“(…) the European Thematic Network for the human-centered design of interactive technologies. Convivio supports and promotes the development of ‘convivial technologies’, ICT products, systems and services that enhance the quality of everyday life and human interaction.” (About Convivio) – congrats fabio!

“Carolyn Snyder’s Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces provides the only complete guide to paper prototyping. It teaches you everything you need to know to successfully do paper prototyping and offers many practical tips. However, only about a third of the book is actually about doing paper prototyping. The majority of the book’s content comprises a basic reference on usability testing. While some of the information on usability testing describes how to test paper prototypes, most of it is applicable to any type of usability testing. If you’re already an expert in usability testing, you may not find this information as useful, but Snyder has honed her approach to usability testing over her many years of experience as a usability professional and provides a wealth of practical information.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)

Proceedings from the Nordic Design Research Conference (May 29-31 2005, Copenhagen Denmark) – “Design is a restless field positioned as a productive practice in between conceiving and making. Design research is no less volatile, as it explores, explains and challenges what we know in and through design.” (About the conference)

“Mockup… The term itself brings to mind the duality inherent in this omnipresent design artifact. It’s both a direct representation of a product experience and a shallow portrayal of an interactive system at the same time. Perhaps the term originated with engineers or product managers intent on pointing out that the mockup was just that: a superficial representation that could never compare to the real product they had to build.” (Luke Wroblewski – UXmatters)

“Think about how you are going to structure things. What is important? What is not? What needs to be on every page? Depending on the scale of the project you might want to create a visual sitemap for your client. Preparing a sitemap is essential if you are reorganising content in any way.” (PingMag) – courtesy of kelake

“When putting together a design study, whether it is usability testing, field research, or focus group activity, it turns out that the most critical activity is recruiting the right participants.” – (Jared Spool – OK/Cancel)

“Planning is crucial if you want your user research efforts to be effective. You need to think about what information you need to gather, and why, before embarking on any research. Good planning, well communicated to the client or project, and followed by careful implementation will ensure your research is effective.” – (Daniel Szuc and Gerry Gaffney – Apogee)

“In fact, many of the changes went against what their user feedback seemed to suggest. In other words, in many ways the team deliberately did not listen to users.” (Kathy Sierra– Creating Passionate Users)

“(…) activity theory is always already part of user-centred design, and vice versa. They are part of the same tree: a mental or cybernetic species. Whether modelling users or activities, the models are systemic, relatively stable, quantifiable, hierarchical, discrete, and often predictive. More importantly, they make it difficult to imagine other ways of understanding.” (Anne Galloway – purselipsquarejaw)

“Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to provoke thought, discussion, and reconsideration of some of the fundamental principles of Human-Centered Design. These principles, I suggest, can be helpful, misleading, or wrong. At times, they might even be harmful. Activity-Centered Design is superior.” (Donald Norman)

How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes – “Collaboration Sessions are highly interactive meetings (or more accurately, work sessions) with representation from each discipline. These meetings address everything from strategic planning to the design of site sections and page details. For example, a team working on the Travel section of our site used this technique to brainstorm a new line of business and then used it to help design page details. This method is most helpful for redesigns, new features, and controversial or strategic sections of a site. Typically, an interaction designer or product manager leads the meeting at the beginning of the Design phase.” (Sasha Verhage – Boxes & Arrows)

“Most importantly, task-based segmentation puts your team in the right frame of mind for insightful design research that very probably will uncover that ‘killer product idea’.” (Indy Young – Adaptive Path)

“When I started working for the company in December 2002, the user interface department was growing fast. Instead of a small number of generalist Web designers, it was becoming a large collection of specialists, with titles such as information architect, visual designer, art director and producer. These new employees, each with their own specific backgrounds, brought with them a surprisingly wide array of new words for what they did, their own jargon. The department’s manager realized something had to be done before his team turned into a new Tower of Babel.” (Peter Boersma – ASIS&T Bulletin Feb/Mar 2005)

Book Excerpt – “Today companies want to infuse more user data into their processes. But if we analyze the ‘right’ way to do customer-centered design for any project we may be dismayed at the time and resources it takes. And, companies are also resistant to changing their own development processes. So what to do?” (Karen Holtzblatt et al. – ACM Ubiquity)

“(1) The brain is a complex adaptive system. (2) The brain is a social brain. (3) The search for meaning is innate. (4) The search for meaning occurs through ‘patterning’. (5) Emotions are critical to patterning. (6) Every brain simultaneously perceives and creates parts and wholes. (7) Learning involves both focused attention and peripheral perception. (8) Learning always involves conscious and unconscious processes. (9) We have at least two ways of organizing memory. (10) Learning is developmental. (11) Complex learning is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat. (12) Every brain is uniquely organized.” (Renate Nummela Caine and Geoffrey Caine – New Horizons for Learning) – courtesy of elearningpost

“But good design is a lot more than style. Good design includes substance: function, comfort, pleasure, safety, economy, environmental friendliness, and a lot more besides. A concept car should be an opportunity to explore all of these directions.” (Donald Norman) – courtesy of usability views

“(…) web developers seem reluctant to adopt methods and approaches from other disciplines that could reduce their problems. Particularly during the crucial initial phase of projects, we can benefit from emulating certain software engineering practices.” (Norm Carr and Tim Meehan – A List Apart) – courtesy of ui designer

“This paper introduces a lot of taxonomies to help understand different form-factors and mobile usage contexts. It is arguing for the application of a User Centered Design process for mobile devices, and presumably within IBM. They strongly differentiate the differences with Fully Mobile Wirelessly Connected (FMWC) devices. A number of examples of UCD activities are given. In particular the effects of context are shown with examples and the need for task-analysis that includes the surrounding activities is promoted.” (Mobile Community Design)

Presentation – “This show-and-tell session describes the results of combining three points of view: (1) It is useful to manage design projects as a collaborative work of “translating research into design. (2) It is useful to manage the design process not as a series of activities, but as a chain of milestone artifacts, each of which requires collaboration by the whole team to complete. (3) Collaboration is better, and therefore translation better accomplished, when the milestone documents are created in large-scale physical form using walls, paper, ink, tacks and glue, rather than digital form.” (Marc Rettig – about, with and for) – courtesy of louise ferguson

“(…) most of the conference presented a rather different story. Speakers from the business world offered their views on the role of design; designers shared cases in which they’d helped businesses; and even the presentations on design methods were squarely in ‘service’ of business innovation.” (Nico MacDonald – Usability News)