All posts about
Information design

Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. (source: Wikipedia)

The Psychology of Content Design

Added on 16 July 2012 Peter Bogaards
Content and Design are partners in a happy marriage.

“The way that we shape content is absolutely paramount to the success of our ventures on the web. Beyond this, the way that we design and craft user experiences should forever be considered not only important, but an integrated part of our content. With that said, this article is not an attempt to pit content against design. Instead, I will simply make the claim that good design is an integrated part of the content.”

(Jonathan Cutrell ~ Tuts Plus)

Ideo’s Tim Brown

Added on 9 July 2012 Peter Bogaards
Getting a Tim Brown brain dump.

“He points to a problem in how we’ve thought about design, trained designers, and have practiced design. The great thing about designing simple products is that you can know almost everything about them: who made them, who they’re for, how they were produced, etc. But as products get more complicated, it gets harder even for a team of designers to really understand what’s going on. They get so complicated that there are lots of places design can fail.”

(David Weinberger ~ Too big to know)

Basic Information Design Concepts PDF Logo

Added on 7 June 2012 Peter Bogaards
Great introduction set from Europe on Information Design, the relevant but forgotten design field.

“Information design has theoretical as well as practical components and information designers need to have theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills. In order to perform sound reflections and make a qualified reflection regarding theory and practice, we need concepts both to structure our thoughts, and to decribe them verbally.”

(Rune Petterson ~ IIID)

Modelling Information Experiences

Added on 30 May 2012 Peter Bogaards
Next up, design models for content experiences.

“Information architecture relates to science as its models draw on insights and theories of cognition. And its models relate to art as they aim to create a meaningful experience. Both aspects are important. Only if IA models manage to blend science and art can they touch the head and the heart.”

(Kai Weber a.k.a. @techwriterkai ~ Kai’s Tech Writing Blog)

Shift Happens

Added on 24 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
Always been a great admirer of Thomas Kuhn.

“The problems that dominated Kuhn’s life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn’t brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm. Our culture has inappropriately latched on to Kuhn’s message as an exaltation of the rootless disconnection of our ideas from the world because we were ready to hear that knowledge is not apart from our knowing of it. But he and we have not yet come to a new shared understanding about what it means to live truthfully as humans.”

(David Weinberger a.k.a. @dweinberger)

Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems

Added on 13 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
A well-thought through post on experience and systems. By IBM, who else.

“But, socio-technical systems are oriented toward people and services. While product excellence and competitive costs are also important to services, they are not enough. The service sector is oriented toward consumption, that is, toward people, who are the consumers of services. Therefore, an overriding design objective for good socio-technical, service oriented systems has to be a positive user experience. Ease of use, intuitive interfaces and good overall customer service must be key objectives for a well designed system.”

(Irving Wladawsky-Berger)

Information Surfacing: Communicating through Design

Added on 3 April 2012 Peter Bogaards
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)

Design Factory: Creative Design with Industrial Approach

Added on 20 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Disclosure: I work at Informaat (The Netherlands).

“Digital strategy touches every fiber of your operation. We firmly believe that it takes a systematic approach that’s woven into your organizational fabric to deliver compelling customer experiences – an approach comprising a recurring cycle of ideation, design, development and evaluation (…) The Design Factory is a methodical, structured design capability that comprises people, processes and tools. It infuses your organization with the creativity, agility and efficiency to successfully execute your digital strategy – from conceiving innovative solutions through to using robust and scalable approaches for design and specification.”

(About Informaat, experience design)

What is Design Thinking and Why Do Entrepreneurs Need to Care?

Added on 19 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Design thinking is thinking about conducting the business. For some…

“Design thinking seems to be all the rage in business and entrepreneurship circles, but the momentum has been building for over 13 years. (…) The beauty of design thinking is that it works best under conditions of uncertainty-when you really don’t know where to start. It’s a methodology that is very messy in practice but does allow for a systematic approach to creating new opportunities. In my opinion, every entrepreneur is a designer.”

(Heidi Neck ~ BostInno) – courtesy of jameskalbach

Cognition & The Intrinsic User Experience

Added on 7 March 2012 Peter Bogaards
Knowing some of the inner workings of people, design for transformational experiences is the goal.

“Over the past few years there’s been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems like everyone’s just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way. The reason every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.”

(Jordan Julien a.k.a. @thejordanrules ~ UX Magazine)

What we talk about when we talk about sketching

Added on 7 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
Always draw when explaining something.

“The sketching is highly generative, best done in a focused session under the influence of caffeine and noise-canceling headphones. My brain has a tendency to free associate and sometimes these sessions spiral out of control, but they are useful activities to conduct at the beginning of a project, as I begin identifying (and blowing past) the tacit boundaries of a space.”

(Dane Petersen a.k.a. @thegreatsunra ~ Adaptive Path)

Structure First. Content Always.

Added on 7 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
First, second, third… sequential thinking. Think parallel, synergy, dialectic.

“There is an emerging fallacy in our industry recently. The idea that you cannot create good design without knowing your content. (…) You can create good experiences without knowing the content. What you can’t do is create good experiences without knowing your content structure. What is your content made from, not what your content is. An important distinction.”

(Mark Boulton a.k.a. @markboulton)

Information Overload Is Not Unique To Digital Age

Added on 5 February 2012 Peter Bogaards
I’m always thrilled when new historical connections are found.

“It is a constant complaint: We’re choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair – this is not a new condition. It’s been part of the human experience for centuries.”

(Ann Blair ~ NPR)

Affective Computing, Affective Interaction and Technology as Experience

Added on 13 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
Technology moving into the fibers of our emotions.

“As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, social computing, art, and tools for creativity, we have had to consider e.g. what constitutes an experience, how to deal with users’ emotions, and understanding aesthetic practices and experiences. Here I will provide a short account of why in particular emotion became one such important strand of work in our field.”

(Kristina Höök a.k.a. @ProfessorHook ~ Interaction-Design.org)

Yet Another Technology Cusp: Confusion, Vendor Wars, and Opportunities

Added on 10 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
The Technium does its work.

“There is a technological revolution in the air, not because new principles and technologies have been discovered, but because so many past technologies have simultaneously reached a state of maturity that they can be incorporated into everyday technology. These cusps in technology produce new opportunities, but until the marketplace settles down, they also deliver considerable confusion and chaos. Each of the changes discussed here seems relatively minor and inconsequential, but taken as a whole, they pose considerable problems and potential risks which I summarize in the afterward.”

(Donald A. Norman a.k.a. @jnd1er)

Design for Innovation

Added on 4 January 2012 Peter Bogaards
The brightness of Design as the silver bullet is increasing.

“The purpose of this design plan is to bring the design elements of the strategy together in one place and to communicate these as widely as possible across design, industry, government and education. The Design Council’s aim is to provide a useful strategic framework for organisations, institutions and individual businesses with an interest in making design-led innovation happen. Design can help organisations transform their performance, from business product innovation, to the commercialisation of science and the delivery of public services. That is why design forms an integral part of the Government’s plans for innovation and growth and features strongly in our Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth.”

(Fred Zimny)