UX Methods
“The cards briefly describe 16 different methods, deliverables, and ideas that user experience professionals can use in their practice.” (Jess McCullin – nForm)
All posts from
March 2007
Shared Presentations from the IA Summit 2007
“Slideshows for tag: iasummit2007.” (SlideShare) – courtesy of elearningpost
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)
Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data
“(…) content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” (Rachel Lovinger – Boxes and Arrows)
Effective Prototyping for Software Makers
“This book will help software makers – developers, designers, and architects – build effective prototypes every time: prototypes that convey enough information about the product at the appropriate time and thus set expectations appropriately. This practical, informative book will help anyone – whether or not one has artistic talent, access to special tools, or programming ability – to use good prototyping style, methods, and tools to build prototypes and manage for effective prototyping.” (The Book)
Does User Annoyance Matter?
“Making users suffer a drop-down menu to enter state abbreviations is one of many small annoyances that add up to a less efficient, less pleasant user experience. It’s worth fixing as many of these usability irritants as you can.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas
“My SXSW 2007 presentation. People seemed to like it. Sam Felder’s transcription of the talk. Podcast supposedly coming from SXSW eventually.” (Dan Saffer – odannyboy)
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)
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)
Intelligent Designs
“When information needs to be communicated, Edward Tufte demands both truth and beauty.” (STANFORD Magazine)
User Research Doesn’t Prove Anything
“Recently, I was reading through a sample chapter of a soon-to-be-published book. The book and author shall remain nameless, as shall the book’s topic. However, I was disappointed to read, in what otherwise appeared at first glance to be an interesting publication, a very general, sweeping statement to the effect that qualitative research doesn’t prove anything and, if you want proof, you should perform quantitative research. The author’s basic assumption was that qualitative research can’t prove anything, as it is based on small sample sizes, but quantitative research, using large sample sizes, does provide proof. This may come as a shock to everyone, but quantitative research does not provide proof of anything either.” (Steve Baty – UXmatters)
Wireframing With Patterns
“When you’re starting out as an information architect (IA), being part of a strong community of fellow practitioners helps immensely. A little over a year ago, on Sunday, February 22, 2006, I participated in an informal workshop on wireframing techniques that took place here in Toronto. Bryce Johnson, Director of User Experience Design at Navantis Inc., facilitated and hosted the workshop at his workplace. The knowledge sharing and the wireframing best practices that emerged from the workshop, plus the sense of community I experienced there, helped me build a foundation as an information architect and got me started on developing my own design workflow. Now, I’d like to share the techniques I’ve learned with a broader community of information architects.” (Lindsay Ellerby – UXmatters)
Winning Against Linux The Smart Way
Including related podcast – “Tune in to learn about how to proactively and effectively sell to Linux users in the mid-market space. We’ve recently completed Linux Persona market research that groups Linux users into 5 personas. Find out what each persona means and how you can use our new screening tool to profile your own customers. – (…) this tutorial will provide you with extensive interactive content that you may require as you apply the personas in the sales and marketing aspects of your business.” (Microsoft) – courtesy of slashdot
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)
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)
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)
Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums
“Integrating digital content from libraries, archives and museums represents a persistent challenge. While the history of standards development is rife with examples of cross-community experimentation, in the end, libraries, archives and museums have developed parallel descriptive strategies for cataloguing the materials in their custody. Applying in particular data content standards by material type, and not by community affiliation, could lead to greater data interoperability within the cultural heritage community. In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic.” (Mary W. Elings and Günter Waibel – First Monday 12.3)
LIFT 2007 Videos
“Here you can watch and download the videos of the presentations given at the conference over the years.” – including Adam Greenfield (Studies and Observations), Jan Chipchase (Nokia), and Florence Devouard (WikiMedia). (LIFT07)
Web Typography Sucks
“It’s all our fault!” (Richard Rutter and Mark Boulton)
Deep Context
“(…) by exposing ourselves to different cultures, we develop a deeper understanding of our own, and this will make us better designers. When we create an information architecture for a website—irrespective of its intended target audience – we will inevitably be called on to express the contextual assumptions that allow the website’s messages to be properly understood. Knowing that these assumptions exist (and understanding how the various audiences may interpret them differently) is the first step in creating sites that communicate more effectively across cultural lines – even if they are within our own society.” (Jorge Arango – Boxes and Arrows)
