All posts about
Technology

Computer Screens Getting Bigger

In the end, high quality screens will have more social impact than faster CPU cycles, improved bandwidth or cheaper storage. Think Retina Displays and beyond.

“Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design.”

(Jakob Nielsen ~ Alertbox)

Responsive web design: A project-management perspective

The silver bullet is not as silver as you think it is.

“Reading blogs out there, you will notice that every attempt to fix a responsive design process is still very experimental: there are as many offered ways as there are blog articles about it! Progress is being made, but nothing is really set in stone at the moment. Knowing that, the most important thing right now is to make sure you ask the right questions at the start of each project, make the right choices, and jump into experimentation yourself with a maximum amount of pragmatism. If you find a good idea to make all of these challenges smoother, please write about it and share your discoveries on the web!”

(Rudy Rigot ~ Dev.Opera) ~ courtesy of luctiemessen

Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems

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)

The UX Community Needs to Start Paying Attention to Android

Technology has always been a great driver of UX, closed or open.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research recently about mobile design patterns and UX best practices for smartphone and tablet devices for both iOS and Android platforms. One thing has stood out more than anything else during this process: no one is talking about Android.”

(Catriona Cornett a.k.a. @inspireUX ~ inspireUX)

Mobile First: What Does It Mean?

It can mean many things. Depending of who asks.

“Many companies caught on to the mobile-first trend awhile back. Google surfaced their mobile-first strategy in 2010. As you’ve probably guessed from the name of this approach to site design, mobile first means designing an online experience for mobile before designing it for the desktop Web-or any other device. In the past, when users’ focus was on the desktop Web, mobile design was an afterthought. But today, more people are using their mobile devices for online shopping and social networking than ever before, and most companies are designing for mobile. Mobile first requires a new approach to planning, UX design, and development that puts handheld devices at the forefront of both strategy and implementation. The digital landscape has changed, and companies have realized that consumers are now accessing more content on their mobile devices than anywhere else.”

(Riley Graham a.k.a. @lrileygraham ~ UXmatters)

Disruptive Innovation

Or how UX and CX can be disruptive. Love the comments.

“A disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Although the term disruptive technology is widely used, disruptive innovation seems a more appropriate term in many contexts since few technologies are intrinsically disruptive; rather, it is the business model that the technology enables that creates the disruptive impact.”

(Clayton M. Christensen a.k.a. @claychristensen ~ Interaction-Design.org)

The User Experience Integration Matrix: Integrating UX into the Product Backlog

As long as we see UX projects as software engineering projects and not the other way around, the plus and minus sides of the magnet will not connect.

“Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design and user experience in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog. While both agile and UX methods share some best practices-like iteration and defining requirements based on stories about users-agile and UX methods evolved for different purposes, supporting different values. Agile methods were developed without consideration for UX best practices. Early agile pioneers were working on in-house IT projects (custom software) or enterprise software.”

(Jon Innes ~ Boxes and Arrows) courtesy of janjursa

The difference between a UX Designer and UI Developer

DTDT (again): Interface is part of the object and experience is part of the subject, be it for design or development purposes.

“UX Designers focus on the structure and layout of content, navigation and how users interact with them. (…) UI Developers focus on the way the functionality is displayed and the fine detail of how users interact with the interface.”

(Ben Melbourne a.k.a. @benmelb ~ as in the city)

The Perfect Paragraph

Or, what a paragraph can do for you.

“In this article, I’d like to reacquaint you with the humble workhorse of communication that is the paragraph. Paragraphs are everywhere. In fact, at the high risk of stating the obvious, you are reading one now. Despite their ubiquity, we frequently neglect their presentation. This is a mistake. Here, we’ll refer to some time-honored typesetting conventions, with an emphasis on readability, and offer guidance on adapting them effectively for devices and screens.”

(Heydon Pickering a.k.a. @heydonworks ~ Smashing Magazine)

The Future is Native

After the Age of Aquarius (source: Hair, the musical), we’re now entering the Age of User Experience.

“(…) as pervasive and unstoppable as its progress may seem, the web can still be lost if we don’t temper ideological extremisms that preach ‘the one web’ above all else, including pragmatism and user experience. In this (no doubt rather controversial) session, Aral Balkan will outline the essential role of user experience in our age and demonstrate how the web must embrace user experience if it is to compete with native. Flawed ‘native is laserdisc’ analogies will be shattered as Aral demonstrates how, in the Age of User Experience, the only possible future is a native one where focused, optimised, and expertly-crafted experiences empower, delight, and thrill users.”

(Aral Balkan a.k.a. @aral ~ Fronteers 2011 videos)
courtesy of ronderksen

How Responsive Web Design becomes Responsive Web Publishing

I guess, content is becoming as fluid as possible.

“The last few years have been a good time to be a web designer. After a decade of making do with the aging technologies, methods and assumptions that gave birth to mainstream web publishing, designers are starting to trade the tiresome challenge of controlling the user experience for a few more interesting ones.”

(Chris Palmieri a.k.a. @cpalmieri ~ AQWorks)

The Interaction Design of APIs

Great to see UX disciplines applied to geek technology.

“Alex Payne explores the interaction design of APIs, particularly through the lens of the speaker’s experience evolving the popular Twitter API. The speaker argues for the notion of a “humane” API”, one derived from simplicity, “explorability” and consistency. Alex Payne is API Lead at Twitter, Inc., a communications service used by millions to share short messages.”

(Stanford University)

Why Separate Mobile & Desktop Web Pages?

So, there is much more involved with the languages of the Web than meets the eye.

“As use of mobile devices continues to skyrocket across the globe, we’re seeing more ways to tackle the challenge of creating great Web experiences across multiple devices. But which approach is right for any given project? In an effort to help answer that question, I’ve compiled the reasons we opted to use a dual (separate mobile and desktop) template system to build our start-up.”

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

What I Bring to UX From Computer Science

As a designer, you must know the materials you’re working with: computational and connected data, information and content.

“Human-Computer Interaction has strong roots in Computer Science, and user experience design is almost exclusively a technology-focused practice. How much does UX design share with its engineering-focused sibling? I’m going to share some thoughts about my experiences from making the transition from software engineering to UX, and how my past career has made an influence in my roles as a user experience designer today.”

(Boon Chew a.k.a. @boonych ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)