“After working on five books as an editor or co-author, Lou Rosenfeld became disenchanted with the traditional book publishing model. So, in late 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house that develops short, practical, useful books on user experience design. Rosenfeld Media published their first book, Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, in early 2008. I recently had the opportunity to interview Lou – along with Liz Danzico, Senior Development Editor at Rosenfeld Media – about starting a new publishing house and ‘eating their own dog food’.” (Joshua Kaufman – UXmatters)

Kate Rutter interviews Nathan Shedroff – “(…) I think Marketing was the big thing long before IT departments rose to the prominence they have. Most IT departments have a grip on senior management that is not healthy, simply because most senior managers don’t understand enough of the details of IT to disagree, haggle, and know when they’re being snowed. However, EVERYONE is a designer, so everyone thinks that they know enough to override design decisions, budgets, and processes. Organizations, however, are discovering that they aren’t managing the design development process well enough and are listening more and judging a little less.” (Adaptive Path)

“You know, I aspire to become the Steve Jobs of university presidents. Seriously, though, I envision RISD as the Apple brand in the university world.” (Steven Heller – Voice)

“Visual organization is the deliberate prioritization of meaning within a visual design. It’s the process of applying the principles behind perception – how we make sense of what we see – to illuminate relationships between content and actions.” (WebGuild)

“I really enjoyed this chat. If we did The Believer-style keywords for it, they would read: adaptive cruise control, ubiquitous computing, human plus machine, ‘user experience’, ‘affordances;, asking the right questions, coupling design with operations, busting down silos, TiVo has never made any money, Palm, many reasons for the Newton’s failure, boss as an absolute dictator, Henry Dreyfuss and John Deere, design evolving from craft to profession, systems thinking, “T-shaped people,” observing the world, water bottle caps. Sound interesting? Take a listen!” (Adaptive Path) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken

An Interview with Dan Saffer – “We aren’t human-computer engineers, usability professionals, information architects, or industrial or graphic designers, even though we have a lot in common with all of those groups. We’re professional designers, not engineers or researchers or testers, and what we design is behavior – how systems behave in response to human action. The combination of interaction and design really set us apart from what existed.” (Chris Baum – Boxes and Arrows)

“Adaptive Path, that rascally little South Park user experience studio at the center of all things web 2.0, celebrated it’s sixth year in existence with a retro prom party. Last year, we had to find out what the meaning of Adaptive Path was? This year, we channel our inner VC and get the answers that any potential sugar daddy might ask.” (Blip.tv)

“If anyone knows a thing or two about designing for human-computer interaction, it’s Don Norman, professor at Northwestern University, author of ‘The Design of Future Things’, and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.” (C|Net News)

“In the following video segment, Bill answers my questions: what takes to be a great User Experience Designer? What are the necessary skills or area of skills? Is it good to be a design generalist? And design opportunities at Microsoft for recent graduates. It’s great to get a design guru like him’s view on these things.” (Canadian User Experience)

“There are very, very few projects where an IA can do all of the work; we have to work together with other user experience practitioners!” (Jan Jursa)

Interview with Howard Rheingold – “I agree with Benkler that there’s a third form of production along with the market and the firm, that’s emerging around common-space peer production, and that we don’t understand a great deal about it yet. I would not dismiss it. But neither do I think we really know whether you can do it with things other than producing code or a knowledge repository online. What can’t you do with it? We don’t really know yet.” (Scott Rosenberg – AssignmentZero)

An Interview with Meredith Davis – “The relationship between the visual representation of data and the human sensing of change is not an area with which design has much experience.” (Steven Heller – AIGA Voice)

“In our practice, the thing that has become a barrier for us in delivering successful projects is how our clients and the different stakeholders on a project work together.” (Peter Merholz – AP blog)

“What do Aristotelian poetics have to do with human-computer interaction? Quite a bit, if you think about it like Brenda Laurel does. From an early interest in interactive theatre and interactive fiction, through falling in love with computer graphics and learning to code, and a long career designing computer games, Brenda has kept the cultural aspects of HCI at the forefront of her work. In this interview she talks about her work designing games for girls, and about working with others who inspired her (including Timothy Leary).” (Tamara Adlin – UX Pioneers)

“Emotional design is good design. That’s what I learned at the Milan Furniture Fair. It had plenty of bad design, but there are some beautiful, beautiful things there. The reason they are well designed is not because there’s a lot of splash. It’s because they’ve been thought through and they connect with us on an emotional level in addition to a functional level.” (Tamara Adlin – UX Pioneers) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken

“Categories are now applied to content when it is extracted from the infospace, whereas historically curators of information (such as librarians) have invested immense energy in organizing information on its way in.” (Yahoo! User Interface Blog)

Brandon Schauer interviews Clement Mok – “I see the opportunity to marry Experience Modeling with the smarts of the Information Architect to structure a powerful model in the user’s world, whether that be through cell phones or tagging systems. The opportunity is to create a model that ties together the deep ethnographic understanding of the user, the system engineering understanding, and the brand/marketing understanding. Tying these three things together is quite powerful.” (IIT Institute of Design Strategy Conference 2006)

Interview by Steve Portigal – “Experience design is an approach to design, and you can use that approach in pretty much any discipline—graphic design or industrial design or interaction design, or retail design. It says the dimensions of experience are wider than what those disciplines normally take into account. And if you think wider—through time, multiple senses and other dimensions – then you can create a more meaningful experience.” (Core77 Design Blog)

“Language is also a domain of user experience. Shouldn’t the words we use to describe a tool be as carefully crafted as the tool itself?” (Régine Debatty – WeMakeMoneyNotArt) – courtesy of markvanderbeeken

“My general interest (and without a doubt, my current position at Google) is pushing me to think about scale more often. Small scales and large scales. One of the components of my talk at Web Directions North will deal with scale of impact. Using our skills and innovation in technology and design to impact the greater good. The web reaches approximately one billion people now, and that number grows every day. Put one page or one application out there for the world to see, and, given the right factors, millions of people could potentially see it, experience it, or be inspired by it within days. How can we use that power for good? Can we harness our collective knowledge and skills to impact and make a difference both locally and in remote parts of the world?” (John Allsopp – Digital Web Magazine)