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Technology

Expanding the 3Cs framework for the IoT ecosystem: Multi-device experiences can be approached in very diverse ways in a connected world

IoT shaking up the UX design world.

“The Holy Grail lies in making that data actionable for people, preferably in an intelligent and seamless way, so that it actively helps them achieve their goals. Nest is a good example of a product experience that goes that extra mile — from just informing users with its data, to using that data behind the scenes to fuel the product behavior in an adaptive, contextual manner.”

(Jenn Webb a.k.a. @JennWebb ~ Radar O’Reilly)

Wearable technology: Designing the fashion of the future

Fashion gets enriched by information technology, therefore information design must be incorporated.

“A lot of people in the mobile industry were surprised that mobile happened as fast as it did. Once the iPhone was released, within two years we saw companies like Motorola and Nokia go from top of the mobile phone world into basically junk stock. And I think a lot of people see wearables as sort of that next big tidal wave. People don’t want what happened in mobile to happen again, so they’re interested in wearables.”

(Laura Kudia a.k.a. @laurakudia ~ Why this way)

Architecture, design, and the connected environment

Great description of the distinction between architecture and design. Like InfoArch and InfoDesign, human cognition and perception.

“(…) user interface design is a context-specific articulation of an underlying information architecture. It is this IA foundation that provides the direct connection to how human end users find value in content and functionality. The articulatory relationship between architecture and design creates consistency of experience across diverse platforms and works to communicate the underlying information model we’ve asked users to adopt. (…) This basic distinction between architecture and design is not a new idea, but in the context of the Internet of Things, it does present architects and designers with a new set of challenges. In order to get a better sense of what has changed in this new context, it’s worth taking a closer look at how the traditional model of IA for the web works.”

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

Why Her will dominate UI design even more than Minority Report

Movies as a source of inspiration and vision visualization for HCI designers has grown more mature.

“It’s not just that Her, the movie, is focused on people. It also shows us a future where technology is more people-centric. The world Her shows us is one where the technology has receded, or one where we’ve let it recede. It’s a world where the pendulum has swung back the other direction, where a new generation of designers and consumers have accepted that technology isn’t an end in itself – that it’s the real world we’re supposed to be connecting to.”

(Kyle VanHemert a.k.a. @kvanhemert Wired)

Surveying the big screen

And what about wall-size screens or future iTVs?

“(…) by embracing large screens, designers have the opportunity to work within a larger fold, presenting the user with more content simultaneously, lessen scrolling on longer pages, and create a richer, more expansive user experience. And by using the same practices we developed to adapt layouts to smaller screens and identifying some common patterns for large screens, we need not necessarily introduce extra cost or time to our projects.”

(Mike Pick a.k.a. @mikepick ~ A List Apart)

Responsive typography

Online typography, typefaces and fonts get mature, finally.

“With the chaos of different screen sizes and a new generation of web browsers, the design paradigms of layout and typography have shifted away from static layouts and system fonts to dynamic layouts and custom web fonts. But screens have not just changed in size but also in pixel density. In other words: maybe we do not just need responsive layouts, we might also need responsive typefaces.”

(Oliver Reichenstein a.k.a. @iA ~ Fronteers 2013)

Why Moore’s Law doesn’t influence design these days: Less is “Moore”

The end of a long-lasting law. New law will be based upon another perspective of technology: paralellism.

“Technology cycles have been on a tear for decades, with each chip iteration bringing more capabilities at lower prices. But less can be more in tech products-and design is the way to balance that factor.”

(Kevin C. Tofel ~ GigaOm)

Responsive web design: Relying too much on screen size

Hardware form factor only is just for one-dimensional designers.

“As people continue to go online using an ever increasing diversity of devices, responsive Web design has helped teams build amazing sites and apps that adapt their designs to smartphones, desktops, and everything in between. But many of these solutions are relying too much on a single factor to make important design decisions: screen size.”

(Luke Wroblewski a.k.a. @lukew)

Why cards are the future of the Web

Cards and tags, a magic duo. Ask Paul Otlet or Bill Atkinson.

“We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.”

(Inside Intercom)

Enabling new types of web user experiences

Trucks and cars. ‘Cars’ as the new driving experience on the information highway.

“The goal of this document is to rise above the current alphabet soup of technical standards and create some conjecture and possibly even motivation around how these standards can work together. The web can be so much more that what native apps can do. It can offer interactivity like water, pouring out of any device with nothing but a click. This is the super power of the web and isn’t appropriately appreciated as the key differentiator from native apps.”

(Scott Jenson a.k.a. @scottjenson ~ W3C Blog)

An answer to the pains of integrating Agile and UX

Tug of war between design and software engineering.

“The real challenge with the standard approach to integrating UX into Agile is fundamental to the staggered sprint model. The challenge is essentially that it is not wholly effective to try to be working ahead on the upcoming backlog items while at the same time supporting the development team, answering their questions, reviewing what they’re doing, and providing ongoing feedback/microiteration with them.”

(Ambrose Little a.k.a. @ambroselittle ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Investigating the state of UX and UI design in tech

System thinking for UX design is disrupting our field.

As web and industrial design begin to collide, UX and UI design are particularly ripe for disruption. ~ “The last major shift in design arguably occurred in the 90s as print design gave way to web design, and designers suddenly had to deal with web safe colors, alias fonts, and the information design challenges of a non-sequential medium. Two decades later, design is approaching a similarly monumental shift as designers move from designing for the web to designing for systems.”

(Jenn Webb a.k.a. @jennwebb ~ O’Reilly Radar)

“The music is not in the piano”

One of the giants on whom’s shoulders we stand.

Interview with computing pioneer Alan Kay ~ “One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea. All the companies I’ve worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent “agriculture” we could put the world back together and all would prosper.”

(David Greelish ~ Techland)

Should designers code?

Designers a.k.a. web designers and coders a.k.a. front-end coders.

“Last 15 years changed everything. Design is generally considered just as important as technology. User Experience Design became the key to success and it’s hard to imagine any grown-up company, without UXers on board. (…) We don’t need coding designers and designing coders – we need people who can communicate, respect and understand each other.”

(Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ UXPin)

We must remove publishing and content management concerns from authoring systems

We tend to forget how important the content infrastructure and technology is.

“They create a language to express publishing, content management, or reuse concerns, and then expect writers to write directly into what is really an internal content management format. Putting a graphical face over the markup does nothing to change this. The graphical interface only hides the syntax of the XML. It does nothing to change the fact that authors are being asked to create what should be the internal semantics of the publishing system — semantics they generally neither care about nor understand.”

(Mark Baker ~ EveryPageIsOne)

Agile is Wrong for UX

Can there be such a thing as software products?

“When something is wrong, it deviates from truth or fact. And I can say, with more confidence than ever, that traditional Agile software development methodologies (i.e. Scrum) are wrong for UX. In order to prove my case, I want to take you back to the inception of Agile (as I have read and experienced it) and its related software development methodologies. Along the way, we’ll point out the reasons these methodologies are incompatible with the field of User Experience Design.”

(Elisabeth Hubert a.k.a. @lishubert)