All posts from
February 2014

The battle for the body field

Content chunck and design. XML revival?

“Richer, more flexible designs can coexist with the demands of multichannel publishing; future design changes can sidestep the laborious process of scrubbing old content blobs; and simpler, streamlined tools can help editors and authors produce better content faster. By combining the best of XML and structured web content, we can make the body field safe for future generations.”

(Jeff Eaton ~ A List Apart)

Accreditation for UX Professionals?

Formal power entering the field of UX. Who’s to decided?

“Are educational institutions equipped to prepare UX designers for the workplace of the future as advances in technology outpace those in education? Should the UX community be pushing for levels of accreditation to verify that someone has the skills and education necessary to call himself or herself a UX designer? How can an employer ensure that a candidate meets their expectations for a role in user experience?”

(Chris R. Becker ~ UXmatters)

Architecting the connected world

Integration, synergy and connections of bits and atoms. A new design ecosystem with many options.

“We’re at a revolutionary information crossroads, one where our symbolic and physical worlds are coming together in an unprecedented way. Our temptation thus far has been to drive ahead with technology and to try to fit all the pieces together with the tried and true methods of literacy and engineering. Accepting that the shape of this new world is not the same as what we have known up until now does not mean we have to give up attempts to shape it to our common good.”

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

The architecture of information

It’s academic, so it must be European. Go Andreas, go!

“This paper maintains that in the epistemological shift from postmodernism to pseudo-modernism, technological, economic, social, and cultural elements of change have thoroughly transformed the scenario in which information architecture operated in the late 1990s and have eroded its channel-specific connotation as a website-only, inductive activity, opening the field up to contributions coming from the theory and practice of design and systems thinking, architecture, cognitive science, cultural studies and new media. The paper argues, through a thorough discussions of causes and effects and selected examples taken from the practice, that contemporary information architecture can be thus framed as a fundamentally multi-disciplinary sense-making cultural construct concerned with the structural integrity of meaning in complex, information-based cross-channel ecosystems.”

(Andreas Resmini a.k.a. @resmini)

Content planning: How to use UX research to uncover hidden needs

CS and UX in concert.

“Understanding how people think and what makes them tick is the common building block behind both creating content and designing experiences that matter to people. But before you dive into content planning or begin designing an experience, you have to understand what your audience finds meaningful. This is where UX research can provide insight to help inform content marketing efforts.”

(Caitlin Vlastakis Smith a.k.a. @caitvsmith ~ Content Marketing Institute)

The future of airline websites

A flying vision of the future.

“According to J.D. Power, eighty-seven percent of travelers used the Internet for the bulk of their travel planning in 2012, yet the online booking experience being offered by modern airlines is still stuck in the 90s. Inspired by the opportunity to bring progressive disruption to this huge marketplace, we reviewed all major airline websites, and graded them against design and usability criteria including: information architecture, interaction design and visual design. The results were disheartening. We believe that unless the airlines take drastic measures to improve their digital experiences, third-party sites like Kayak and Expedia will continue to eat into their profits. So we launched an experiment to explore, What if?”

(Fi)

There is no such thing as UX strategy

When people talk about it, there is such a thing by definition. Beauty, love, friendship, experts, you name it.

“2013 saw a lot of discussion around the topic of UX Strategy. In fact, there was at least one conference on the topic and a string of articles. However, all of this activity around a topic doesn’t actually mean it exists.”

(Jeff Gothelf a.k.a. @jboogie ~ Perception Is The Experience)

Towards a new information architecture: The rise and fall and rise of a necessary discipline

That’s why the byline of this stream is ‘Understanding by Design’.

“Taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, those are just tools. Metadata is just a material. Information Architecture is about making meaning out of piles of facts. Who cares how you do it, or in what medium? (…) Information Architects are in the understanding business. Clarity is their north star, and organizing and clarification are their tools. We may have a new tsunami of data. But we also have information architects ready to help. Let us never forget how much we need them.”

(Christina Wodtke a.k.a. @cwodtke)

Interacting in the global city

An expert speaks…

“In today’s global cities, public urban space is constituted in my different ways. Residents in the same neighborhood may have very diverse types of knowledge about their shared public space: The children know the neighborhood at ground level, the tech designer knows the Wi-Fi coverage at the cafes, the homeless know about the night fauna. How do these understandings of urban space affect our view, use, and design of technology?”

(Saskia Sassen a.k.a. @SaskiaSassen ~ Interaction14 videos)

The shift: UX designers as business consultants

Will they then become CX consultants?

“UX is a broad field and designers are increasingly playing a strategic role in many companies. Be that designer. Businesses are increasingly adopting user-centered approaches to create experiences, moving UX design to be one of the core activities driving the company strategy and operations. This is an incredibly valuable opportunity that we designers can take to step up and contribute to create the great experiences and services they envision, taking our vision, tools and understanding to a different level. But we need to learn the new skills to play at this table, a table that’s often speaking a different language with a lot of politics and different stakeholders. This talk will cover exactly these extra skills that are required to make this strategic jump: understanding the business needs, educating the client, understanding the hidden request, managing the various party involved in a project, defining the right process, understanding the internal impact and more.”

(Davide Casali a.k.a. @Folletto ~ Interaction14 videos)

Adopting a professional compass for information architecture

Sailing the volatile oceans of digital transformation, you need a compass, maps and a sense of direction.

“In this column, I’ll demonstrate that, with an IA compass in place, expressing the value that information architecture delivers to a business becomes clearer. The IA compass that I’ll describe is absent of theoretical and technical rhetoric and focuses on a greater good. This greater good is one that is most likely to resonate with our business and marketing colleagues. While it is important that they acquire a general understand of information architecture, they are more interested in how information architecture fits into their business model and delivers value.”

(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters)

The beginning of a beautiful friendship: Data and design in innovative citizen experiences

This time, the C is Citizen and not Customer. Citizens are entitled to great CXs too.

“The past decade has brought enormous and growing benefits to ordinary citizens through applications built on public data. Any release of data offers advantages to experts, such as developers and journalists, but there is a crucial common factor in the most successful open data applications for non-experts: excellent design. In fact, open data and citizen-centered design are natural partners, especially as the government 2.0 movement turns to improving service delivery and government interaction in tandem with transparency. It’s nearly impossible to design innovative citizen experiences without data, but that data will not reach its full potential without careful choices about how to aggregate, present, and enable interaction with it.”

(Cyd Harrell a.k.a. @cydharrell ~ Beyond Transparency)

Designing digital strategies: Cartography

Designing mission, vision, and strategy. Making decisions with intent is the essence of design.

“As digital products and services come to comprise an increasingly important part of our everyday life, the division between the digital and the physical begins to blur. We can, for instance, see a washing machine on TV, read reviews of it online, purchase it on our phone, and have it installed by our local shop-all without leaving our computer. The sum total of these processes functions as a single, continuous experience. Designers can more prudently frame the experiences they create by incorporating ecosystem thinking into their process.”

(Sofia Hussain ~ UX Booth)

Languaging reality, dialogue and interaction

Language, the most important instrument to communicate, interact and view the world.

“In his keynote, Klaus will distinguish four theories from the philosophy of language and elaborate on dialogical conceptions of how reality comes to be constructed. To him, languaging – the process of conversing in language – is a creative and fundamentally socio-cultural practice. Language does not merely describe, it creates realities in conversations and actions. Dialogical conceptions raise doubts in several common epistemological assumptions. Questioning them could open possibilities of seeing interaction design in a new way.”

(Klaus Krippendorff ~ Interaction14 videos)

Context-specific design in the cross-channel user experience

Design for the unique traits of each and every touchpoint.

“Emphasize and leverage each channel’s unique strengths to create usable and helpful context-specific experiences. (…) Incorporating helpful and usable context-specific elements creates an exceptional user experience in a world of competing channels, devices, and screen sizes. In order to focus design efforts, teams must understand the common tasks completed by users within each channel. This will help identify the best opportunities for creating channel-optimized experiences that will build user loyalty and differentiate the organization from competitors. In addition to being optimized for the channel, cross-channel experiences must be consistent, seamless and available.”

(Janelle Estes ~ Nielsen Norman Group)