"(...) I (and many others) have been told to "create a good user experience." We've heard this in creative briefs, project kick-off meetings and critiques. It may have been a bullet point in a PowerPoint presentation or uttered by someone trying to sell a client or company on the value of their services. But there's a fundamental problem with stating that your goal is to "create a good user experience." It's not specific, directly measurable, actionable, relevant or trackable. Thus, it will create disagreement and disorganization, sending many projects into chaos. However, we can avoid this by using S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting criteria when defining user and business goals."

(Dickson Fong a.k.a. @dicksonfong ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on September 14, 2011 | Permalink

Interaction Design Tactics For Visual Designers

It keeps coming back to the idea of 'know the material you work with'.

"Interaction design is a multi-faceted discipline that links static communications together to form an experience. Understanding the basic principles of this discipline is core to designing websites that are not only aesthetically pleasing but that actually solve business problems and bring delight to their users. This article just scratches the surface of interaction design. For Web designers of any kind, considering these fundamentals when designing any transaction or interaction is imperative."

(Jeff Gothelf a.k.a. @jboogie ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on September 12, 2011 | Permalink

Framing the Practice of Information Architecture

The ship 'Titanic' sets course to a new UX iceberg.

"Over the past two decades, the volatile evolution of Web applications and services has resulted in organizational uncertainty that has kept our understanding and framing of the information architect in constant flux. In the meantime, the reality of getting things done has resulted in a professional environment where the information architect is less important than the practitioner of information architecture."

(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters)

Posted on September 07, 2011 | Permalink

Leveraging UX Insights to Influence Product Strategy

How UX influences product strategy and the other way around.

"Many UX researchers and analysts aspire to influencing not only design implementation, but also product strategy. However, it is rather difficult to effect this kind of influence because user research insights tend to center on design and fail to speak to a company's overall strategy for a product. In this article, I'll describe how you can influence product strategy through a well-defined approach to user research and illustrate this approach by describing my first-hand experience with it. I'll also discuss how any UX professional intending to add business value can leverage this approach in influencing product strategy."

(Frank Guo ~ UXmatters)

Posted on September 07, 2011 | Permalink

Great Customer Experiences Learn Continuously

Humans just have one mission in life and that's to learn. From the beginning 'til the end.

From Apple's poster for its retail employees. - "All of these experiences have made us smarter. And at the very center of all we've accomplished, all we've learned over the past 10 years, are our people. People who understand how important art is to technology. People who match, and often exceed, the excitement of our customers on days we release new products. The more than 30,000 smart, dedicated employees who work so hard to create lasting relationships with the millions who walk through our doors. Whether the task at hand is fixing computers, teaching workshops, organizing inventory, designing iconic structures, inventing proprietary technology, negotiating deals, sweating the details of signage, or doing countless other things, we've learned to hire the best in every discipline."

(Mike Wittenstein a.k.a. @mikewittenstein)

Posted on August 30, 2011 | Permalink

Transmedia Design for the 3 Screens (Make That 5)

Increasingly 'computer' becomes a generic term; its instantiations matter.

"Mobile use will rise, but desktop computers will remain important, forcing companies to design for multiple platforms, requiring continuity in visual design, features, user data, and tone of voice."

(Jakob Nielsen a.k.a. @NNgroup ~ Alertbox)

Posted on August 29, 2011 | Permalink

What marketing executives should know about user experience

Marketing 2.0 has a change, and that's not marketing the social way.

"Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before."

(Nick Myers a.k.a. @nickmyer5 ~ Cooper Journal)

Posted on August 27, 2011 | Permalink

Where Do Good UX Ideas Come From?

I would say AAPL, but that's problably not a satisfying answer.

"Many companies struggle with the question of whether to develop UX strategy, research, and design capabilities internally, or to engage external UX firms as-needed when projects arise. Companies must forecast their need for these services on a long-term basis, and weigh the comparative costs and benefits of each approach. But is it purely a question of economics? Does an external UX team offer value beyond the flexibility and overall cost savings of not maintaining an internal team? When asked only in the context of individual projects, the answer to this question is probably 'no'. For a single project, the rationale for engaging an external UX firm may remain purely financial. But it's crucial to ask a broader question: how effective will each approach be at fostering ongoing UX innovation, beyond the limits or needs of existing projects?"

(Nick Gould a.k.a. @nickgould ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Permalink

What I Bring to UX From Computer Science

As a designer, you must know the materials you're working with: computational and connected data, information and content.

"Human-Computer Interaction has strong roots in Computer Science, and user experience design is almost exclusively a technology-focused practice. How much does UX design share with its engineering-focused sibling? I'm going to share some thoughts about my experiences from making the transition from software engineering to UX, and how my past career has made an influence in my roles as a user experience designer today."

(Boon Chew a.k.a. @boonych ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on August 26, 2011 | Permalink

Desktop Summit: Claire Rowland on service design

Service design as holism applied to man-machine studies, HCI, UI and product design for Linux pros.

"Like it or not, the vision of the interconnected future is coming, and our mundane devices and appliances are going that route as well. Making those things work well for users, while still allowing user freedom, is important, and it's something the free software community should be contemplating."

(Jake Edge ~ LWN.net)

Posted on August 25, 2011 | Permalink

The Integration of User Experience into Software Development

Recurring issue, especially now with all the buzz around Agile, Scrum, and 'what-have-you'. IBM called it OVID.

"If the UX professional's job ends at the end of the design phase, something is wrong with the process."

(Janet Six et al. ~ UXmatters)

Posted on August 24, 2011 | Permalink

The Difference Between UI and UX

As long as there is still confusion among few, these DTDT posts seem relevant. 'Filed in Graphics' (sic!)

"In today's creative and technical environment, the terms UI ('User Interface') and UX ('User Experience') are being used more than ever. Overall, these terms are referring to specialties and ideas that have been around for years prior to the introduction of the abbreviated terminology. But the problem with these new abbreviations is more than just nomenclature. Unfortunately, the terms are quickly becoming dangerous buzzwords: using these terms imprecisely and in often completely inappropriate situations is a constant problem for a growing number of professionals, including: designers, job seekers, and product development specialists. Understanding the proper separation, relationship and usage of the terms is essential to both disciplines."

(Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ Design Shack)

Posted on August 23, 2011 | Permalink

You can't save your way to innovation

"Speed, cost or quality, just pick two." is 20th century thinking. "Creativity, productivity or freedom, just pick one." is 21th century.

"What's wrong, you might argue, with keeping costs down? Quite a bit, it turns out. If your objective is to design a product people want to use, or to invent something brand new, you must embark on a journey of creativity and innovation. That might seem like normal, every day business, but don't make the mistake of trying to run your creative organization like a conventional one."

(Alan Cooper a.k.a. @MrAlanCooper ~ Cooper Journal)

Posted on August 23, 2011 | Permalink

5 Proven UX Strategies

Set expectations, and then exceed them.

"Whether dealing with large corporations, game developers, small businesses or a sole proprietor, most business goals tend to amount to the same needs. User experience is an area that touches almost every single business problem. While every project comes with its own unique situations, there are a few tried-and-true user experience techniques that just work well and always produce results."

(Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ DesignM.ag)

Posted on August 22, 2011 | Permalink

Why I'm not a UX Designer (and neither are you)

Interesting observation by the Don: "When terms enter the vocabulary, they start to loose their special meaning."

"I think it comes from a growing disregard for the systems nature of product design. What's taken hold is this notion that because a user's experience with a product is influenced by that product's design, the experience as a whole can therefore be designed."

(Aaron Weyenberg a.k.a @aweyenberg)

Posted on August 19, 2011 | Permalink

UX Designers: Masters of Everything, Definers of Nothing

As said, promising new initiative focusing on UX.

"I'm a UX Designer, and with a strong understanding and working knowledge of interaction design, information architecture, information design, industrial design, visual interface design, user assistance design, and user-centered design, I'm able to research, design, and prototype new user experiences. While using a holistic multidisciplinary approach, I rapidly iterate on new ideas from concept to completion. Testing and designing not only the physical dimension of digital products, but using a powerful set of learned methods to design and perfect the emotional one."

(Mike Stefanko a.k.a. @EssentialUX ~ Essential UX)
courtesy of richardanderson

Posted on August 17, 2011 | Permalink

Requirements-Driven Software Development Must Die

Function follows feature follows user.

"The process by which most enterprise software is developed is fatally flawed. There are flaws in any software development process, but in the past 13 years I've seen one approach produce more bad software and blow more budgets than any other: requirements-driven software development. Thankfully, I've also had the opportunity to see the success of an alternative type of process, a process in which user experience design drives what gets developed. This type of process helps teams deliver good software on time and within their budgets."

(Fred Beecher a.k.a. @fred_beecher ~ Evantage Consulting)

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink

The UX of Learning

Remember the days of computer-based training, courseware and instructional systems design.

"Learning is a complex process with distinct stages, each with corresponding tasks and emotions. Understanding how users learn can help us design experiences that support the user throughout the entire process. So let's learn a thing or two about learning itself. (...) Far from being monopolized by schools, learning is an essential human activity. Empathizing with and supporting users as they traverse the many stages of learning fosters happier users and a more profitable business."

(Tyler Tate a.k.a. @tylertate ~ A List Apart)

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink

A Service Design Approach Is Required To Deliver Great Customer Experiences

For commercial contexts, that's true. But there is so much more...

"Internally focussed business tools, processes and systems are often thought about and designed in isolation from the design of the things customers interact with. Or to put this another way, projects that focus on improving the customer experience often don't fully consider the tools, processes and systems staff use in the delivery of the experience."

(Iain Barker ~ @Iain_barker ~ Meld Studios)

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink

What is Cross-channel?

Or what a lot of reading, days of conversations and writing a book can do to your use of terms.

"Cross-channel is not about technology, or marketing, nor it is limited to media-related experiences: it's a systemic change in the way we experience reality. The more the physical and the digital become intertwined, the more designing successful cross-channel user experiences becomes crucial."

(Andrea Resmini)

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Permalink

Transforming User Experience

Raising the bar. I might consider to change the goal of 'compelling user experiences' into 'transformative user experiences'.

"Although the initial discussion of transformation focused on the changes planned for the museum, she also discussed the desired transformation that visitors to the museum would experience. She noted that individual transformation was unique to each person and the result of not only the experience offered by the museum, but by each person's frame of reference, personal interpretation of the information, and their culture and background."

(Karen Bachmann a.k.a. @karenbachmann ~ Perficient)

Posted on July 22, 2011 | Permalink

The End of Client Services

G+ is a great example of the importance of UX in social.

"(...) a new economic paradigm in which the act of producing and consuming are one and the same, and he believes it's upon us right now. I subscribe to this theory, and I believe its most fascinating expression takes the form of social software, in which there is no consumption unless its users produce, and there is no production unless its users consume. The secret sauce that starts this virtuous cycle is not just technology, but also user experience design."

(Khoi Vinh ~ Subtraction)

Posted on July 21, 2011 | Permalink

Visual Designers Are Just As Important As UX Designers

Always thought perception was an integral part of feeding the experience.

"Conceptually I believe you can break design into tangible and abstract activities. Tangible design typically draws on the artistic skills of the designer and results in some kind of visually pleasing artefact. This is what most people imagine when they think of design and it covers graphic design, typography and visual identity."

(Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography)

Posted on July 19, 2011 | Permalink

The UX of User Stories, Part 1

Reminds me of scenario-based design of John Carroll.

"If you are a UX designer who wants to quickly get up to speed with integrating Agile and UX, there are few better places to start than with User Stories. They are both a quintessential embodiment of Agile thinking (i.e. if you understand User Stories, you understand Agile thinking) and a potential power tool for a UX designer on an Agile team. But like any tool, they can be both highly useful and help your team be highly effective, or, if you have no idea how stories work, cause some serious damage, especially to the UX dimension of your product. So, if you're using User Stories or thinking about adopting them as a tool, here are ten tips to help UX designers understand User Stories (we'll just call them Stories from hereon) and wield them to both yours and the team's benefit."

(Anders Ramsey a.k.a. @andersramsay)

Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink

The CSS of Design Storytelling: Context, Spine, and Structure

And I thought CSS meant something else in Design.

"(...) to be a really good storyteller, you need to understand three basic concepts: Context, Spine, and Structure (CSS). Each is critical and necessary, and all three need to work together."

(Tracy Lepore a.k.a. @TraciUXD ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink

User experience research and practice: Two different planets?

Keynote presentation by longtime reseacher of MUX ('Mobile UX'). Afterwards, the two planets (research and practice) kept their distance.

"Good user experience is increasingly important for profitable business: once utility and usability are taken for granted, successful companies design for experiences. But how to manage the fuzzy thing called user experience in product development? Can UX research help UX work in practice? This talk discusses the impact of business goals on UX research and the transfer of UX research results into practice."

(Virpi Roto ~ Chi Sparks 2011 videos)

Posted on July 18, 2011 | Permalink

The Difference (And Relationship) Between Usability And User Experience

DTDT: One is a quality of an artifact in use; the other is an emerging phenomenon within the human, at the moment, during the episode, and in the long-term.

"After web site accessibility, 'user experience' is probably the phrase that most people tend to confuse usability with. Whilst this topic has been discussed by various experts in the respective fields, I feel the need to write about it for two main reasons. The first reason is that several posts I have encountered emphasize the distinction between these two terms, yet they fail to highlight the relationship that exists between usability and user experience. The second reason is that whilst most of the posts are similar in nature, I have found some minor, albeit very valid points scattered in various posts I have read. Therefore, the objective of this post is to discuss these two terms, whilst highlighting their differences and more importantly the relationship that exists between them in a clear, concise way."

(Justin Mifsud a.k.a. @justinmifsud ~ Usability Geek)

Posted on July 15, 2011 | Permalink

Business Analysis and User Experience

"At UC Berkeley there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of business analysis (BA) and user experience (UX) in the software development lifecycle. In this article, we will discuss the advantages of involving BA and UX practitioners in your development process, when and how to involve them, and the similarities and differences between the two professions."

(Allison Bloodworth, James Dudek, and Rachel Hollowgrass ~ Modern Analyst)

Posted on July 13, 2011 | Permalink

The User Experience of the BBC News

"In a news environment, there is ultimately one asset that the web designer has to enhance and protect. Credibility. News is all about telling a believable version of real life. A brand as well established as the BBC's naturally goes a long way to distinguish its content from lesser-known, opinion-led publishers. But all brands are vulnerable to erosion if the presentation doesn't do them justice. The painstaking work that goes into the BBC's online output - the designer's understanding of what its content really is, who its readers are, what flavours of content to mix, and the mastery of formal methods of presentation - is all part of the never-ending preparation and re-preparation of an enticing Bento box."

(Tammy Gur ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on July 11, 2011 | Permalink

Let's Be Frank

"Architect, designer, and living legend Ephraim Goldberg, better know as Frank Gehry, is one such individual. His explorations in light, sound, movement, and materials, as well as his innate ability to understand the psychology of human behavior, set him apart in the fields of architecture and design. To Gehry, the physical form of architecture isn't really about a physical structure at all, but rather the manifestation of all disciplines of art, design, and technology coming together to solve a problem."

(Christian Saylor ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on July 07, 2011 | Permalink

What's in a name: The duality of user experience

"As somebody who has publically stated that they "don't care about user experience" and is fed up of "defining the dammed thing" I find myself being drawn into discussions about the term far more often than I'd like."

(Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography)

Posted on July 07, 2011 | Permalink

Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations With Your Customers

"Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs."

(Louis Rosenfeld a.k.a. @louisrosenfeld ~ Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on July 06, 2011 | Permalink

Building Trust on e-Commerce Home Pages

"While the presence of many trust elements, aids, and cues throughout an ecommerce site contributes to customers' perception of its trustworthiness, as UX designers, we can build greater trust by including and appropriately placing these identified trust elements on a site's home page, as this article describes."

(Shazeeye Kirmani a.k.a. @shazeeye ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 05, 2011 | Permalink

How Cognitive Fluency Affects Decision Making

"Every day, your users make judgments and decisions about the products and services you provide based on the way you present them. In this column, I'll talk about why seemingly insignificant aspects of information presentation can have surprising effects on people's perceptions and behavior."

(Colleen Roller a.k.a. @DecisionUX ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 05, 2011 | Permalink

Experience Design Models: Minding the Gap Between Ideas and Interfaces

"So what can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? How can we use our abilities to visualize for the greater good? Enter experience modeling."

(Marc Sasinski a.k.a. @sashimijack ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Permalink

Tales of Designer Initiation: The UX Design Boot Camp

"Our objective during the UX Design Boot Camp was to design a user interface for a new product concept in only two weeks. Four new team members paired up to form two teams that would work on separate design projects. Deliberately vague, the description of the design problem for each pair comprised fewer than five sentences."

(Lauren Shupp and Davis Neable ~ UXmatters)

Posted on June 24, 2011 | Permalink

The Future of UX

"Are we going to evolve into tie-wearing consultants? Do UX pros matter at all a few years down the road? And how do Africa and refrigerators fit in? Together with the awesome folks at UXcamp Europe, we discussed the future of our profession."

(UX Café)

Posted on June 21, 2011 | Permalink

Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites

"It's easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we're all end users. But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job. We talk about how we like using some sites, but there's always the 'I wish it was way.' Still, we are our own worst enemies. We constantly pick at sites and snipe on Twitter how certain missing features are UX 101, but we don't offer constructive feedback. We don't understand that some decisions are based on conscious business decisions. Worst of all, we don't get that company culture, most of all, plays a part in the final product. Not every company is Apple where design is king. Trade offs are made all the time, sometimes without any input from the user experience stakeholders. All good user experience designers make decisions regarding what they can live with and what they can't."

(Patrick Neeman ~ usabilitycounts)

Posted on June 20, 2011 | Permalink

Developing a UX Practice of Practicing

"Good practice focuses on the process, while work focuses on the outcome. When doctors, musicians, and pilots are practicing, they are not doing the entire job. They are looking at the process of the work, often repeating the same step multiple times."

(Jared Spool a.k.a. @jmspool ~ User Interface Engineering)

Posted on June 15, 2011 | Permalink

CS is (Still) Not (Only) UX ... and Why It Matters

"(...) I tend to think of UX design as a kind of design work associated with certain methods, processes, and values. It's not limited to the web, or even (theoretically, at least) to the digital world."

(Erin Kissane a.k.a. @kissane ~ Brain Traffic)
courtesy of basevers

Posted on June 10, 2011 | Permalink

I don't care about User Experience

"These days we've stopped selling UX and started simply doing it. (...) Sure, some agencies or individuals haven't quite reached that inflexion point yet, but I can tell you that it's on the way. Demand is far outstripping supply, so if you're not there yet, you soon will be. User Experience is no longer a point of difference, it's just the way all good websites are built these days."

(Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd)

Posted on June 01, 2011 | Permalink

user-interface, user-experience & usability explained

"So in short, when I'm 'interacting' with a website I'm using its user-interface design. How I 'feel' and my 'preferences' when using it is my user experience and how 'easy and intuitive' it is for me to perform the functions I came to do, is a measure of its usability. As you can see, it's really hard for someone to specialise in one of these areas without an understanding of the other two."

(Bernhard Schokman a.k.a. @bernardschokman ~ myware)

Posted on May 31, 2011 | Permalink

ROI of UX

"If we can measure the exact ROI of UX, we can demonstrate the value of the UX team, their work and also justify the need for research when it is necessary. Often the complaint around UX is speed. We can speed up the UX process by sketching, measuring features when they are live, and evolving our designs rather than working to create a final and highly polished version at launch. We can calculate the trade-off of using this faster deployment method rather than the more traditional process of doing lots of user testing up-front. There will be times where it isn't appropriate, and knowing the numbers allows us to justify this to the business. A caveat for the faster deployment method is that the UX team must be very senior and experienced."

(Marie-Claire Jenkins a.k.a. @missmcj ~ i-thought)
courtesy of rolandnagtegaal

Posted on May 30, 2011 | Permalink

The Expanding Role of User Experience Design

"As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We're not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well."

(Aarron Walter a.k.a. @aarron ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on May 25, 2011 | Permalink

Capturing Meaningful and Significant User Experience Metrics

"How many times have you wondered how you can collect meaningful and significant metrics to validate your research? Many researchers struggle with this same dilemma on a daily basis. For example, how can we know the magnitude of the issues we are detecting in a traditional usability lab study? Surprisingly, there are many ways to capture useful UX metrics if you have the knowledge of what solutions to use and how to use them."

(Kim Oslob ~ UXmatters)

Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink

Design + Lean Startup = Lean UX

"Janice Frasier, talking about lean UX (...)"

(Startup Lessons Learned's videos)

Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink

Service Design and User Experience: Same or Different?

"One designs the interface of the experience and the other the service and organization behind it..."

(Oliver King a.k.a. @ollyking ~ Engine service design)

Posted on May 20, 2011 | Permalink

Concept to Code: Code Literacy in UX

"Code is the material that breathes life into a user experience, so we ought to get familiar with it."

(Ryan Betts a.k.a. @hitsmachines ~ UX Magazine) courtesy of janjursa

Posted on May 18, 2011 | Permalink

Mobile & UX: A Perfect Storm

"In his presentation at at Mobilism in Amsterdam, Netherlands Jared Spool outlined four major forces driving the value and visibility of design in Web-based applications. Here are my notes from his talk." (LukeW writings)

Posted on May 17, 2011 | Permalink

Gamification: Using Game Design Elements in Non-Gaming Contexts (.pdf)

"Gamification is an informal umbrella term for the use of video game elements in non-gaming systems to improve user experience (UX) and user engagement. The recent introduction of 'gamified' applications to large audiences promises new additions to the existing rich and diverse research on the heuristics, design patterns and dynamics of games and the positive UX they provide. However, what is lacking for a next step forward is the integration of this precise diversity of research endeavors. Therefore, this workshop brings together practitioners and researchers to develop a shared understanding of existing approaches and findings around the gamification of information systems, and identify key synergies, opportunities, and questions for future research." (Sebastian Deterding ~ Gamification Research Network)

Posted on May 16, 2011 | Permalink

Cross-channel Experiences in Retail

"83% of consumers prefer retailers offering a continuous and consistent shopping experience across the different channels: people would like to seamlessly interact with a company independently by the touchpoint, medium or place." (Pervasive Information Architecture blog)

Posted on May 02, 2011 | Permalink

Marketing: Don't be a Hater

"Let's consider branding an essential part of service design solutions. How does branding help unify cross-channel experiences? How can it make services more enjoyable, memorable, and likely to be used again? Let's acknowledge the value that marketing brings to the UX conversation by including people from marketing departments in our client stakeholder interviews. Ultimately they will be telling the world about the products and services we create." (Kim Cullen ~ Adaptive Path)

Posted on April 28, 2011 | Permalink

The UX of this article

"In many respects, when we talk about, evaluate, and revise products from a usability standpoint, we overlook the most important piece: content. Our tendency is to be concerned only with the wrapper or container, navigation through that container, and the interplay of the elements that make up the container. But what about the content which populates this otherwise dead space?" (Brett Sandusky ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 27, 2011 | Permalink

Ten Guidelines for Quantitative Measurement of UX

"Most UX designers use qualitative research - typically in the form of usability tests - to guide their decision-making. However, using quantitative data to measure user experience can be a very different proposition. Over the last two years our UX team at Vanguard has developed some tools and techniques to help us use quantitative data effectively. We've had some successes, we've had some failures, we've laughed, we've cried, and we've developed ten key guidelines that you might find useful." (Richard Dalton ~ UX magazine)

Posted on April 26, 2011 | Permalink

Share The Sandbox: UX Can't Own Customer Experience

"While CX is becoming a key competency for many companies, there isn't an agreed upon definition. I view it as an extension of UX, where non-digital experiences and services are just as important as screen interactions, and the full range of touchpoints with a brand across time has to be explicitly designed." (Samantha Starmer ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Permalink

Is Marketing The Evil Empire?

"UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question: Is Marketing the Evil Empire? We were expecting to get at least a couple of embittered responses, but instead found consistent opinions that marketing is misunderstood and should be treated as a partner rather than an adversary." (Jonathan Anderson ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 20, 2011 | Permalink

Integrating UX into Agile Development

"Requirements definition is an integral part of an agile development process, and writing user stories is a fast, effective way of capturing requirements and estimating level of effort. UX professionals on agile teams sometimes add value by taking responsibility for writing user stories." (Janet Six ~ UXmatters)

Posted on April 19, 2011 | Permalink

Anticipating the Next Wave of Experience Design

"We live in a world defined by increasing time pressure and more and more things competing for our attention. In such a frenetic world, it is understandable that we place more value on the quality of our experience. We want to make the most of the time we have. Experience design has emerged in part as a response to this growing need we all have. It is no longer enough to design products and services so that they have aesthetic appeal and perform well. We demand a more satisfying broader experience when interacting with these products and services so that we more effectively pull out the true potential of these products and services." (John Hagel)

Posted on April 18, 2011 | Permalink

The Elements Of Player Experience

"Video games are breaking out of the roles they've traditionally occupied and are moving into spaces where they collide with UX design. There are games that serve as social glue between old friends, and games that bring strangers together to collaborate on solving problems. There are games that help people meet their life goals, and games that let people reward others for meeting theirs. There are games that facilitate creative self-expression, help people understand the news, train doctors to save lives, and advocate for human rights. As they expand into these realms, the lines separating game design from software UX design are growing fuzzier and less important." (John Ferrara ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on April 08, 2011 | Permalink

The Meaning of User Experience

"Even though UX is also concerned with satisfaction, usability is seen only as a part of UX, in which the satisfaction can arise from some other source than product's good usability. Collectively, UX is about designing for pleasure rather than preventing usability problems." (User Intelligence)

Posted on April 06, 2011 | Permalink

The fall and rise of user experience

Closing plenary of the IA Summit 2011 ~ "Although there's still a substantial gap between aspiration and execution, business leaders are at least now talking about the right things: experience, prototyping, design strategy, and innovation. (...) User experience converts are typically drawn to the glamour of interaction design on shiny technology, and the amateur psychology that helps them sound authoritative about their approaches. Most lack knowledge of basic information architecture, design theory and elementary programming skills." (Cennydd Bowles)

Posted on April 04, 2011 | Permalink

Are you experienced? Business and the web user experience

"(...) designing online user experiences is now an important process for any company that is serious about the web, from huge names such as Google and Facebook all the way down to small businesses. "User experience designers are the digital equivalent of architects," says Andy Budd." (Bobbie Johnson ~ BBC)

Posted on April 01, 2011 | Permalink

Use Gestalt Laws to improve your UX

"An overall good user experience is an essential aspect for creating a successful website. The term user experience seems to be a popular trend recently, but how can we describe user experience and how can we make sure to offer enough of it on our websites? To keep it simple, user experience describes how users perceive a website, what kind of emotions they have when visiting a website, and whether or not they are motivated enough to return. This subjective experience is in a large part based on the visual appearance of a website." (Sabina Idler ~ DesignModo)

Posted on March 31, 2011 | Permalink

Assume an Amorphous User

"Physicists often have to construct clean, clear-cut models to describe messy realities. They do this by cleaning up their concepts about reality, assuming things like frictionless surfaces, lossless mirrors, and yes, spherical objects. UX designers often do the same thing, assuming a spherical user (...) who knows what he wants to do and takes the logical path in achieving his goals. Our scenarios describe happy paths that lead to success for this user." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters)

Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink

Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design

"I'm very excited to be kicking off my new UXmatters column, Service Design: Orchestrating Experiences in Context, with this discussion of the value of service design to UX professionals. In my column, I'll explore the concepts of service design and how to leverage its practices to optimize the user experiences our companies and clients look to us to create." (Laura Keller ~ UXmatters)

Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink

UX Zeitgeist

"Use UX Zeitgeist as your library of UX books and articles. Add items, keep up with what others have added, learn which are rated best, and create and share your own public reading lists." (Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink

The Materials of Digital Products

"A perfect example is developing for the mobile platform. A native iOS app will allow for much greater refinement in performance, motion and visual treatment, but there will likely be greater build costs compared to an HTML5 mobile app. Conversely, HTML5 will allow much greater flexibility in deployment and distribution. Both technologies have their place in mobile, we just need to know when plastic is more appropriate than stainless steel." (P.J. Onori ~ Adaptive Path)

Posted on March 17, 2011 | Permalink

More, better, faster: UX design for startups

"Startups don't have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn't something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?" (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal)

Posted on March 16, 2011 | Permalink

Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed

"A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We're supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed." (Helge Fredheim ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on March 15, 2011 | Permalink

Innovation in Customer Experience

"The experience delivered by a product or service can be a source of competitive advantage and business value through innovation. Experience designers – using the empathy they generate with customers during primary research, and the understanding of the customers’ broad context of use they gain – are well-placed to be the source of such innovation." (Steve Baty ~ Meld Studios) courtesy of jameskalbach

Posted on March 15, 2011 | Permalink

Where Innovation Belongs in User-Centered Design

"While user-centered designers haven't always been the greatest advocates for innovation there is incredible potential for UX professionals to become the champions of innovation and the leaders of holistic design. User experience practitioners are in a unique position to reach out to users and across silos in pursuit of a beautiful user experience. Furthermore, while innovation can come from anywhere only user experience practitioners are equipped to evaluate whether a user population is willing to adopt an innovative idea. Innovation is inherently risky, and usability can mediate that risk through testing. Perhaps greater consideration needs to be given to how innovative ideas are evaluated in order to avoid focusing on the first use, but there is a place for User Experience in an world where innovation is king." (Jake Truemper ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on March 11, 2011 | Permalink

UX is 90% Desirability

"We are part of creating an experience. We are manufacturing something that wasn't there before. Sure usability is important. Yes, it needs to be designed well. Of course, it should function without a glitch. But, are those really what sell the experience? There's something more intangible that drives people to products: The desire to use it." (Francisco Inchauste ~ FINCH)

Posted on March 11, 2011 | Permalink

Lean UX: Getting Out Of The Deliverables Business

"Lean UX is an evolution, not a revolution. UX designers need to evolve and stay relevant as the practice evolves. Lean UX gets designers out of the deliverables business and back into the experience design business. This is where we excel and do our best work. Let’s become experts at delivering great results through these experiences and forgo the hefty spec documents. It won’t be an easy road. Culture and tradition will push back, yet the ultimate return on this investment will be more rewarding work and more successful businesses." (Jeff Gothelf ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink

UX Trends

"Over the past few years, the term user experience has become better known in business, so selling user experience is no longer as hard as it used to be. It's becoming easier to tell the UX story, because through success stories like Apple, businesses are beginning to see the value of great design. However, there is still a gap between knowing how to make UX operational and how to source and invest in the right skill sets to make great design happen." (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters)

Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink

Research Methods for Understanding Consumer Decisions in a Social World

"Ultimately, the goal is to understand the entirety of the consumer experience, so we can make the most informed decisions about online strategy, content, and positioning. In this column, I'll first summarize the findings from Edelman's article, then discuss how we can apply traditional user research methodology to supporting changes in marketing strategies." (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters)

Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink

Approaches to User Research When Designing for Children

"Children's exposure to computing devices depends on a great variety of factors—including cultural traditions, economic power, and family values. But there is no doubt that, in general, children's access to technological devices and interactive products has increased dramatically in recent years. We are now seeing even higher adoption of technology among children—thanks to the unpredictably intuitive interaction of youngsters with touchscreen technologies and mobile devices that they can carry everywhere and use at any time." (Catalina Naranjo-Bock ~ UXmatters)

Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink

Tough Sell: Selling User Experience

"(...) this kind of a journey is a stretch for some UX professionals. It really does not suit all of us. In fact, you might be turned off by this kind of task, and that's OK. For those of you who try it, it can be rewarding and a great career expander. You will have added a new skill to your repertoire, and you will likely have professional connections with new parts of your business that you never knew existed." (Misha W. Vaughan ~ Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 6 Issue 2)

Posted on March 06, 2011 | Permalink

Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications

"More and more products and services are being deployed on the web, and this presents new challenges and opportunities for measurement of user experience on a large scale. There is a strong need for user-centered metrics for web applications, which can be used to measure progress towards key goals, and drive product decisions. In this note, we describe the HEART framework for user-centered metrics, as well as a process for mapping product goals to metrics. We include practical examples of how HEART metrics have helped product teams make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centered. The framework and process have generalized to enough of our company's own products that we are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to reuse or adapt them. We also hope to encourage more research into metrics based on large-scale behavioral data." (Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu ~ Google Research)

Posted on February 22, 2011 | Permalink

Prospecting in the 21st century

"Service design is the natural progression from UX – taking interactions across platforms and concentrating on the invisible and tangible connections around customer or user interactions. Information architects should be at the heart of this design work and don’t be surprised to start to see IAs appear in companies that you didn’t even think of as 'digital'. (...) It is not just interface design. It is not just about making the world more usable and ethically correct. It’s all this and more. It is a force for changing business in its approach and to make it economically stable by providing for needs but also satisfying wants beyond the present day. This is the business value of UX. How you interpret the data you collect, and create something truly unique, relies on the teams skill set and experience." (James Kelway ~ user pathways) | courtesy of petermorville

Posted on February 18, 2011 | Permalink

Effective Design Documentation Without a Fuss

An Interview with Dan Brown - "Design documentation is shorthand for the collection of techniques to capture and communicate design ideas to other people on the design team. Those ideas may be half-baked or they may be well-cooked, and designers have various reasons for creating documentation." (Brad Nunnally ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on February 18, 2011 | Permalink

Content Strategy and UX: A Modern Love Story

"Why the gold rush? The answer is pretty simple: it's inherently impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you're passionate about creating better user experiences, you can't help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content." (Kristina Halvorson ~ UX magazine)

Posted on February 17, 2011 | Permalink

Content Strategy Is Not User Experience

"(...) content people who come from or work in the UX world say content strategy and mean bits of all of the above, but with user-centered design at the core of the work. Product design becomes feature design; messaging and branding become content goals and style guides; data modeling becomes content templates and page tables." (Erin Kissane ~ Brain Traffic)

Posted on February 11, 2011 | Permalink

Persuasion in Design

"Persuasion in design is often regarded as a subset of UX, but it goes beyond UX and the mechanics of traditional usability. It's about understanding the emotions that influence people’s behavior and decision-making, and then acting on that information to design compelling user interactions. Persuasive design applies psychological principles of influence, decision-making in a consumer context, engagement strategy, and social psychology to every stage of the design process, and it identifies potential barriers and emotional triggers to elicit the desired actions." (Elisa Del Galdo ~ UX magazine)

Posted on February 09, 2011 | Permalink

User Experience White Paper

"(...) a result from a Dagstuhl seminar on Demarcating User Experience, where 30 experts from academia and industry worked together to bring some clarity to the concept of user experience. We see the white paper as an important step towards a common understanding on user experience." (AllAboutUX) ~ courtesy of jaspervankuijk

Posted on February 07, 2011 | Permalink

The Relationship Between User Experience And Customer Experience

"Moving forward I will still use the term user experience to refer to that total library experience we want to design and deliver. In my presentations on UX I would be more likely to introduce the term 'customer experience' and point out how each term adds to our knowledge about and conversation on designing better libraries." (Steven Bell ~ Designing Better Libraries)

Posted on February 07, 2011 | Permalink

Business Objectives vs. User Experience

"Here's a question for you: would you agree that creating a great user experience should be the primary aim of any Web designer? I know what your answer is and you're wrong! Okay, I admit that not all of you would have answered yes, but most probably did. Somehow, the majority of Web designers have come to believe that creating a great user experience is an end in itself. I think we are deceiving ourselves and doing a disservice to our clients at the same time. The truth is that business objectives should trump users' needs every time. Generating a return on investment is more important for a website than keeping users happy. Sounds horrendous, doesn't it?" (Paul Boag ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on February 04, 2011 | Permalink

UX Benefits to Building Mobile Web Apps

"(...) there are many business benefits to building HTML5 mobile apps, but few, if any, user experience benefits." (LukeW)

Posted on February 03, 2011 | Permalink

Designing a Reason to Come Back

"For most of us, launching and maintaining a Web site is enough of a chore. But what change is there to look forward to? Once a year, a number of sites participate in a CSS reboot, where all the styles are dropped. Some sites even commit to refresh their look on this day. This gives casual visitors - especially those who rarely visit a site, reason to come back - to see what's new. Department stores regularly have sales, seasonal offerings and other events, yet the only online equivalent seems to be cyber Monday." (Stephen Anderson ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on February 02, 2011 | Permalink

User Experience and Experience Design

"The notion of (User) Experience as stories told through products has a potential to change the way we think and design. At the moment, the majority of commercially available interactive devices is either too practical or too open-ended." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia)

Posted on February 01, 2011 | Permalink

A model for UX design reviews

"Design reviews are so important for our work as user experience designers, but they too often fail us. Here is a model for design reviews that overcomes the problems of ego, emotion, and communication that so often get in the way of helpful feedback." (Davin Granroth)

Posted on January 28, 2011 | Permalink

Passive magic, design of delightful experience

"It is noteworthy when the design of an experience is so compelling that you feel wonder and delight. When designed right it feels totally natural, some might even say it is truly 'intuitive'. No training is needed, no set-up, no break in flow, the tool fits seamlessly, improving without disrupting your experience; it's like a little bit of magic." (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal)

Posted on January 26, 2011 | Permalink

UX, It's Time to Grow Up

"(...) one of the main issues that we see, but at times ignore, in this field is that most of us try to be jacks of all trades within UX." (Elisabeth Hubert)

Posted on January 20, 2011 | Permalink

Mobile UX Essentials

"At the BAYCHI Interaction Design event tonight, Rachel Hinman (Nokia) talked about where and how to begin designing for mobile in her presentation. Here's my notes from her talk." (Luke Wroblewski)

Posted on January 20, 2011 | Permalink

UX, Design, and Food on the Table

"In this case study, Laura Klein takes us inside the design process in a real live startup. (...) Interactive prototypes and iterative testing let you improve the design quickly before you ever get to the coding stage. Targeting only the confusing parts of the interface for redesign reduces the number of things you need to rebuild and helps make both design and development faster. Lean design is about improving the user experience iteratively! Fixing the biggest user problems first means getting an improved experience to users quickly and optimizing later based on feedback and metrics." (Eric Ries ~ Startup Lessons Learned)

Posted on January 19, 2011 | Permalink

Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability

"Three methods for increasing UX quality by exploring and testing diverse design ideas work even better when you use them together." (Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Permalink

Barriers to Holistic Design Solutions

"Face it, most UX design work consists of incremental improvements over the previous version of a product, and we rarely get to design holistic solutions that elegantly meet the needs of our target audience across systems, services, and devices—or wherever such needs crop up. Further, time-to-market pressures and narrow, predefined solution spaces usually constrain the occasional opportunities we may get to design a first-release product. This leaves so many UX professionals dissatisfied, because they know they could have done a better job or, worse, they may even have envisioned exactly how their design could have been better, only to find insurmountable barriers to their vision’s ever seeing the light of day." (Christian Rohrer ~ UXmatters)

Posted on January 17, 2011 | Permalink

Ten tips for UX Freelancing

"I offer no guarantees about any of these tips, all I can say is that they have worked for me and that they form the basis of my ongoing approach to UX Freelancing. Some of these I've known since the beginning, some I've learned, most often the hard way." (Leisa Reichelt)

Posted on January 14, 2011 | Permalink

Debunking User Experience

"It dawned on me recently that, despite working in the industry since 1994, I don't really know what User Experience is." (Dean Schuster) courtesy of uxtweets

Posted on January 14, 2011 | Permalink

All about UX: Information for user experience professionals

"This is an independent site to share and, one day, also collect information about user experience. There has been an active group of researchers collecting user experience evaluation methods, frameworks, and definitions for several years now. We promised to bring the results back to the people who have helped us in this work. Finally, we are able to share the results! We are aware of the immaturity of this site on the day of its birth, but the site is supposed to grow as more information reaches the maturity level high enough for publishing. It is great to get the existing information online now." (About AllAboutUX)

Posted on January 13, 2011 | Permalink

Power or Collaboration: What's Most Valuable to a UX Leader?

"In this column, we'll explore these very questions: Do UX leaders need to acquire and wield power to ensure their organizations can produce game-changing design? If they don't already have executive support, can they can collaborate their way to success?" (Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters)

Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink

Why you need a user experience vision (and how to create and publicise it)

"Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the 'Design the Box' activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision: telling a short story; drawing a cartoon showing the experience; and creating a video to illustrate the future." (David Travis ~ UserFocus)

Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink

The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users

"Is it possible to calculate the ROI of great design? What about the cost-per-acquisition of a customer sold on User Experience? There are no second chances for first impressions, and even the smallest opportunity is a chance to 'Wow' users. What you do with that opportunity can spark a chain of events that can make or break your business." (Nicolas Thomas ~ UX Booth)

Posted on January 05, 2011 | Permalink

Emergent Computing Paradigms

"Curious if these three emergent paradigms make sense to you: organic material, infrastructure, and social currency." (Rachel Hinman ~ Rosenfeld Media)

Posted on January 03, 2011 | Permalink

UX Design and Agile: A Natural Fit?

"Generally speaking, as an interaction designer you don't want to invest a lot of time programming something live, since what you really want is to keep iterating on the fundamentals of the design quickly. That's why working with paper prototypes is so commonplace and effective early in a project." (Communications of the ACM 54.1)

Posted on December 27, 2010 | Permalink

An Interview with Jesse James Garrett

"I'm pretty excited that the new edition of Elements of User Experience is out - the first edition was one of the first books I really connected with, and it's great to see a refresh. What are some of the highlights in this version? (...) There is so much evident care and craft in the Rosenfeld Media books - I think they now occupy the place O'Reilly books held 15 years ago as definitive works." (Russ Unger ~ Peachpit)

Posted on December 21, 2010 | Permalink

The Importance of Designing an Experience Culture

"Attitudes and behaviors are constantly being shaped within organizations. It's the reason there are performance reviews, processes and procedures, and role expectations. If business leaders want to foster a specific culture, then all opportunities, activities, and expectations of their staffs will be measured against the success of exemplifying that culture. To design is to plan something for a specific role, purpose, or effect - to work out its form. Company culture is designed in every conversation, and in every bit of feedback and evaluation criteria. It's possible to control the corporate atmosphere by choosing which behaviors to support and encourage, and which to discourage. Cultures grow organically, but they are actively designed." (Cynthia Thomas ~ UX Magazine)

Posted on December 21, 2010 | Permalink

Essential and Desirable Skills for a UX Designer

"UX Designers need to be excellent communicators and facilitators, as they often help bridge gaps in communication between other organizations." (Janet M. Six ~ UXmatters)

Posted on December 20, 2010 | Permalink

UX Project Documentation: Answering What, Why, and How

"Many people don't see the importance of gathering the necessary explanatory documents that define what you did all throughout your project development. Either that, or they treat the documentation process as a simple putting-together of all the sketches and wireframes generated. We should, nonetheless, give more relevance to this final, whole-project document." (Pamela Rodríguez ~ UX Booth)

Posted on December 14, 2010 | Permalink

An interview with Mike Kuniavsky

"And we never fully understand our technology. We may understand the technical aspect of it, but we never fully understand the social implications of it. Lots of people point out that every technology is a double-edged sword; for every positive thing that it does, there's a negative effect that it has. What we do is try to balance those. As designers, I think the role is to try to understand as much as possible about that, given the time, budget, and knowledge constraints that we have, in order to be able to make decisions to try to mitigate the negative aspects while amplifying the positive aspects of technology." (David Bevans ~ Morgan Kaufmann Publishers)

Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink

UX: The Enemy Within

"The in-fighting has to stop. We must kill the enemy within. The real enemy is out there, in the vast realm of people who still don't get user experience." (Karen McGrane - 52 Weeks of UX)

Posted on December 07, 2010 | Permalink

The Holy Grail of Innovation: It Takes an Ensemble to Achieve Inspired Creativity

"Have you ever seen really good improv? Did you walk out of the experience willing to swear that the actors had rehearsed it ahead of time or it was some kind of magic? I'll let you in on an actor’s secret: chances are the work was neither rehearsed nor magic! What's more likely is that the group performing the improv was a true ensemble of actors who had trained and practiced the principles of improv and were accustomed to working together." (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Posted on December 06, 2010 | Permalink

Content Strategy Will Make or Break Your Process

Karen McGrane and Jeff Eaton presentation ~ "User experience is key, and applying the basic principals we know about human-centric design can help give information and how it’s processed the place it deserves. By factoring this into pre-planning, task optimization, and above all communication, a beautiful site can have beautiful content without the last-minute chaos state." (Duo Consulting)

Posted on November 26, 2010 | Permalink

Designing for Content Management Systems

"Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS." (Rachel Andrew ~ Smashing Magazine)

Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink

Applying Lessons from UML to UX

"Software Engineering is typically much more formal than User Experience in they way they model an application before development begins. After pseudo code, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is probably the most widely used modeling language among software engineers. It has developed from other object‑based analysis and design languages over a period of many years and provides software engineers with a visual language that describes the design of a system at multiple levels." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink

Winning in the Marketplace: How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take?

"User experience encompasses all aspects of users’ interactions with a company, its services, and its products. Prioritizing user advocacy from the beginning of a product design process puts users at the center of the process and ensures their needs are foremost in all UX design decisions." (Sean Van Tyne ~ UXmatters)

Posted on November 22, 2010 | Permalink

On UX and advertising

"Peter Merholz's rant The Pernicious Effects of Advertising and Marketing Agencies Trying To Deliver User Experience Design is bold, uncomfortable and dogmatic, as all rants should be." (Cennydd Bowles)

Posted on November 21, 2010 | Permalink

Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences

"As physical and digital interactions intertwine, new challenges for digital product designers and developers, as well as, industrial designers and architects are materializing. While well versed in designing navigation, organization, and labelling of websites and software, professionals are faced the crucial challenge of how to apply these techniques to information systems that cross communication channels that link the digital world to the physical world." (Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati ~ Pervasive IA)

Posted on November 17, 2010 | Permalink

IA Summit 2011, Denver CO

"The IA Summit is the premier destination for those who practice, research and are interested in the structural design of shared information environments. Some call themselves information architects (and many don't) but all share a common desire to help people live better lives through meaningful experiences with information. (...) After 11 successful years bringing hundreds of practitioners together for five days of intense exchange of ideas and experiences, we pause to reflect on the state of information architecture and what is in store for this community of practice. As we continue to strive for more, we turn our focus to what can make us - as practitioners - and our practice, better."

Posted on November 11, 2010 | Permalink

UX Card Sort

"If you are an Information Architect, User Experience Designer, Interaction Designer or similar and your job is designing digital interactive (web)sites, services or products then join in with the UX Card Sort! This card sort is a way of creating insight into what UX professionals have in common and what the differentiators are, based on your daily professional activities instead of discussing what a label such as IA/UXD/ID etc. should contain. The Card Sort does start though with the request to enter your job title as that might already identify existing clusters with a common label." (George Miles)

Posted on November 03, 2010 | Permalink

We're All Content Strategists Now (the video)

"The "Best Careers 2009" issue of U.S. News and World Report gently mocked the user experience profession for its inability to agree on a name for itself. Indeed, many job titles seem like a mix-and-match game, mashing up words like "information" and "experience" and "architect" and "designer." And now "content strategy" comes around, looking for a seat at the UX table. Some say the profession fills a gap in our professional practices. Others argue that it's just a different name for the things that we already do. In this session, we'll discuss why UX needs content—and how UX practitioners of every flavor can put content strategy to work on their projects." (Karen McGrane ~ IDEA 2010)

Posted on November 02, 2010 | Permalink

Storytelling for UX: An Interview with Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks

"This book looks across the full spectrum of user experience design to discover when and how to use stories to improve our products. Whether you are a researcher, designer, analyst, or manager, you will find ideas and techniques you can put to use in your practice." (Daniel Szuc ~ UXmatters)

Posted on November 01, 2010 | Permalink

The UX Design Education Scam

"If you emerge from university today with a web design degree, chances are rather slim that you’re employable as a user experience or web designer. Maybe you learned a lot of stuff; it's just probably the wrong stuff. Congratulations, you've been defrauded. Hope it didn't cost you or your parents too much." (Andy Rutledge)

Posted on October 26, 2010 | Permalink

More on European UX Events

"In Adaptive Path's newsletter of September 28, I shared my views on the European UX scene. In response, several people wrote to me with additions to the landscape. Below are the most interesting ones, followed by my impressions of 3 more European conferences: Euro IA, UX Russia and Design by Fire. And yes, I will count Russia as part of Europe in this respect." (Peter Boersma ~ Adaptive Path)

Posted on October 19, 2010 | Permalink

US UX versus EU UX – What’s the difference?

"In response to questions from Amy Knox regarding US.UX and EU.UX, Søren Muus (creative director at FatDUX and co-initiator of ECUX) recently posted on the mail list of the Information Architecture Institute some interesting ideas in this matter. We are happy to republish his piece, because we find it food for debate." (European centre for user experience)

Posted on October 11, 2010 | Permalink

Information as a Material

"This talk will discuss what it means to treat information as a material, the properties of information as a design material, the possibilities created by information as a design material, and approaches for designing with information. Information as a material enables The Internet of Things, object-oriented hardware, smart materials, ubiquitous computing, and intelligent environments." (Mike Kuniavsky ~ Kicker Studio D3)

Posted on October 11, 2010 | Permalink

Oliver Sacks on Empathy as a Path to Insight

"Oliver Wolf Sacks is a British neurologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also holds the position of Columbia Artist. He previously spent many years on the clinical faculty of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine." (HBR IdeaCast)

Posted on October 08, 2010 | Permalink

Making it suck

"Making conventional interactions suck seems counter-intuitive and cruel. But there are plethora of products and services that aim to suck at common expectations for good reason. Among the many possibilities, things that suck can lead to strength, fun, good business and can introduce friction to prevent improper usage." (Cooper Journal)

Posted on October 07, 2010 | Permalink

Inspiration Beyond the Lab

"Over the last ten years, both of us have read countless articles about innovation, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible ventures that change the world. The theme that appears to emerge time and time again is the importance of getting out of the office, visiting different cultures, looking outside the bubble we live in, and experiencing new adventures. But it wasn't until a recent vacation in Costa Rica, where Bryan had the opportunity to see rural farm workers using cell phones to talk with other farm workers—people who appeared to be very poor—that he fully realized the importance of understanding the world beyond that which we encounter on a daily basis." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

Posted on October 04, 2010 | Permalink

Aligning UX Issues’ Levels of Severity with Business Objectives

"Many of us in the field people now generally refer to as user experience have long used levels of severity as a means of indicating the criticality of a product’s or service’s usability issues to clients. Over the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the vague and somewhat solipsistic nature of the gradations UX professionals typically use to describe the severity of usability issues. High, medium, and low don't begin to sufficiently explain the potential brand and business impacts usability issues can have." (Paul J. Sherman ~ UXmatters)

Posted on October 04, 2010 | Permalink

Researcher-practitioner interaction update (UXRPI)

"One thing that has been useful for me is the overall model of the problem space that emerged for me." (Keith Instone) - courtesy of resmini

Posted on October 01, 2010 | Permalink

UXpod: User Experience Podcast

"The User Experience Podcast features a wide range of interviewees and commentary. Transcripts are available for some episodes, and more are being added." (Information & Design)

Posted on September 30, 2010 | Permalink

How to measure the effectiveness of web content?

"(...) I can see two issues that make this a pretty difficult task, and it's the reason why the above three methods should not be used in isolation. In combination, they help tell the whole story. It is difficult to know what users really read on a page and it is difficult to isolate the effect of content changes from the other influencing factors on a page." (Rian van der Merwe ~ Elezea)

Posted on September 27, 2010 | Permalink

Gastronomy: A source of inspiration for user experience design

"Today, I delivered my presentation at the EuroIA 2010 in Paris on the relation between my two passions: gastronomy and user experience design. Gastronomy: A source of inspiration for user experience design. "A crazy topic with a scary video clip of a positive eating experience", I said in my impersonation as Lars Von Trier!" (Composing Cook ~ FoodUX)

Posted on September 26, 2010 | Permalink

Global launch of Designing intranets: Creating sites that work

"The definitive textbook for intranet teams on how to design intranets that work for staff. In 275 pages, this book walks through a practical user-centred approach to the design process, richly illustrating each step with full-colour screenshots from organisations across the globe." (James Robertson)

Posted on September 21, 2010 | Permalink

Leveraging User Data by Embedding UX Design Knowledge in Products

"The role of data in a UX design process usually goes something like this: User researchers or UX designers gather data about users and their needs, using a variety of qualitative and quantitative approaches. They then analyze the data—often developing documentation that synthesizes the data, such as a task analysis or a set of personas. Finally, they use their analysis as a basis for making design decisions or influencing the strategy of the broader organization. Throughout this process, UX professionals mediate the relationships between the data that describes users and their requirements, design goals, and business objectives, seeking to align them as closely as possible. This article looks at how we can make this process of data analysis and design—or redesign—more effective by embedding UX design knowledge in computer systems." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Posted on September 20, 2010 | Permalink

Can Experience be Designed?

"As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Some just make empty promises, some sell fluffy white papers, some use the slogan to hold pompous speeches, some just upsell naive clients with hot air. (...) Being an active facebook or Twitter user, a talented speaker, a winning sales man or a collector of UXD articles doesn’t make you an expert on user experience design." (Oliver Reichenstein ~ Information Architects)

Posted on September 16, 2010 | Permalink

Simplicity is Not Overrated, Just Misunderstood

"Usability and user experience design is all about making things simple and easy to use. I never would've expected such a contradictory statement coming from some one who co-founded the Nielsen and Norman group, a firm that offers usability consulting, training seminars and research reports. This statement puts a dagger into the back of usability and user experience design." (UX Movement)

Posted on September 13, 2010 | Permalink

Design With Intent: How designers can influence behavior

"The central idea behind UCD is that designers create experiences based on a rich and nuanced understanding of observed and implied user needs over time. UCD grew out of a functional, usability-oriented philosophy that began in the workplace, but it has since expanded beyond the purely functional to take into account many dimensions of the user’s experience, including emotional needs and motivations. Using the UCD approach, designers are one step removed from the action. We influence behavior and social practice from a distance through the products and services that we create based on our research and understanding of behavior. We place users at the center and develop products and services to support them. With UCD, designers are encouraged not to impose their own values on the experience." (Robert Fabricant ~ Design Observer)

Posted on September 13, 2010 | Permalink

Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design

"Of course verifying the integrity of the user experience is the role of the UX and design teams. While this may be true, many do not approach verifying all elements of a user experience with the same rigor as technical QA. This is in part because of easily made assumptions that once a design is near finalized or in development that it’s already been finalized from a UX standpoint. However, there are many elements of the user experience that need to be reviewed at this stage of the development process." (Catriona Cornett ~ inspireUX)

Posted on September 08, 2010 | Permalink

On defining UX

"Information architects, interaction designers, researchers, academics. They are all UX professionals and not necessarily involved in the broad process, but are a cog in the machine. (...) Just like the debate about whether designers should be able to write HTML, this discussion is just not as black and white as every one is making out. There's a whole lot of grey in there." (Mark Boulton)

Posted on September 07, 2010 | Permalink

Why I think Ryan Carson doesn't believe in UX Professionals, and why I do

"I think the reason Ryan thinks that 'UX professional' is a bullshit job title designed to 'over-charge naive clients' is because he's never actually been in the position to need one. If you look at Ryans' background, he worked for agencies in the late nineties and early noughties when the field of user experience was still in it's infancy. As such I suspect that he's never worked with a team of dedicated UX people." (Andy Budd)

Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink

Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change

"To accomplish the good intentions of persuasive design, we need to do more than design to get people to act. We need to create content that influences people’s thinking in a positive way, motivates them to act, and makes acting easier. As the UX design industry pays more attention to content, we’ll be better prepared to influence what people do and think—and have a real chance at making the world a better place, online and off." (Coleen Jones ~ UXmatters)

Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink

Juicy Stories Sell Ideas

"Stories are hot. And why not? We all know how to tell a story. Stories are a lot more interesting than most other ways of sharing information. And they work. Stories are a great way to introduce a concept in an imaginative way or sell an idea to your team or management." (Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks ~ UXmatters)

Posted on September 06, 2010 | Permalink

UX design framework: Interaction

"Undoubtedly, interaction design is a design discipline that has become a defining element of UX. Though the preceding two quotes assert the alignment with a user's behaviour they do so here in relation to their interaction (the person and the artifact). In other words, it is the behaviour of the object in relation to the user. The following principles reassert this notion that many interaction design issues are born out of preconceptions of what a user expects to be able to do with the interface they are presented with." (User Pathways)

Posted on September 05, 2010 | Permalink

Designing Behavior in Interaction: Using Aesthetic Experience as a Mechanism for Design

"As design moves into the realm of intelligent products and systems, interactive product behavior becomes an ever more prominent aspect of design, raising the question of how to design the aesthetics of such interactive behavior. To address this challenge, we developed a conception of aesthetics based on Pragmatist philosophy and translated it into a design approach. Our notion of Aesthetic Interaction consists of four principles: Aesthetic Interaction (1) has practical use next to intrinsic value, (2) has social and ethical dimensions, (3) has satisfying dynamic form, and (4) actively involves people's bodily, cognitive, emotional and social skills. Our design approach based on this notion is called 'designing for Aesthetic Interaction through Aesthetic Interaction', referring to the use of aesthetic experience as a design mechanism. We explore our design approach through a case study that involves the design of intelligent lamps and outlines the utilized design techniques. The paper concludes with a set of practical recommendations for designing the aesthetics of interactive product behavior." (Ross, P. R. & Wensveen, S. A. G. ~ International Journal of Design 4.2)

Posted on August 31, 2010 | Permalink

Don't Become A Digital Dinosaur: Design For The Space Between

"As UX professionals, we need to extend our reach beyond just experiences for the Web and mobile applications. A website or mobile app might comprise just one interaction—one touchpoint—in the end-to-end experience that users have during their journey to complete their goals." (Samantha Starmer ~ UX magazine)

Posted on August 30, 2010 | Permalink

Why Great Ideas Can Fail

"Designers are proud of their ability to innovate, to think outside the box, to develop creative, powerful ideas for their clients. Sometimes these ideas win design prizes. However, the rate at which these ideas achieve commercial success is low. Many of the ideas die within the companies, never becoming a product. Among those that become products, a good number never reach commercial success." (Donald A. Norman ~ Core77)

Posted on August 26, 2010 | Permalink

Jodi Forlizzi on Service Design

"Interaction design encompasses human interaction with objects, people, environments and systems. It's not a widely held perspective outside of the Pittsburgh diaspora." (Jeff Howard ~ Design for Service)

Posted on August 26, 2010 | Permalink

Emotional Design with A.C.T.: Defining Emotion, Personality and Relationship (1/2)

"In Part 1 of this two-part article, I'll be discussing how emotions command attention. Then, we'll dive deeper to explore how design elicits and communicates emotion and personality to users. Emotions result in the experience of pleasure or pain that commands attention. The different dimensions of emotion affect different aspects of behavior as well as communicating personality over time. In Part 2, I'll introduce a framework for describing the formation of relationships between people and the products they use." (Trevor van Gorp ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on August 24, 2010 | Permalink

Personas: Explorations in Developing a Deep and Dimensioned Character

"If we are going to begin to address these issues, we need to get at the root of the problem—our empathetic understanding of our users. Having empathy for users and understanding their needs doesn't come from reading words on a page. It doesn’t come from statistical analysis of demographics either. It comes from truly embodying and experiencing the character of a persona, so it becomes ingrained emotionally and physically in our memories. Actors understand this. From the time Stanislavski began teaching Method Acting - a process of transformation in which actors begin to take on the true nature of a character - actors have referred to this moment when they realize a character's emotional memory and have truly become the character as the moment of embodiment." (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Posted on August 23, 2010 | Permalink

The making of Undercover UX Design

"Writing a book has been the most complex information architecture challenge of my life. The permutations in which you can sculpt, exclude, clarify and link information are staggering. No surprise then that we relied on our familiar design process, heading up the chain of goals, structure, content and surface. We appropriated the tools of our trade: personas, content analysis, user feedback and deep iteration—but it was trial and error that finally unearthed the process that worked for us." (Cennydd Bowles)

Posted on August 19, 2010 | Permalink

Supporting User Experience Throughout the Product Development Process

"For most of us, the ideal when working on a product-development project would be to work with a group of like-minded professionals, each with their own areas of responsibility, but sharing the same overarching goal. Yet all too often in User Experience, we encounter unwarranted resistance to our ideas, making the product-development process much less efficient and adding to a project's costs. The apparent cost of involving User Experience early and throughout a product-development process becomes a series of hidden costs, resulting from project delays, incomplete requirements, and less than optimal products that result in higher error rates and reduced efficiency for users." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Permalink

Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology

"(..) I'll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part of an effective design process, with a particular focus on those activities that are essential for good interaction design. Although this column focuses primarily on activities that are typically the responsibility of interaction designers, this discussion of the product design process applies to all aspects of UX design." (Pabini Gabriel-Petit ~ UXmatters)

Posted on July 19, 2010 | Permalink

How content strategy fits into the user experience

"I just presented a talk to the Content Strategy Seattle group on how content strategy fits into the user experience. Here are my slides and a videocast for the talk." (Nick Finck)

Posted on July 16, 2010 | Permalink

The ROI of UX: Proving the Value of User Experience Design

"I was recently asked to describe what a user experience designer does in less than 7 words. I could only narrow it down to 16: A UX Designer designs or enhances products, services and environments based on a holistic consideration of the user’s perspective. Pulling it all together, the tactics described in this presentation are intended to help you prove the ROI of UX. To me, that means: Proving to our clients and potential clients that designing their products or services with a holistic consideration of the user's perspective will reap larger returns than other potential business investments." (Erin Young)

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Permalink

What If Customer Experience Has No ROI?

"Customer experience is not an altruistic endeavor; executive teams should focus on it because they believe that it will help their organization’s long-term business results. The bottom line: Improving customer experience is (often) good business." (Customer Experience Matters)

Posted on July 14, 2010 | Permalink

Where business analysis and user experience intersect: The benefits of collaboration

"The real benefits of BA/UX collaboration is making a product users want to use! A product that rocks their world! A product that even makes your company money! A product that improves work processes, reduces errors, gets the information to the user the quickest, or whatever your goals are. It will achieve these objectives simply by focusing on the users’ needs and understanding how they relate to your business goals and needs. Oh, not to mention that it will also result in BAs and UX professionals with expanded skill sets and a new lense to look through!" (Evantage)

Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink

Six Questions from Kicker: Kim Goodwin

"It wasn’t when I got my first job as a designer, I felt I had to achieve some degree of skill before I deserved the label. I'm not even sure where I had set that internal bar, but it took at least a couple of years. The beauty of interaction design being a relatively new profession is that it’s been easy for people to get into the field. The problem with interaction design being a relatively new profession is the same thing…there are lots of people with the job title who have great intentions and no idea what they're doing. This can affect perceptions of the profession as a whole, which is one of many reasons I think it's important to evangelize good techniques." (Kicker Studio)

Posted on July 13, 2010 | Permalink

Agile UX and The One Change That Changes Everything

"(...) changing your attitude can be much easier if you have a clear and concrete goal you are working toward. And one of the most common challenges I come across when talking to UX designers transitioning to Agile is that they do not have a clear understanding of the journey. It is not clear what is different and what remains the same. It is not clear where to begin in making a change." (Anders Ramsay)

Posted on July 09, 2010 | Permalink

Needs, affect, and interactive products: Facets of user experience

"Subsumed under the umbrella of User Experience, practitioners and academics of Human–Computer Interaction look for ways to broaden their understanding of what constitutes 'pleasurable experiences' with technology. The present study considered the fulfilment of universal psychological needs, such as competence, relatedness, popularity, stimulation, meaning, security, or autonomy, to be the major source of positive experience with interactive technologies." (Hassenzahl, M., Diefenbach, S., and Göritz, A. ~ Experience Design)

Posted on July 07, 2010 | Permalink

Maturing a Practice

"The authors of this paper position pratice-led research (PLR) as an effective agent in the transformation of the seemingly inherent and natural acts found in casual practice into the formal arrangement of accepted truths and regulated practices of a discipline for user experience design (UXD) and information architecture (IA) communities of practice. The paper does not intend to exhaustively define discourse analysis, discipline practice or pratice-led research per se, but rather to introduce practitioners and the fields of UX and IA at large to the basic concepts of PLR so as to begin establishing discussion and awareness." (Hobbs, J., Fenn, T., & Resmini, A. ~ Journal of Information Architecture No. 3)

Posted on July 01, 2010 | 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." (Agile Product Design)

Posted on June 29, 2010 | Permalink

Anatomy of a Noob: Why your Mom Suck at Computers

"The words metaphor and intuitive are often used in UX. They are the metrics that we use to judge the quality of a solution. But is this quality really as universal as we might like to believe? (...) Understanding something intuitively really means that you understand it holistically. If you understand it holistically you can fill in the gaps. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make your design intuitive or improve on it, not at all. Just understand that you are doing it for the natives not for the noobs." (Thomas Petersen ~ Black&White)

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink

UX Myths: Debunking user experience misconceptions

"(...) the most frequent user experience design misconceptions and explains why they don't hold true. And you don't have to take our word for it, we'll show you lots of researches and articles from design and usablity gurus." (Zoltán Gócza and Zoltán Kollin)

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink

Agile+UX: Six strategies for more agile user experience

"Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams." (Austin Govella ~ Thinking and Making)

Posted on June 23, 2010 | Permalink

Zombie Personas

"This is by far the nerdiest episode we ever did, so fasten your seat belts. In his session at UXcamp, Tom said: "Personas – love 'em or hate 'em – you can't not use 'em. Either you have zombies, or you have living ones." In this recording of his session he talks about different kinds of zombies like Mirror Personas, Undead Personas, Unicorn Personas or Stupid User Personas. He gives advice on how to avoid these fellas and how to make good use of living personas during a project. As a bonus, Tom explains why 37signals doesn't need personas at all." (UX Café)

Posted on June 22, 2010 | Permalink

The Importance of a Focused User Experience Strategy

"An important aspect of user-centered design is identifying a strategy for how you will support an experience that addresses user needs and business goals. It is critical to remember that you need to focus your website’s strategy based on experiences that are relevant and valuable in context of the services your organization provides." (inspireUX)

Posted on June 22, 2010 | Permalink

User Experience Balance Scorecard

"Customers have experiences with an organization’s products and services regardless of whether the organization is consciously managing them. A good user experience delights customers—increasing adoption, retention, loyalty, and, most important, revenue. And a poor user experience discourages customers from using a product or service and drives them to the competition—eventually, making a product offering unviable." (Sean Van Tyne ~ UXmatters)

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink

Ethnography in UX

"On my current project, I'm designing and implementing a framework for business that provides workflow management and supports information gathering and reporting. While there may be a software component further down the track, for now the technology is taking the form of procedures, reporting templates, and guidance material. This technology is both intellectual and social. Its goal is to support teams within the organization, and it requires people to work together. The biggest challenge with designing and implementing such technology is not creating code or a user interface, but ensuring its compatibility with team dynamics. This is where ethnography comes in." (Nathanael Boehm ~ UXmatters)

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink

Favorite UX & Technology Blogs

"When I presented this question to the Ask UXmatters panel of experts, I had expected to have much overlap among their responses. However, as you can see, our experts’ favorites include a great variety of blogs and other news sources." (UXmatters)

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink

Architecture and User Experience: An Ecology of Use

"Over the past several months I've proposed Architecture differs from design in its strategic and political positioning. In the last article, I suggested User Experience Architecture is at its best when it forces the business to question its assumptions about its market, its offerings, the technologies it depends on, and ultimately its vision. Do all businesses benefit equally from a User Experience Architecture? When is the time, effort and cost valuable, and when is it unnecessary? Hasn't business done just fine for the past several thousands of years without a need for a User Experience Architecture? Why now?" (CHIFOO)

Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink

Engagement, Entertainment, or Get The Task Done: Cognitive, Visual, and Motor Loads in UX Design

"Before the days of websites and user experience, the interaction designer's job was focused. The term wasn't user experience, it was usability, and there was one goal: make it simpler and easier for users to get their tasks done. The design wasn't of websites, but software applications. 99% of the software applications were being used by people to get something done: write a report, analyze financial data, or sell an apartment building. There were lots of constraints on what the technology could do, and most of the technology was largely unusable for the everyday user who was not a computer expert. It took a lot of negotiation to make any interface changes, since programming was cumbersome and every change meant someone had to rewrite programming code." (Susan Weinschenk - UX Magazine) courtesy of janjursa

Posted on June 18, 2010 | Permalink

What every UX professional needs to know about statistics and usability tests

"Do you like computers, but hate math? Would you love to work on creating cutting-edge technology, but don’t think you have the quantitative aptitude to be a programmer or electrical engineer? Then become a user experience professional! If you can count to 5 (the number of users in a usability test), then you already know all the math you'll need! Everything else is art! I bet you're good at art, aren't you?" (Stat 101) courtesy of usanews

Posted on June 17, 2010 | Permalink

Master user experience design

"Craig Grannell talks to UX experts to demystify the process behind web design and development's fastest-growing and potentially most important industry." (.net magazine)

Posted on June 17, 2010 | Permalink

The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design

"Designers often neglect to focus on both well-written copy and structuring a design so that it highlights the copy on the page. Today we'll discuss why copywriting is so important, who needs to learn it, and how to create content-centric designs." (Joshua Johnson)

Posted on June 15, 2010 | Permalink

The Problem with Great Ideas

"Even great ideas have a limited shelf life. Bill Buxton has some stern words of advice for those looking to rest on their laurels." (Business Week)

Posted on June 10, 2010 | Permalink

Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences

"Good user experience isn't just about good design. Learn how to create a positive user experience by being fast, open, engaged, surprising, polite, and, well... being yourself. Chock full of examples from the web and beyond, this talk is a practical introduction for developers who are passionate about user experience but may not have a background in design." (Google I/O 2010)

Posted on June 09, 2010 | Permalink

From Industrial Design to User Experience: The heritage and evolving role of experience-driven design

"In this article, I want to share some thoughts about user experience design, UX practice today, and its parallels to industrial design practice. In efforts to continue the conversation about the true fit of UX as a growing specialization, I will attempt to position it within the landscape of established design disciplines. I will also to raise questions and considerations to entertain as UX emerges from its software-related origins and grows into strategic leadership across design disciplines. This is neither a manifesto nor a hard-lined stance on UX; rather just some ideas to help carry the collective discussion forward." (Mark Baskinger - UX Magazine)

Posted on June 09, 2010 | Permalink

(Digital) Experience

"(...) if we start with the concept of experience as an event, the common historical lineage of these distinct understandings reveals itself. We are interested in this historical lineage, and would like to explain 'digital experience' as a historically developing category." (Ronald E. Day and Hamid R. Ekbia ~ First Monday Volume 15, Number 6)

Posted on June 08, 2010 | Permalink

Lou Rosenfeld Talks Past, Present And Future Of User Experience Design

"I had the pleasure of interviewing Lou and, I have to admit, I was surprised by what I learned about my own role in the world of User Experience Design. We all contribute to the Big Tent of User Experience, and the future is very bright." (Anthony Viviano ~ Three Minds)

Posted on June 04, 2010 | Permalink

The How, What, and Why framework for Experience Design

"Many companies have used the phrase "content is king" in recent years to talk about the importance of the material their sites ship. I heard this phrase first at Adobe Max a few years ago and have since noticed it in a number of places online. I think this is near to the mark but not quite there. In our framework here I've rephrased it as "The 'why' is king" because it puts the user at the center. Your content is pretty important to your site, but without users it's kind of worthless. The reason your users are coming to your site is of preeminent importance - that should drive your content. Then your content can drive your presentation, etc. etc." (R.J. Owen ~ Inside RIA)

Posted on June 02, 2010 | Permalink

Top 5 reasons why The Customer is Always Right is wrong

"The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service." (Alexander Kjerulf ~ Chief Happiness Officer)

Posted on May 27, 2010 | Permalink

Usability Ain't Everything: A Response to Jakob Nielsen's iPad Usability Study

"The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group's April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We're not usability engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we're user experience designers. Experience is more than just usability." (Fred Beecher ~ Johnny Holland)

Posted on May 26, 2010 | Permalink

Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010

"There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial, I examine some of our most cherished beliefs. Examples: design research helps create breakthrough products; complexity is bad and simplicity good; there is a natural chain from research to product." (Videos of the IIT Institute of Design)

Posted on May 26, 2010 | Permalink

The Elegant Architecture of the Customer Experience

"People are the most vital asset when designing and crafting a unique customer experience. Disciplined execution requires a robust set of processes to ensure efficiency and uniformity and keep pace with the burgeoning scalability requirements of the enterprise. Automated systems are vital to augment productivity of operations and to fulfill accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, reliability and scalability needs." (E-Commerce News)

Posted on May 25, 2010 | Permalink

Experience Design: Technology for all the right reasons

"The book clarifies what experience is, and highlights five crucial aspects and their implications for the design of interactive products. It provides reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach, and presents a detailed working model of experience useful for practitioners and academics alike. It closes with the particular challenges of an experiential approach for design. The book presents its view as a comprehensive, yet entertaining blend of scientific findings, design examples, and personal anecdotes." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)

Posted on May 18, 2010 | Permalink

Special Issue: Experience Design – Applications and Reflections

"Already last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and I edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and views in Human-Computer Interaction and Design." (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)

Posted on May 18, 2010 | Permalink

Designing User Experiences for Children

"Creating a great experience for Web site users should always take the users’ perspectives into consideration. While a user's age can be a contributing factor in a design's success for a particular user, demographic information should not trump design conventions. Then, why do UX designers struggle when creating Web sites for children?" (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)

Posted on May 17, 2010 | Permalink

Playful User Experiences

"As user experience designers, we tend to focus on getting users to the end of the journeys we've designed for them as quickly and effortlessly as possible. We try to take them from point A to point B in the shortest possible time. To me, it sometimes feels a little like we’re trying to get a child to quickly undergo a blood test before he notices that it hurts." (Shira Gutgold ~ UXmatters)

Posted on May 17, 2010 | Permalink

The Anatomy of a Website

"Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task. Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article's comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components." (Alexander Dawson - Six Revisions)

Posted on May 10, 2010 | Permalink

Peter Merholz: The Want Interview

"The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they're shifting away from 'user experience' and towards 'experience design'. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful 'customer journeys' by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three 'waves' - and predicts the fourth." (Want Magazine)

Posted on May 05, 2010 | Permalink

Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II

"This month's column covers strategies for making people more aware of the filtering options that are available to them, as well as methods of improving transitions between the various states a user encounters in a search user interface." (Greg Nudelman ~ UXmatters)

Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink

Achieving Design Focus: An Approach to Design Workshops

"Stakeholders with business, design, and technology viewpoints can pull products in different design directions—sometimes without knowing how the design work fits into an overall strategy. This can leave stakeholders feeling lost and unhappy. Creating a focus around design goals and asking and answering the hard design questions as a team is an effective way of coalescing a team around one design direction. At the same time, it can create a more optimal and fun working environment. In this article, we'll describe a design workshop approach that can help you find that design focus." (Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong - UXmatters)

Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink

Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology

"As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients’ products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink

Developers, UX is not UI, learn that and stop trivializing!

"And while this might be just my personal feeling, I am under impression that this kind of misunderstanding and trivialization of UX comes mostly from the developer-centric cultures like ones from Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Reason more for those companies to keep investing and educating all parties involved – you owe that to the customers and to the community of practice! Good things have been done so far – but obviously much more needs to be done." (UX Passion)

Posted on April 29, 2010 | Permalink

The Promise of Using UI Patterns for Large Software Packages Revisited

"In this case study, we reflect on how a UI pattern-based design for building standard business software affects the user experience and the user-centered design process. We learned that pattern-based design does not optimize the user experience per se. Additional factors, such as user-centered design, prototyping tools, and management support determine the success or failure of the pattern-based approach. Interweaving the factors in the right way is a prerequisite for success." (Annette Stotz and Udo Arend - SAPDesignGuild)

Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink

Intentional Communication: Expanding our Definition of User Experience Design

"Design and content. Content and design. It's impossible (and stupid) to argue over which one is more important than the other - which should come first, which is more difficult or 'strategic'. They need each other to provide context, meaning, information, and instruction in any user experience (UX)." (Kristina Halvorson - interactions XVII.3)

Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink

User Experience Metrics

"These days many sophisticated metrics are built into web analytics packages, but few tools help us recognize which are really measuring that holy grail of UX: user engagement." (52 Weeks of UX)

Posted on April 26, 2010 | Permalink

UX Groundswell

"Because I never stop thinking about wicked design problems or obsessing about user experiences, I decided to share my ideas here." (K. Bella Martin)

Posted on April 22, 2010 | Permalink

Want Magazine: Coming Soon

"Want Magazine was born out of love for new understanding of man-made experiences (...) and our resulting motivation for contributing in return with enriching experiences of our own." (David Gómez-Rosado)

Posted on April 20, 2010 | Permalink

Industry trends in prototyping

"Prototypes are meant to be a cost-effective way of experimenting with ideas. They are generally considered part of the pre-planning phase, rather than part of the construction or manufacturing process that results in the final product—although obviously the discoveries made during the process of prototyping should ultimately both inform and shape the construction process." (Dave Cronin ~ Cooper)

Posted on April 20, 2010 | Permalink

Ubiquitous Service Design

"Decades later, these concepts remain relevant, and yet we must adapt for new contexts. As Glushko and Tabas explain, today's service systems may include interrelated sub-systems (e.g., person-to-person, self-service) across multiple locations, devices, and channels; and customer satisfaction is influenced by the extent of integration and consistency across those channels." (Peter Morville ~ Semantic Studios)

Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink

CHI 2010: Growing the UX Management Community

"As User Experience matures as a discipline and grows in influence in the business community, UX leaders need to support one another by sharing their insights with their counterparts in other organizations, as well as with the educators molding the next generation of UX leaders at universities offering Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) programs. Indeed, the success of UX design and research initiatives within organizations depends significantly on how UX leaders position their teams and partner and build support with other senior leaders in their organizations." (Jim Nieters ~ UXmatters)

Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink

The Process Police

"No process guarantees success. If there were a process that guaranteed happy users everyone would be using it. Nobody gets it right every time. Design doesn’t work like that. It’s iterative, responsive, ever-changing. You have to react as much as plan. You have to change your process on the fly to react to the marketplace. That's why we need to optimize for what's most important, a happy user, and do whatever it takes to make it happen, process be damned." (52 Weeks of UX)

Posted on April 19, 2010 | Permalink

IA Summit 10: Whitney Hess Keynote

"In her keynote closing the 2010 IA Summit, Whitney asks if our work is just our job or our passion. To really make the difference we seek, our practice needs to be our calling. The UX community is united because of a common mission: We empower people to become self-reliant and more resourceful, organized, social, and relaxed. We don’t do it for them, they do it for themselves." (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on April 16, 2010 | Permalink

The perils of persuasion

"The success of UCD has sustained demand for user experience design skills, and the land rush has continued in 2010. UX is becoming a cookie cutter add-on for digital agencies and I rarely meet a web designer now who doesn’t claim UX proficiency, although not all can articulate what that means. And it’s not just the designers: I also see back-end developers, SEO professionals and marketers rapidly appending these two magical letters to their CVs." (Cennydd Bowles)

Posted on April 16, 2010 | Permalink

The riddle of experience vs. memory

"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our 'experiencing selves' and our 'remembering selves' perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness." (TED2010)

Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink

The Design Process and the Scientific Method

"The design process is messy, difficult to explain and sell, and its results are not certain from the beginning. People want more predictability." (Dan Saffer - Kicker Studio)

Posted on April 09, 2010 | Permalink

Designing with Lenses

"A design lens allows you to view your user experience design from the perspective of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design." (Bill Scott and Theresa Neill)

Posted on April 07, 2010 | Permalink

Using a Collaborative Parallel Design Process

"Genetic algorithms essentially mimic evolutionary biology to find optimal solutions. Initially, they select a population of solutions based on some evaluation criteria, then use some subset of that population—the fittest members—as breeding stock for the subsequent generation of solutions. This process continues for multiple generations, each getting closer to an optimal solution. This article describes my experience with parallel design and discusses how to make parallel design more collaborative." (Mike Myles - UXmatters)

Posted on April 05, 2010 | Permalink

Service design goes mainstream

"Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard's post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of Service Design and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this (...)" (Paul Sims - Made by Many)

Posted on April 01, 2010 | Permalink

Case study: Agile and UCD working together

"Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods. This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It's important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success." (James Kelway - Boxes and Arrows)

Posted on March 31, 2010 | Permalink

Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps

"In February 2010 Fred Wilson, a New York based tech investor, spoke at the annual Future of Web Apps Miami conference. His talk, clocking in at just under 30 minutes, looks at his top 10 principles for creating a successful web app. A full transcript is available too." (Keir Whitaker - Think Vitamin)

Posted on March 30, 2010 | Permalink

Rock Stars Need Not Apply

"The world needs talented, passionate service designers but it can do without rock stars. Service designers are humble. They embrace participatory values, particularly the idea that we should be designing with people rather than designing for them. The practical upshot is an evolutionary divergence in approach to research, sketching, design and prototyping." (Jeff Howard)

Posted on March 29, 2010 | Permalink

Leonard Cohen versus Jesse James Garrett

"I think we should be called information architects and that it’s easier to talk about IA with people outside our field in terms of A than to talk with them about UXD in terms of X or D. Mr. Garrett thinks we are now and have always been user experience designers, that UXD is easier for muggles to understand, and that those of us who specialize in and choose the titles of IA or IxD are either fools or liars." (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate)

Posted on March 26, 2010 | Permalink

Interaction10: How to Design an Experience for Experience Designers?

"Collaborating with a large team of designers, who all worked as volunteers, we decided to approach the conference experience as designers creating a service, taking every aspect of the experience into account. We thought through the lifecycle of the event, in light of the needs and motivations of the 600+ participants at the event, in their various roles from attendees and speakers to sponsors, volunteers, and conference staff. We used our empathy as designers to imagine what was important to each user at each stage of the experience. And while not everything worked out exactly as we planned, based on feedback, I think conference was a success. Here are a few things we learned along the way." (Jennifer Bove - Fast Company)

Posted on March 26, 2010 | Permalink

UX at Year X

"Adaptive Path co-founder and principal Jesse James Garrett's accolades range from creating seminal works on user experience to coining the term AJAX. Ahead of his UX London presentation, he talked to us about The Elements of User Experience a decade on, how service design relates to user experience, and his pick of future UX rock stars. (...) the phenomenal success Apple has had in the last ten years has been a double-edged sword for us." (Jeroen van Geel - Johnny Holland Magazine)

Posted on March 24, 2010 | Permalink

Taming Goliath: Selling UX to Large Companies 1/2

"Large companies are the financial backbone of the web industry, but their size and complex organizational structure can make them challenging to work with. Having worked on both sides of the fence, I've seen great ideas become the casualties of this struggle between the proverbial David and Goliath, as agencies or freelancers meet face-to-face with Big Business to create web sites. Closing the door to large companies means missing out on important revenue, good work, and more people using our designs, so how can we make large companies work for us?" (Alan Colville - UX Booth)

Posted on March 23, 2010 | Permalink

UX Design versus UI Development

"One of the more interesting tensions I have observed - since getting into user experience design about five years ago - is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves - and sometimes rightfully so - to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint. It's not the value they add, just the mechanics of delivering the creative concepts." (Mike Hughes - UXmatters)

Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink

Sustainable User Research

"Traditionally, user research involves directly observing and talking with people in the context of their work or play. Either researchers travel to observe participants in their natural environments or participants travel to a usability lab or focus-group facility. How better to understand how people use a product or technology than to observe them using it firsthand?" (Jim Ross - UXmatters)

Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink

There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett

"The president of a firm that's synonymous with User Experience and who literally 'wrote the book' on the elements of User Experience making an impassioned call for everybody who’s called information architect or interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm does its work is different than every other kind of design approach that’s come before it? It's a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he doth protest too much." (Dan Klyn - Wildly Appropriate)

Posted on March 21, 2010 | Permalink

How UX can get anything they want

"When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power. The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They're already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers." (Scott Berkun)

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Permalink

Preso: User Experience Will Make or Break Social Business

"User experience is the art and science of designing digital products that people want to use." (Karen McGrane - Bond Art+Science)

Posted on March 17, 2010 | Permalink

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