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A Conversation with Don Norman and Jon Kolko on Trends in and the Relationships between Art, Business, and Design ~ “The ~2-hour exchange with and between Don and Jon and the audience was particularly engaging, thoughtful, rich, and delightful.”
(Richard Anderson a.k.a. @Riander)
“As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible. This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact. This little rant isn’t going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look.”
(Bret Victor a.k.a. @worrydream ~ WorryDream)
“This second installment of my series on hiring IA practitioners, therefore, expounds on the Boersma T-model by presenting a grid that can help hiring managers make informed recruiting decisions by giving them a clear picture of the key verticals of UX practice, while taking into account three potential levels of an IA practitioner’s professional experience.”
“In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen.”
(Ben Crothers a.k.a. @bencrothers ~ UXmatters)
“Many guidelines are similar for mobile and desktop design, but their mobile interpretation is much more unforgiving.”
“The relationship between client and designer does not always work out as smoothly as we would wish, despite the best efforts of all concerned. In this column, I’ll take a look at some of the questions that can arise on a project team – and how they should and should not be answered. I hope these raise a smile – and possibly help you tackle the next awkward client conversation you encounter.”
“In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design process? Do you need to convince stakeholders they should do user research? Do you try to get user experience thinking inserted earlier in the project lifecycle? Perhaps you need to sell yourself or your company? I certainly do. In fact, I find that there are many of these persuasive moments in the practice of user experience design. To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive.”
“(…) brands have to take the lead in innovation with a strong and consistent vision, and outlined several reasons why it’s actually detrimental to listen to your users. I have to admit, their examples are compelling, but are they correct? How do we reconcile their claims with what we know about the value of design research and user-centered design? (…) I surmise that the pioneers of innovation really did have inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and non-linear thinking on their side. These are traits I would consider a part of a tinkerers’ personality.”
(Peter Hui a.k.a. @hooooy ~ Teehan+Lax)
courtesy of nicoooooooon
“If IBM and Apple had a baby today, it would be called UX. Not very likely, perhaps, but you see the point: UX has a mixed heritage, drawing from engineering traditions as well as big-D design traditions. I would like to characterize briefly what I have come across as typical values in professional UX practices. Then talk about what I see as ‘designerly’ ways of working within interaction design. And then finally put the two together in order to highlight some opportunities for designerly ways of working in UX.”
“Without a style guide, high-fidelity mockups are the best way to communicate a new feature to developers. Unfortunately, though, pixel-perfect mockups almost always result in duplicative and wrongly abstracted code. Why? First, fidelity alone (without good annotations) does not communicate the abstractions you intend. Without knowing how the designers conceive of the design language, developers may make different modeling choices and make the code difficult to maintain. Second, higher fidelity can unintentionally signal novelty. Developers may think that you mocked up something in higher fidelity because it is a new UI component, and thus fail to reuse existing code. This slows down development and results in bloated, less maintainable code.”
(Jim Lindstrom a.k.a. @jimlindstrom ~ UX magazine)
“How does one end up in UX after counseling delinquent girls and brain injured individuals? This question is one I am asked frequently once people find out the somewhat unorthodox route I took towards my career in UX. With some explanation, the connection between the two areas becomes much clearer and there is greater understanding for how my background in psychology has laid the groundwork for a career in UX.”
(Lori W. Cavallucci a.k.a. @lwcavallucci ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)
“Seamless, cross-channel experiences are the way of the future, as technology fades into the background and the personal, physical, and social context determine the methods we use to interact with information.”
(Tyler Tate a.k.a. @tylertate ~ UXmatters)
“UX strategy is about building a rationale that guides user experience design efforts for the foreseeable future. This article provides an overview of the ingredients I consider essential for developing a successful UX strategy. If you want to enter the growing field of UX strategy or learn more about it, this overview points you in the right direction.”
(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)
“The fields of user experience and service design typically use storyboarding to sell design solutions. They do this by casting personas in stories, showing the benefits of those solutions. They often look quite polished and professional, and can be daunting to some in these fields to pick up a pencil and try it for themselves. But not only can you draw these scenario storyboards yourself to sell your solutions, you can also use them as a powerful method for devising those solutions in the first place. Storyboards are part of the intriguing world of sequential art, where images are arrayed together to visualise anything from a film to a television commercial, from a video game to a new building. They’re an effective communication device, bringing a vision to life in a way that anyone can grasp and engage with, before investing in producing the real thing.” ~ UPDATE: Added part 2 and part 3
(Ben Crothers a.k.a. @bencrothers ~ Johnny Holland Magazine)
“Wasn’t the Lean Start-up® simply a case of the Emperors New Clothes? A combination of User Experience Design and Agile development rebranded and repackaged for a new market. Also, what the hell was that ® about?”
(Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd ~ Blogography)
“User experience is a catch-all term that we use in the software industry to describe the overall feeling an end-user gets when using a product. The UX is the attitude that is triggered when using (and subsequently thinking about) a company and their products and services. Since your user’s attitude affects their future behavior toward your brand or product, a good user experience is vital to product adoption, engagement and loyalty.”
(Jurgen Altziebler a.k.a. ALT74 ~ Intridea)
“Welcome to the world of atoms. The human body is part of the physical world. It savors touch and feeling, movement and action. How else to explain the popularity of physical devices, of games that require gestures, and full-body movement? Want to develop for this new world? There are new rules for interacting with the world, new rules for the developers of systems.”
(Donald A. Norman ~ dConstruct 2011 videos)
“People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people’s wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer.”
(Beatriz Russo ~ Technical University Delft)
“What I also find disturbing is the lack of competency that some senior IA practitioners, with three to five years of experience, demonstrate when looking for employment. As a manager of an IA team, I have reviewed many resumes and portfolios of IA practitioners who don’t meet the basic requirements; whose design artifacts don’t reflect what I would expect of someone with senior-level experience. Does anyone know what junior or senior means? UX design managers, managers of information architecture, and IA practitioners should have a shared understanding of what makes a junior or senior IA practitioner a viable candidate.”
(Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters)
“It was never my childhood dream to become a usability professional. In kindergarten, I didn’t observe the other kids playing with their toys and think of ways to improve them. I didn’t yearn to perform heuristic evaluations, usability tests, and contextual inquiries. Don Norman wasn’t my Mister Rogers and Jakob Nielsen wasn’t my Captain Kangaroo.”
(Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters)