All posts from
May 2008

Interviewed by BusinessWeek

Added on 9 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Among the podcasts I subscribe to is BusinessWeek’s ‘Innovation of the Week’, featuring interviews with people on the subject of design and innovation. So I was excited when BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella asked me to talk with him about our MX 2008 conference, and our new book. You can listen to the interview.” (Peter Merholz – Adaptive Path)

An Interview with Lou Rosenfeld and Liz Danzico

Added on 8 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou – along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media – about starting a new publishing house and ‘eating their own dog food’.” (Joshua Kaufman – UXmatters)

Simplicity in Your Mind

Added on 8 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“There is increasing interest in the simplification of information technology (IT). The IT industry is recognizing the need to simplify software technology as businesses express their increased interest in governing the return on their IT investments. Two goals are surfacing as explicit mandates to which all software vendors are responding: (1) lowering the skills required of software users and (2) increasing their productivity. Although this simplification mandate is most essential to small- and medium-sized businesses, where people with high-end technical skills may not be affordable, an awareness of the damage complexity inflicts on users is spreading to the enterprise market as well. Commoditization pressures make it necessary for the IT industry to reduce skills requirements as well as service and maintenance costs.” (Lucinio Santos – UXmatters)

XProc: An XML Pipeline Language

Added on 7 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“An XML Pipeline specifies a sequence of operations to be performed on zero or more XML documents. Pipelines generally accept zero or more XML documents as input and produce zero or more XML documents as output. Pipelines are made up of simple steps which perform atomic operations on XML documents and constructs similar to conditionals, iteration, and exception handlers which control which steps are executed.” (W3C)

Information Design Patterns

Added on 6 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“A sophisticated online collection of about 48 design patterns that describe distinct methods for the display of interactive information graphics, their active behavior as well as the forms of user interaction with them.” (Niceone) – courtesy of informationaesthetics

User Experience Evaluation in Nokia PDF Logo

Added on 5 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“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.)

Bill Morggridge’s keynote presentation

Added on 5 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Bill Morggridge delivered a really cool talk during the Service Design Symposium, hosted by the CIID. It’s really interesting the way he explains how design has evolved over time. Just after graduation, back in the 60’s, he thought he would spend his whole life designing kettles and washing machines. But as technology evolved, and life became more complex, he realised that designers needed to design the systems that actually surround a product. For example, how to make a train journey more delightful? Designers need to not only worry about making a comfy seat, they actually need to think about the whole customer journey, and how systems, processes, people impact a customer’s experience. Welcome to the amazing world of service design!” (Erick Mohr – intuire)

User Experience Factor 1: State Glue

Added on 5 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“I finally got myself an iPhone, … and it is reeeaaally nice! Perhaps not the best phone on the market but using it is a real joy. One of the great things about it is that the interaction feels so smooth and sweet. It made me wonder what makes it so nice. One of the things I want to show you in this article is how this actually works in practice and what makes it such a good user experience.” (Martijn van Welie – Thoughts on Interaction Design)

User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Added on 2 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.” (Mike Padilla – Digital Web Magazine)

The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research

Added on 2 May 2008 Peter Bogaards
“The focus of this paper is interaction design research aimed at supporting interaction design practice. The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice. Based on a comparison between the notion of complexity in science and in design, it is argued that science is not the best place to look for approaches and methods on how to approach design complexity. Instead, the case is made that any attempt by interaction design research to produce outcomes aimed at supporting design practice must be grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of design practice. Such an understanding can be developed into a well-grounded and rich set of rigorous and disciplined design methods and techniques, appropriate to the needs and desires of practicing designers.” (Erik Stolterman – International Journal of Design) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken