All posts from
April 2012

Information Surfacing: Communicating through Design

Manipulate user engagement? Direct user behavior would be better.

“Information surfacing is to interaction designers what information hierarchy is to graphic designers. (…) Conceptual models are nothing new, but often become unintentionally obfuscated during the design processes. The design team, often dazed and confused, struggles to figure out why the product is now cluttered and unintuitive. A design thinking method I call ‘information surfacing’ helps to remedy this problem. Information surfacing involves the prioritization of UI elements with an intent to manipulate user engagement.”

(Ernest Volnyansky a.k.a. @ernestvo ~ UX Booth)

Capturing User Research

Anything you can capture from other people helps.

“It’s interesting to think of what the future might bring in information-capture technology for user research. In my dreams, an ideal tool would be on a tablet, reducing the massive amount of paper that I currently waste when capturing handwritten notes. It would allow me to view a discussion guide and add handwritten notes using a stylus. My notes would be synced with either an audio recording or a wireless video recording, which would make it easy to jump to any point in a recording that corresponds to particular notes. The application would then take my handwritten notes and automatically convert them to text that I could manipulate in a word processor. Do you know of any tools that would let me achieve this? If not, I can dream. In the meantime, I’ll be taking plenty of handwritten notes on paper and backing them up with audio or video recordings.”

(Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters)