All posts from
September 2010

Mobile HCI 2010 Tutorials

Added on 12 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“After more than 10 years of Mobile HCI, providing an overview of the state of the art becomes more and more challenging. During the tutorial days of Mobile HCI 2008 & 2009, a number of well-known researchers in Mobile HCI gave overviews of the state of the art and cover many of the relevant topics. The tutorials also introduced the must read papers in this domain. The audience varied and included new students starting a PhD in Mobile HCI, practitioners wanting a quick survey of the state of the art and educators wishing to get an overview of Mobile HCI for their own teaching.” (Enrico Rukzio) – courtesy of Wolf Noeding

The auteur theory of design

Added on 9 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Why is it that some projects never rise to the level of the talent of those who made it? It’s oft said regarding good work that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But sometimes the whole is less than the sum of its parts—a company or team comprised of good people, but yet which produces work that isn’t good. In his session, John Gruber will explain his theory to explain how this happens—in both directions—based on the longstanding collaborative art of filmmaking. Learn how to recognise when a project is doomed to mediocrity, and, more importantly, how best to achieve collaborative success.” (John Gruber ~ dConstruct 2010)

Quality Assurance as Applied to User Experience Design

Added on 8 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Of course verifying the integrity of the user experience is the role of the UX and design teams. While this may be true, many do not approach verifying all elements of a user experience with the same rigor as technical QA. This is in part because of easily made assumptions that once a design is near finalized or in development that it’s already been finalized from a UX standpoint. However, there are many elements of the user experience that need to be reviewed at this stage of the development process.” (Catriona Cornett ~ inspireUX)

On defining UX

Added on 7 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Information architects, interaction designers, researchers, academics. They are all UX professionals and not necessarily involved in the broad process, but are a cog in the machine. (…) Just like the debate about whether designers should be able to write HTML, this discussion is just not as black and white as every one is making out. There’s a whole lot of grey in there.” (Mark Boulton)

Strategic Content Management

Added on 7 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The rise of content strategy is dealing the content management industry a huge kick up the backside. In the web’s Wild West era, the CMS was run by the IT department—or sometimes a lone webmaster who knew HTML—so CMS choices were based on features, price, and cultural fit, rather than web or content strategy. It was the classic IT drill: selection committees, feature matrices, and business lunches with men wearing neckties.” (Jonathan Kahn ~ A List Apart)

Why I think Ryan Carson doesn’t believe in UX Professionals, and why I do

Added on 6 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I think the reason Ryan thinks that ‘UX professional’ is a bullshit job title designed to ‘over-charge naive clients’ is because he’s never actually been in the position to need one. If you look at Ryans’ background, he worked for agencies in the late nineties and early noughties when the field of user experience was still in it’s infancy. As such I suspect that he’s never worked with a team of dedicated UX people.” (Andy Budd)

No knowledge but through information

Added on 6 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“This article argues for the following: (1) Information is a thing to be handled and controlled; knowledge is not. (2) Knowledge can be managed only indirectly, through the management of information. (3) Personal knowledge management is, therefore, best regarded as a subset of personal information management — but a very useful subset addressing important issues that otherwise might be overlooked.” (William Jones ~ First Monday 15.9)

Three Reasons Why Persuasive Design Isn’t Enough to Influence Change

Added on 6 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“To accomplish the good intentions of persuasive design, we need to do more than design to get people to act. We need to create content that influences people’s thinking in a positive way, motivates them to act, and makes acting easier. As the UX design industry pays more attention to content, we’ll be better prepared to influence what people do and think—and have a real chance at making the world a better place, online and off.” (Coleen Jones ~ UXmatters)

UX design framework: Interaction

Added on 5 September 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Undoubtedly, interaction design is a design discipline that has become a defining element of UX. Though the preceding two quotes assert the alignment with a user’s behaviour they do so here in relation to their interaction (the person and the artifact). In other words, it is the behaviour of the object in relation to the user. The following principles reassert this notion that many interaction design issues are born out of preconceptions of what a user expects to be able to do with the interface they are presented with.” (User Pathways)