in the best possible sense, help justify our existence and our value. When clients can see that user experience recommendations lead to specific, positive changes in the behavior on their site, that's powerful stuff. And the user experience expert becomes someone to consult not just when testing is needed, but as an integral part of the design and development process." (Fran Diamond - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on July 29, 2003 | Permalink

HCI, the Arts and the Humanities

"The digital world has crept out of the workspace and into our homes, our networks and our journeys between places. The new tendency to talk of designing for 'experience' as well as 'performance' reflects this shift towards immersive and ubiquitous computing, but have our analysis and evaluation approaches kept pace?" (Alan Dix et al.) - courtesy of purse lip square jaw

Posted on July 27, 2003 | Permalink

Top Sites' User Experience Teams and Their Challenge

"In short, it comes down to (...) 'integrated customer experience'. Increasingly, in order to fulfill their online goals, customers interact with the company in a way that cuts across internal teams, and even questions how the company is organized." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience)

Posted on July 22, 2003 | Permalink

DUX 2003 Case Studies

"The DUX 2003 program featured accepted submissions of real-world design practices, research, and cases from around the globe, creatively combined in sessions moderated by leading design practitioners and theorists." (AIGA) - courtesy of beth mazur

Posted on July 15, 2003 | Permalink

Design The Experience, Not The Participant

"Experience design is a lot like parenting. In both cases, it is my job to create a safe, creative and inspiring environment in which children, adults or businesses can thrive. As a parent, or as a marketer, I strive to provide the right tools to create desired outcomes. Clarity, consistency, honesty and engagement serve as guideposts in my personal and professional communications. So why is it that sometimes, even with the right pieces in place, the outcome is horribly wrong? I believe that this often happens because, although we can do our best to drive the experience, we cannot control the participants in it. We create the environment, draw the map and try to set a good example. But, even if you're with your children - or your brand participants - every minute of every day, eventually they will do their own thing." (Wendy Kadens - Thread)

Posted on July 11, 2003 | Permalink

Prototype the Experience

"The context within which a product exists strongly influences the user experience and provides meaning." (Ian White - Core77) - courtesy of croc o'lyle

Posted on July 08, 2003 | Permalink

This is Broken

"A new project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience)

Posted on July 01, 2003 | Permalink

The Most Important User Experience Method

"Changing the organization is the most difficult and most important part of user experience work." (Mark Hurst - Good Experience) - courtesy of guuui

Posted on June 23, 2003 | Permalink

Themes in User Experience, Part III - Emotion in Business

"There's a tendency to assume that business is driven by numbers, and in talking to most user experience folks about their difficulties in work with 'business', the primary issue is a lack of good metrics." (PeterMe)

Posted on June 20, 2003 | Permalink

Interact Lab

"(...) a research centre concerned with possible interactions between people, technologies and representations. Its focus is on developing novel user experiences in a variety of settings, including the home, schools, public spaces and work. A major Interact goal is to create innovative experiences by embedding physical artefacts in the environment with intelligence. Another is to understand the socio-cognitive basis by which people interact with novel media and environments." (About Interact Lab) - courtesy of purse lip square jaw

Posted on June 20, 2003 | Permalink

The Elements of User Experience

A conversation with Jesse James Garrett (Engaged) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on June 16, 2003 | Permalink

DUX 2003: Opening Plenary

Bill Buxton & Mitch Kapor (Celia Romaniuk) - courtesy of iaslash

Posted on June 14, 2003 | Permalink

New Methods for Experience Design

"Designers need to better understand people's emotions, desires, dreams, and relations to others." (Nathan Shedroff)

Posted on June 11, 2003 | Permalink

Themes in User Experience, Part 2: Empathy

"Empathy is a critical quality for people working in the user experience field." (PeterMe)

Posted on June 10, 2003 | Permalink