The Problem with Great Ideas
“Even great ideas have a limited shelf life. Bill Buxton has some stern words of advice for those looking to rest on their laurels.” (Business Week)
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User experience
Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences
“Good user experience isn’t just about good design. Learn how to create a positive user experience by being fast, open, engaged, surprising, polite, and, well… being yourself. Chock full of examples from the web and beyond, this talk is a practical introduction for developers who are passionate about user experience but may not have a background in design.” (Google I/O 2010)
From Industrial Design to User Experience: The heritage and evolving role of experience-driven design
“In this article, I want to share some thoughts about user experience design, UX practice today, and its parallels to industrial design practice. In efforts to continue the conversation about the true fit of UX as a growing specialization, I will attempt to position it within the landscape of established design disciplines. I will also to raise questions and considerations to entertain as UX emerges from its software-related origins and grows into strategic leadership across design disciplines. This is neither a manifesto nor a hard-lined stance on UX; rather just some ideas to help carry the collective discussion forward.” (Mark Baskinger – UX Magazine)
(Digital) Experience
“(…) if we start with the concept of experience as an event, the common historical lineage of these distinct understandings reveals itself. We are interested in this historical lineage, and would like to explain ‘digital experience’ as a historically developing category.” (Ronald E. Day and Hamid R. Ekbia ~ First Monday Volume 15, Number 6)
Lou Rosenfeld Talks Past, Present And Future Of User Experience Design
“I had the pleasure of interviewing Lou and, I have to admit, I was surprised by what I learned about my own role in the world of User Experience Design. We all contribute to the Big Tent of User Experience, and the future is very bright.” (Anthony Viviano ~ Three Minds)
The How, What, and Why framework for Experience Design
“Many companies have used the phrase “content is king” in recent years to talk about the importance of the material their sites ship. I heard this phrase first at Adobe Max a few years ago and have since noticed it in a number of places online. I think this is near to the mark but not quite there. In our framework here I’ve rephrased it as “The ‘why’ is king” because it puts the user at the center. Your content is pretty important to your site, but without users it’s kind of worthless. The reason your users are coming to your site is of preeminent importance – that should drive your content. Then your content can drive your presentation, etc. etc.” (R.J. Owen ~ Inside RIA)
Top 5 reasons why The Customer is Always Right is wrong
“The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.” (Alexander Kjerulf ~ Chief Happiness Officer)
Usability Ain’t Everything: A Response to Jakob Nielsen’s iPad Usability Study
“The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group’s April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We’re not usability engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we’re user experience designers. Experience is more than just usability.” (Fred Beecher ~ Johnny Holland)
Don Norman at IIT Design Research Conference 2010
“There is a great gulf between the research community and practice. Moreover, there is often a great gull between what designers do and what industry needs. We believe we know how to do design, but this belief is based more on faith than on data, and this belief reinforces the gulf between the research community and practice. I find that the things we take most for granted are seldom examined or questioned. As a result, it is often our most fundamental beliefs that are apt to be wrong. In this talk, deliberately intended to be controversial, I examine some of our most cherished beliefs. Examples: design research helps create breakthrough products; complexity is bad and simplicity good; there is a natural chain from research to product.” (Videos of the IIT Institute of Design)
The Elegant Architecture of the Customer Experience
“People are the most vital asset when designing and crafting a unique customer experience. Disciplined execution requires a robust set of processes to ensure efficiency and uniformity and keep pace with the burgeoning scalability requirements of the enterprise. Automated systems are vital to augment productivity of operations and to fulfill accuracy, efficiency, effectiveness, reliability and scalability needs.” (E-Commerce News)
Experience Design: Technology for all the right reasons
“The book clarifies what experience is, and highlights five crucial aspects and their implications for the design of interactive products. It provides reasons why we should bother with an experiential approach, and presents a detailed working model of experience useful for practitioners and academics alike. It closes with the particular challenges of an experiential approach for design. The book presents its view as a comprehensive, yet entertaining blend of scientific findings, design examples, and personal anecdotes.” (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)
Special Issue: Experience Design – Applications and Reflections
“Already last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and I edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and views in Human-Computer Interaction and Design.” (Marc Hassenzahl ~ Experience Design)
Designing User Experiences for Children
“Creating a great experience for Web site users should always take the users’ perspectives into consideration. While a user’s age can be a contributing factor in a design’s success for a particular user, demographic information should not trump design conventions. Then, why do UX designers struggle when creating Web sites for children?” (Traci Lepore ~ UXmatters)
Playful User Experiences
“As user experience designers, we tend to focus on getting users to the end of the journeys we’ve designed for them as quickly and effortlessly as possible. We try to take them from point A to point B in the shortest possible time. To me, it sometimes feels a little like we’re trying to get a child to quickly undergo a blood test before he notices that it hurts.” (Shira Gutgold ~ UXmatters)
The Anatomy of a Website
“Many people find it hard to picture a website as more than a bundle of content. This often makes explaining the mixture of languages used and the way everything comes together a difficult task. Because what makes up a website can be related and linked to the physiology of a human body, this article’s comparison should help clients and beginners alike understand the complex nature of a site’s creation and components.” (Alexander Dawson – Six Revisions)
Peter Merholz: The Want Interview
“The founder and president of Adaptive Path explains why they’re shifting away from ‘user experience’ and towards ‘experience design’. He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful ‘customer journeys’ by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such. He also outlines the history of personal computing in three ‘waves’ – and predicts the fourth.” (Want Magazine)
Design Patterns for Mobile Faceted Search: Part II
“This month’s column covers strategies for making people more aware of the filtering options that are available to them, as well as methods of improving transitions between the various states a user encounters in a search user interface.” (Greg Nudelman ~ UXmatters)
Achieving Design Focus: An Approach to Design Workshops
“Stakeholders with business, design, and technology viewpoints can pull products in different design directions—sometimes without knowing how the design work fits into an overall strategy. This can leave stakeholders feeling lost and unhappy. Creating a focus around design goals and asking and answering the hard design questions as a team is an effective way of coalescing a team around one design direction. At the same time, it can create a more optimal and fun working environment. In this article, we’ll describe a design workshop approach that can help you find that design focus.” (Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong – UXmatters)
Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology
“As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients’ products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology.” (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters)
Developers, UX is not UI, learn that and stop trivializing!
“And while this might be just my personal feeling, I am under impression that this kind of misunderstanding and trivialization of UX comes mostly from the developer-centric cultures like ones from Microsoft, Sun and IBM. Reason more for those companies to keep investing and educating all parties involved – you owe that to the customers and to the community of practice! Good things have been done so far – but obviously much more needs to be done.” (UX Passion)