All posts from
April 2013

The WorldWideWeb is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative

Added on 30 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
A proposal which changed the world forever.

“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest in user support, resource discovery and collaborative work areas.”

(CERN)

Service Design: Designing cross-channel service experiences

Added on 26 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Listen to the thoughts, insights and ideas on service design of this illustrious trio.

“We’ll start with a brief introduction to Service Design and cover a case study from an insurance company to demonstrate its key service design ideas and methods. Gjensidige – Norway’s biggest insurance company – is a large organization dealing with an abstract “product” of insurance and financial services, but with outcomes that deeply affect people at critical moments in their lives. Building on Gjensidige’s strategy to be completely customer centered, we will show you how a service blueprint can bring together groups – like Marketing and IT – that are often misaligned and at times at war. We’ll also show you how cross-channel experience prototyping with customers and staff made two organizations (insurance and banking) feel like one to the customer.”

(Lavrans Løvlie, Andy Polaine, and Ben Reason ~ O’Reilly)

Steampunking interaction design

Added on 25 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
A kind of out-of-place and out-of-time way of designing.

“Contemporary Steampunk culture owes much to the Internet and the communities of practice that have arisen online to share techniques, post tutorials, debate principles, and generally create an ecosystem that supports and celebrates improvisation, exploration, experimentation, and bricolage.”

(Joshua Tanenbaum, Audrey Desjardins, Karen Tanenbaum ~ ACM Interactions May/June 2013)

Cognitive overhead, or why your product isn’t as simple as you think

Added on 22 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Designing for simplicity versus complexity is a zero-sum game.

“Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully.”

(David Lieb a.k.a. @dflieb ~ TechCrunch)

Core questions for service design

Added on 22 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
The theatre metaphor really helps our thinking on services.

“These questions continue to apply in prototyping, building and all the way to delivery of new services and on into business as usual. I’ve used these same questions in co-design sessions, putting them directly in the hands of participants as they work on being a part of their own products and services.”

(Stephen Collins ~ acidlabs)

5 reasons why kids need special user research

Added on 19 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Identified a new type of experience: KX (‘Kids Experience’).

“Kids are special. There is no doubt about that. But it does not explain why they also need special attention when it comes to user research. Here are 5 reasons why we need to start doing user testing with kids and why it’s very different than what we know from testing adults.”

(Sabina Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ UXkids)

Selling user experience

Added on 15 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Some would label this ‘evidence-based’.

“If our community is going to actively sell the concept of user experience, we need hard data. Yet at every conference I attend, I hear about new tools, new techniques, new processes – but almost never about unassailable scientific results that demonstrate replicability. Sadly, most of the case stories I hear are merely glorified advertising. Moreover, like touching the hot iron as a child, learning about what doesn’t work is also important.”

(Eric Reiss a.k.a. @elreiss ~ FatDUX)

Keynote: Health behavior change and beyond: The health benefits of success experiences

Added on 15 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Great and important topic, the patient experience.

“While sustained behavior and lifestyle changes can lead to improved health outcomes, there may be another pathway to health. Namely, the increased sense of confidence and control that comes from being successful at changing ANY behavior, even if the change is not sustained, can also improve health outcomes. Learn how to avoid the tyranny of prescribed failure experiences. Learn how to prescribe success by aligning with passions, discovering patient-generated solutions, and celebrating success.”

(David Sobel ~ Healthcare Experience Design 2013, the presentation videos)

To Dwell Is To Garden: An empathic approach to employee experience design

Added on 15 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
CX being driven by the EX.

“The methods of experience design uniquely situate experience designers to address employee disengagement in textured ways. By uncovering the root behavioral causes and co-producing solutions with employees, experience designers can create the right kind of resources, which empower organizations to own their desired change over time. As employee experience design is not a tidy activity, this article will focus less on concrete deliverables or step-by-step how-to-recommendations. Instead, a working framework is presented to assist experience designers in thinking through their own process-centric approaches and solutions.”

(Liana Dragoman a.k.a. @ldragoman ~ UX Magazine)

The content strategy order of operations or ‘Dear Aunt Sally Can Perform Magic’

Added on 12 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Mnemonic device for the UX disciplines: LATCH re-visited.

“The reason I ask has to do with something you may remember from early math classes when coursework introduced multiple types of operations. There needed to be a set of rules in place so that little Jimmy would know whether or not multiplication happens before or after subtraction. Enter the Order of Operations, a.k.a ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally’.”

(Tom Harari a.k.a. @tomharari ~ iAcquire)

40 years of icons: The evolution of the modern computer interface

Added on 12 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Knowing where you come from is a great foundation.

“The greatest thing is that this has sort of become a sandbox for the mind. It’s a medium, not just a calculating machine. We now have this thing in front of us, it allows us to paint, to write, to listen to music. It mesmerizes us and steals our lives. I think it is the invention of the last 500 years. And we’re waiting to see what it does next.”

(Jesse Hicks a.k.a. @jessehixxx ~ The Verge)

Transitional interfaces

Added on 11 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Animation conveys meaning.

“Folks keep throwing around the word ‘delight’ when referring to animation and cute interactions. Cool and great for those guys. Guess what though? Animation can be used functionally too. It’s not just an embellished detail. Animation leverages an overlooked dimension – time! An invisible fabric which stitches space together. You don’t have to be a math dork to understand this. Let’s take a look at some simple ideas.”

(Pasquale D’Silva ~ Medium Design/UX)

Design process is a myth

Added on 11 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Just a set of steps a.k.a. process in ‘hinzeit’.

“Typically, when a product design falls flat, people want to insert a design process to fix the bad design. However (…), a one-size-fits-all design process does not exist. Don’t force a process on a design team that everyone must follow. Every designer has their own unique way of solving design problems. Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a better design process.”

(Marc Hemeon a.k.a. @hemeon ~ Medium Design/UX)

The management of experience design

Added on 10 April 2013 Peter Bogaards
Finding what you’re looking for implies you know what to look for.

“The customer experience, in all its different facets, is moving into the focus of innovation management.(…) Firms have started abandoning the transactional and product-oriented view of customer relationships. Instead, they have begun to design and align all their interactions with a customer so that consistent experience cycles evolve. Practical product functions are becoming a commodity and the communicational functions as well as the symbolic environment are becoming competitive differentiators. The product is thus merely one element to develop and is to be embedded in an equally important environment of consistent and meaningful customer touch points. The key challenge for firms is to handle the dispersion of responsibilities for relevant touch points across functions and business partners. Therefore, this research explores the means for an effective management of the experience design activities.”

(Torsten Lars Brodt)