All posts from
October 2017

Ideation in practice: How effective UX teams generate ideas

Many good ideas, far less good execution.

“Data from 257 UX professionals shows that quality UX ideas come from ideating early in the design cycle, drawing inspiration from user research, and working with a group. Many struggle with generating ideas because they lack time, managerial support, and a methodology for conducting effective ideation sessions.”

Aurora Harley a.k.a. /auroralharley | @aurorararara ~ Nielsen Norman Group

The role of storyboarding in UX design

Getting closer and closer to film making.

“To come up with a proper design, UX designers use a lot of different research techniques, such as contextual inquires, interviews and workshops. They summarize research findings into user stories and user flows and communicate their thinking and solutions to the teams with artifacts such as personas and wireframes. But somewhere in all of this, there are real people for whom the products are being designed for.”

Nick Babich a.k.a. /nbabich | @101babich ~ Smashing magazine

Building a UX Team: Change is the only constant

Design is team work.

“This journey is just beginning. There are many new areas of design to explore. As a father of a 2-year-old boy, I want to be responsible and contribute in a creative way, to ensure we gift a better world to our future. We can look beyond our immediate projects to explore the technical, social, material, and theoretical challenges of designing technology to support collaborative work and life activities.”

Moin Bhuiyan a.k.a. @bhuiyan_moin ~ UXPA magazine

A practical guide to improving web accessibility

It so obvious that for many it’s not.

“This article is intended to provide guidance on making library websites and other digital content accessible within the constraints of most organizations’ technological environments. Accessibility can mean different things depending on the context, but the focus in this article is on web accessibility, which the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) defines as “enabling people with disabilities to participate equally on the Web” (W3C, 2016). Many existing articles provide an overview of the big picture aspects of accessibility, including benefits to the organization (see Rowland, Mariger, Siegel & Whiting, 2010), legislation (see Fulton, 2011), statistics (see local census data), and general principles (see Quesenbery, 2014). The focus of this piece will be on specific best practices and guidelines, as well as their benefits for content creators, who frequently have limited access to edit digital content and cannot always apply recommended solutions that assume full control and access.”

Cynthia Ng a.k.a. /cynthiasng | @TheRealArty ~ Weave: Journal of Library User Experience (Volume 1 Issue 7)

The future of graphic and communication design

Design disciplines still relevant in the digital domain, even though there’re last century.

“To get a glimpse of the future of graphic and communication design, it’s not enough to think about new hardware, corporate needs, or visual trends. In the short term, digital design will move beyond screens to physical surfaces and augmented or artificial environments, and designers will occupy more positions where they are directing or consulting on larger and more complex systems of experience. Design is already less visual and more collaborative, and will continue along that trend. It’s not enough, though, to look five or ten years in the future. Will there be a Machine-Learning designer in 2050? Maybe. But in forty years, it’s just as likely that jobs will no longer exist, or at least not in a way that we would recognize them.”

Juliette Cezzar a.k.a. /juliette-cezzar | @juliettecezzar ~ Design Observer

The convergence of interaction design and architecture

Moving from the physical to the digital domain.

“The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is propelling us toward a world where an ever-increasing amount of our experiences are mediated by digital interactivity. As this trend continues, the task of designing our built environment will be as much about designing the interactive experiences that happen in that space as it will be about form, program, materiality and so on. The fields of interaction design and architecture will become one and the same, and we’ll need to work across disciplines and cultivate new skill sets to design new buildings.”

James Patten ~ DesignIntelligence

Human-centered design for machine learning

Always keep the human in mind, even when the mind is artificial.

“Machine learning (ML) is the science of helping computers discover patterns and relationships in data instead of being manually programmed. It’s a powerful tool for creating personalised and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars. But as more and more experiences are built with ML, it’s clear that UX’ers still have a lot to learn about how to make users feel in control of the technology, and not the other way round.”

Josh Lovejoy and Jess Holbrook ~ IoT for all