“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)