An interview with Donald A. Norman – “One of the interesting things about the iPod, one of the things that people love most about it is not the technology; it’s the box it comes in. That’s because Apple really understood that the iPod was not about the iPod; it was about the entire experience: the way they design their stores, the box it comes in, the iTunes website, the ease of getting the user back and forth.” (Mark Zachry – RedNova News) – courtesy of usernomics

“To design a usable website, designers need to think how the user is going to use their website rather than present him with what they want him to see.” (IT Conversations) – courtesy of usabilitynews

“(…) findability is only one of many qualities that can be designed into an information architecture, along with accessibility, credibility, desirability, and usability. Sometimes, it’s more important for a product to be attractive. Sometimes, companies rely more on push than pull. But as the Internet increasingly puts the customer in control, making it easy for your people to find your products and your support content becomes a top priority. And as ubiquitous computing propels us toward a massive, networked transmedia environment, findability will only become more important and challenging.” (infonomia)

An Interview with Eric A. Meyer – “They’ve got to do millions upon millions upon millions probably an hour if not a day. And a typical auction page — just the HTML document — is somewhere in the vicinity of 40-45KB. It’s all built with font tags, tables and spacer gifs.” (David Poteet – User Interface 10 Conference)

A conversation between GK VanPatter and David Kelley (Co-Founder of the Stanford Design Institute) – “(…) businesses today are looking for ways to become more innovative. Corporations are expecting that revenues will come primarily from new innovations, rather than simply sprucing up existing products and services. What we’ve learned from companies is that they’re looking for students to be able to come out and help them with their innovation strategy. Our goal at the d.school is to train students to be innovators.” (NextD Journal 7.3)

“David Moore talks to information architecture expert Louis Rosenfeld about the problems with search features, why CMS Silver Bullets don’t work, and why information architects need to be better at horsetrading.” (iQ Content)

“I dream of harmony between the things in our life and the social, emotional, and experiential parts of our lives. Artifacts are not just about making us work better: they are about living better, about enjoying life more, and about spreading these benefits to everyone, everywhere.” (Christina Li – uiGarden)

“Evil design is perpetrated by people who are deliberately doing the wrong thing, and this harms everyone. Nielsen cites pop-up windows as an example. Users now expect pop-ups to be unwanted ads, and close them without looking at them. As a result, good designers can no longer use pop-up windows even when they would be a good solution.” (Jack Schofield – Guardian Unlimited)

Interview with Julie Lasky – Editor-In-Chief of I.D. Magazine “Names, please. I know it’s discomfiting to supply them, but that’s the only way you’ll help me understand the dimension you find lacking.” (GK VanPatter – NextD)

“The learning curve to develop for standards is very high and demands that people constantly learn. The sheer volume of knowledge required to work this way is humbling, and I am challenged every single day by it. I think that’s why it’s so interesting for many developers.” (Joshua Porter – User Interface 10 Conference)

“Although many may refer to this field as ‘information design’, Tufte, (…) has come to prefer the name ‘analytic design’. That name reflects Tufte’s focus on visual displays that serve as evidence.” (Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls – Technical Communication Quaterly) – courtesy of kottke

“In April 2004, Boxes and Arrows sent a set of questions to Steve Krug for an interview to be published in the June edition. What we didn’t know at the time was that Steve is a notoriously slow writer, and easily distracted. Eleven months later, this turned up.” (Boxes and Arrows)

“I interviewed John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing to get the ‘how-to’ on corporate blogging and referral marketing.” (Rok Hrastnik – Marketing Studies Net) – courtesy of theotherblog

“A very interesting project. Computer scientists don’t always try to change people’s social behavior.” (ACM Ubiquity)

“I had an epiphany at about twenty years of age, a true momentary epiphany. It had nothing to do with making things understandable for the world. It had to do with my own ignorance. Everything comes from that terrifying moment, that milli-second, that terrifying moment of utter truth that I understood that I understood nothing. Understanding what it is like not to understand is the one thing that touches every part of my life, Even at those times when I am engaged in fun, games, frivolity, glitzy stuff and making a fool of myself it always comes from that moment, the moment when I am an empty bucket.” (GK VanPatter – NextD Journal 6.1)

“When you watch a lot of people use web sites (which is what usability experts do), you realize that even minor things that are left unclear or ambiguous often lead users astray and keep them from succeeding at whatever they’re trying to do on the site.” (Management Consulting News) – courtesy of webword

An interview with John Zapolski, national AIGA board member and expert in the design of human-centered products, systems, strategies, and decision-making structures. – “(…) a very senior person in the organization, often the CEO, implicitly ‘gets’ design, and uses those biases to orient the activities of the corporation. Steve Jobs is probably the most obviously example. While Jobs may not consider himself a designer, I don’t think he can talk about Apple for more than five minutes within mentioning design. His passion gets operationalized within the company in a number of ways: in who the company hires and promotes (‘great product people’ instead of ‘sales guys’), in which projects it chooses to invest in, in how the company talks about itself publicly. And its a self-reinforcing cycle.” (Institute of Design Strategy Conference)

“I think the sky’s the limit. That’s the beauty of working at Microsoft Research. We have a generous budget to create or purchase the kinds of equipment we need, and the beauty of working here is that we have some of the best minds in the business. (…) Well, I’ll tell you that information is going to follow you around and have some understanding of your context — that’s going to be there in the not-so-distant future.” (Mary Czerwinski – ACM Ubiquity)

GK VanPatter interviews Lorraine Justice – “I was also frustrated with the universities and the corporations in the US. I worked in both for many years and the structure and atmosphere was not inclusive for design. People were protecting their own turf on all accounts and didn’t have room for the new guy (design). Many of us in the design profession spent every day promoting design through our work and other venues, but people are loathe to give up what little power and security they perceived they would lose if they made design important. I did see improvement over the last twenty years, but what alarmed and amazed me is that the Chinese government understood design and all its implications.” (NextD Journal 5.2)

A conversation with Liz Sanders and GK VanPatter – “So much of what is talked about today under the name of co-designing or human-centered innovation is still based on the expert-driven model. Informed ethnography is just not enough to support human-centered innovation. Participatory design practices together with an attitude adjustment are needed. Experts design for people. In the future we will be designing and innovating with people, not just for them.” (NextD Journal)