All posts from
January 2014

Living service worlds

Added on 30 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Design for open systems is a major wicked problem.

“The living nature of digital services means that designers can’t design a service experience. They can only design the resources for people to bring the experience to life for themselves. Designers create affordances that help people know where to start, what to do and when to do it. Services come to life through people: how they read the resources, their personal history and their context. Shelley Evenson and Tom Schneider see two trends placing new demands on designing for service. The first is what they call living services—the meteoric rise of mobile, embedded sensors and more natural interfaces. The second, just starting to appear as a broader global trend, is described in the book The Intention Economy – the shift from sellers finding buyers to buyers finding sellers. In this video, Evenson and Schneider describe how they think these trends will influence designing for living services.”

(Shelley Evenson and Tom Schneider ~ Videos from the 2013 AIGA Design Conference)

Elements of learning experience design

Added on 30 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Jesse’s booklet still vital for instructional and learning purposes.

“Designing learning experiences must be treated in the same way as designing any sort of user experience. Learners, just like users, have needs that can only be solved through proper research, design, validation, and iteration. Anyone involved in adult learning should step outside the limiting boundaries of curriculum design in order to account for the learner’s entire experience. By only focusing on content, we are missing out and what actually makes up a person’s reality, including the environment in which they’re learning in, and their lives before and after the learning experience. By taking each of these elements into consideration, any teacher or instructional designer can start begin to think beyond those limitations, and look to create immersive and enriching experiences for their learners. This not only allows us to be more effective at teaching others, but it also establishes a higher level of quality that people should expect of a learning experiences.”

(Andre Plaut a.k.a. @andreplaut ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Connecting the customer experience

Added on 28 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Unfortunately, no design or Design mentioned whatsoever.

“Enabling great customer experiences and optimizing them across all touchpoints in a consistent and human, customer-centric way leads to marketing success. And it increasingly revolves around personal, personalized and at the same time connected and integrated approaches.”

(J-P De Clerck a.k.a. @conversionation ~ i-Scoop)

Architecture, design, and the connected environment

Added on 26 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Great description of the distinction between architecture and design. Like InfoArch and InfoDesign, human cognition and perception.

“(…) user interface design is a context-specific articulation of an underlying information architecture. It is this IA foundation that provides the direct connection to how human end users find value in content and functionality. The articulatory relationship between architecture and design creates consistency of experience across diverse platforms and works to communicate the underlying information model we’ve asked users to adopt. (…) This basic distinction between architecture and design is not a new idea, but in the context of the Internet of Things, it does present architects and designers with a new set of challenges. In order to get a better sense of what has changed in this new context, it’s worth taking a closer look at how the traditional model of IA for the web works.”

(Andy Fitzgerald a.k.a. @andybywire & +Andy Fitzgerald ~ O’Reilly)

The lingering seduction of the page

Added on 24 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Great to see IA being pushed around like mad.

“(…) I examined the articulatory relationship between information architecture and user interface design, and argued that the tools that have emerged for constructing information architectures on the web will only get us so far when it comes to expressing information systems across diverse digital touchpoints. Here, I want to look more closely at these traditional web IA tools in order to tease out two things: (1) ways we might rely on these tools moving forward, and (2) ways we’ll need to expand our approach to IA as we design for the Internet of Things.”

(Andy Fitzgerald a.k.a. @andybywire & +Andy Fitzgerald ~ O’Reilly)

How Google unified its products with a humble index card

Added on 24 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Think Paul Otlet and his index cards. His mission and operations align so well with those of Google.

“We’ve actually tapped into one of the oldest pieces of graphic and information design around — business cards, calling cards, greeting cards, playing cards. They all have the same embodiments because they’re all reflections of a similar set of design problems.”

(Mark Wilson a.k.a. @ctrlzee ~ Fast Co.design)

Cards: The next paradigm?

Added on 24 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Leave out the question mark for me.

“I’m going to share some insights about cards and explore other design patterns that those drawn to cards might want to consider. (…) The cards design pattern is a smart solution for the modern web, which is both dynamic and responsive. However, the pattern has its limitations and might be a challenge to adopt when designing for a complex interface.”

(Wan-Ting Huang ~ EchoUser) ~ courtesy of @iatv

Quantifying customer experience

Added on 20 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Changing from UX design to CX design, just like that.

“Customer experience stretches far to either side of any interaction that can be influenced by UX interface design. Customer experience starts from when a customer first hears about what your product or service is promising, gets cemented by how well you deliver on that promise (through UI and well beyond), and gets broadcast in social media to influence the impressions of future customers. As such, it’s important to have a way to quantify the effects of the customer experience improvement that stretch beyond Google Analytics and screen attention heat mapping.”

(CX design 2013)

The future of UI and the dream of the ’90s

Added on 20 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Dream on…

“In this dream from the 90’s, we hoped for a world where every computer knows us personally. We would wake up to them, have them around us all day, and they would be the last thing we interact with before we go to sleep. They would predict our needs and wants and all interfaces would feel as natural as having a conversation with a friend. Technology would become our primary means (or only means) of communication and we would form relationships with these objects that take care of us.”

(Helen Tran a.k.a. @tranhelen)

How design patterns and component libraries create unity and context

Added on 16 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Thinking about design as a system of patterns, components and elements.

“Components and patterns help create unity. They help create a consistent context. (…) Components and pattern libraries can lead to greater similarity across elements. That can be a good thing at times in that it creates a unified context. Similarity doesn’t have to mean sameness though. There can still be more than enough variety to keep things unique.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ vanseo design)

Why Her will dominate UI design even more than Minority Report

Added on 16 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Movies as a source of inspiration and vision visualization for HCI designers has grown more mature.

“It’s not just that Her, the movie, is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is more people-centric. The world Her shows us is one where the technology has receded, or one where we’ve let it recede. It’s a world where the pendulum has swung back the other direction, where a new generation of designers and consumers have accepted that technology isn’t an end in itself – that it’s the real world we’re supposed to be connecting to.”

(Kyle VanHemert a.k.a. @kvanhemert Wired)

The UX Runway: Integrating UX, Lean and Scrum cohesively

Added on 14 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Getting software development more into the world of people through UX design.

“This article looks to educate developers, project managers, ScrumMasters, Product Owners, product managers, UX team members, and the like about a way to integrate UX and Lean UX principles into Scrum projects. It specifically focuses on the Scrum framework so familiarity with that method is encouraged when implementing the UX Runway practice detailed here and understanding this article. There are some concepts from SAFe but an in depth understanding is not critical. Though I have based the UX Runway around Scrum, it does have reusable concepts and could be readily adapted for other Agile methods.”

(Natalie Warnert a.k.a. @nataliewarnert and Thomson Reuters ~ Methods and Tools)

The science behind fonts (and how they make you feel)

Added on 10 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Typography as the integral part of UX design.

“The right font choice along with the absence of sidebars and popups makes everything feel easier and better to read. Websites like Medium, Signal vs. Noise, and Zen Habits are like yoga studios for content. Their presentation of content puts me at peace while reading, allowing me to fully focus on the stories without distraction.”

(Mikael Cho a.k.a. @mikaelcho ~ The Next Web)

Slow change interaction design

Added on 8 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
Slow food for thought for UX and interaction designers.

“This article sketches a theory of slow change interaction design as one way for designers to approach what we will call slow change problems-attitudinal and behavioral changes that are difficult to initiate and sustain. Those familiar with persuasive technology will recognize the theoretical foundation atop which slow change interaction design sits. The domains of persuasive technology and captology cast sufficiently wide nets as “the research, design, and analysis of interactive computing technologies created with the purpose of changing people’s attitudes or behaviors or both without using coercion or deception”. Slow change falls within these domains. Importantly, however, slow change offers evolved perspectives, or lenses, on the ethical, temporal, and systemic thinking that any designer should adopt in slow change interaction design practice.”

(Martin Siegel and Jordan Beck ~ ACM Interactions Magazine Jan-Feb 2014)

The Lean UX Manifesto: Principle-driven design

Added on 8 January 2014 Peter Bogaards
As there is always UX, there’s always lean or fat UX.

“This all boils down to something that I call principle-driven design. As stated, some lean UX is better than none, so applying these principles as best you can will get you to customer-validated, early-failure solutions more quickly. Rules are for practitioners who don’t really know the value of this process, while principles demand wisdom and maturity. By allowing principles to drive you, you’ll find that you’re more nimble, reasonable and collaborative. Really, you’ll be overall better at getting to solutions. This will please your stakeholders and team members from other disciplines (development, visual design, business, etc.).”

(Anthony Viviano a.k.a. @anthviv ~ Smashing Magazine)