All posts from
October 2010

The IxD Library: A collection of materials related to interaction design

“(…) a collection of books, articles, and presentations of interest to interaction designers. It attempts to not be the definitive collection of every piece of content about interaction design, only the best and most influential. It is also strictly (as is possible) about interaction design and not usability, information architecture, visual design, human factors, or even general experience design, although certainly all of those fields affect and exist alongside interaction design in the field.” (About)

Visualisations in Service Design

“The thesis provides an academic basis on the use of visualisations in service design. It is concluded that it seems like the service design community currently sees services as being not-goods, a line of thought other service disciplines have discarded the last ten years and replaced with a view of services as the basis for all transactions. The analysis highlights areas where there is a need to improve the visualisations to more accurately represent services.” (Fabian Segelström)

Prototyping Theory: Understanding How Prototyping Practices Affect Design Results

“This research examines aspects of the creative process such iteration and comparison, two key strategies for discovering contextual design variables and their interrelationships. We found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping helps designers learn. Our experiments also indicate that creating and receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel— as opposed to serially — leads to more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall design performance. Most recently, we found that groups who produce and share multiple prototypes report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal information, share more features, and overall, reach a better consensus.” (Stanford HCI Group)

Inspiration Beyond the Lab

“Over the last ten years, both of us have read countless articles about innovation, entrepreneurship, and socially responsible ventures that change the world. The theme that appears to emerge time and time again is the importance of getting out of the office, visiting different cultures, looking outside the bubble we live in, and experiencing new adventures. But it wasn’t until a recent vacation in Costa Rica, where Bryan had the opportunity to see rural farm workers using cell phones to talk with other farm workers—people who appeared to be very poor—that he fully realized the importance of understanding the world beyond that which we encounter on a daily basis.” (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)

Aligning UX Issues’ Levels of Severity with Business Objectives

“Many of us in the field people now generally refer to as user experience have long used levels of severity as a means of indicating the criticality of a product’s or service’s usability issues to clients. Over the past several years, I’ve grown increasingly dissatisfied with the vague and somewhat solipsistic nature of the gradations UX professionals typically use to describe the severity of usability issues. High, medium, and low don’t begin to sufficiently explain the potential brand and business impacts usability issues can have.” (Paul J. Sherman ~ UXmatters)