All posts from
January 2010

Designing & Selecting Components for UIs

“I have to think much harder when I design rich interfaces than when I work on standard Web applicaitons. With the increased flexibility and more components comes a higher risk of making silly mistakes. If I use a component inappropriately, users can’t figure out what to do, even though the components may look cool. The purpose of this article is to help designers avoid mistakes and to help them choose (or design) components based on sound, fundamental principles of usability.” (Donna Maurer Spencer – UX Magazine)

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)

What is Interaction Design History?

“The interesting question is how you separate interaction design history from the broader scope of computing history in general. User experience people gravitate toward the history of hypertext and the graphical user interface, direct manipulation and the mouse, the work done at Xerox PARC and Apple. In many people’s minds, that era marks the dividing line between the ‘us’ of the design community and the ‘them’ of computer scientists, because it’s the point at which it became possible to draw a separation between the work that was done to serve the needs of the machine, and the work that was done solely to meet the needs of the user.” (Karen McGrane)

Research Is Communication

“In actuality, the reason so many small software businesses fail so quickly is because they don’t understand that their knowledge of how to build a product is not sufficient to build success. The true vision of a multidisciplinary team of engineers, designers, product people, marketers, business people, and researchers is foreign to them. If some of the people creating software don’t understand our role, it’s not surprising consumers don’t.” (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClainUXmatters)

Controls are Choices

“Designing Devices is a series of articles on how and why to create devices, written by me, Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio. This is a place for essays that I hope to eventually collect into a book in 2011. Like drafts, the articles will be constantly evolving, hopefully with your feedback.” (Dan Saffer – Designing Devices)