All posts from
March 2010

Sustainable User Research

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“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)

There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett

Added on 21 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“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)

Invisible Revolution

Added on 19 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the story of Doug Engelbart, the man who invented much of the information environment we live in today – the computer mouse, word processing, email, hypertext and so on. In short: Interactive computing. This is his story, and the story of his fellow dreamers, thinkers, doers – revolutionaries – who changed our lives forever.” (Frode Hegland & Fleur Klijnsma)

How UX can get anything they want

Added on 18 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“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)

Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way

Added on 17 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“So many articles explain how to design interfaces, design graphics and deal with clients. But one step in the Web development process is often skipped over or forgotten altogether: content planning. Sometimes called information architecture, or IA planning, this step doesn’t find a home easily in many people’s workflow. But rushing on to programming and pushing pixels makes for content that looks shoehorned rather than fully integrated and will only require late-game revisions.” (Kristin Wemmer – Smashing Magazine)

The Guardian supplement on Service Design

Added on 15 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“We are happy to announce that the British newspaper The Guardian has released a ten page supplement on Service Design today, Monday, 15th of March! In co-operation with the Service Design Network The Guardian has produced a supplement themed on Service Design and Innovation in partnership with organisations from the Service Design and Innovation markets. Included are many interesting case studies and best practices with perceivable business impact but also enjoyable and easy understandable examples. 10 Pages, 350.000 copies… great stories! ” (Service Design Network) – courtesy of ronverweij

The Virtues of a UX Professional

Added on 11 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“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)

Can you mix Agile and UX?

Added on 11 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“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)

The Craft of Interaction Design

Added on 9 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I’ve been involved in developing what I would say is the craft of interaction design. A craft is a way of working that you develop entirely through experience without thinking about rationalizing it or systematizing it. And I believe that craft is essential to interaction design, and always will be. But I also believe that there could be ways of thinking about interaction design, ways of generalizing principles from experience and existing knowledge, just as in the twenties general principles about composition and graphic design were developed at the Bauhaus, or a new grammar of film was invented by Eisenstein and written about by Arnheim. These ways of thinking about practice make a platform in which people coming after us can build without them needing to invent everything from the start.” (Gillian Crampton-Smith 2007)