All posts about
User experience

User experience is about how a person feels about using a product, system or service. (source: Wikipedia)

Communities of Practice: Optimizing Internal Knowledge Sharing

Added on 2 November 2009 Peter Bogaards
“An intranet has the potential to unify a corporate culture, emphasize core company values, and develop a sense of community among employees, in addition to its basic function of providing access to documents and procedural information. Unfortunately, some intranets have simply grown organically, as collections of disjointed Web sites for different departments or document repositories for particular workgroups.” (Michael Hawley – UXmatters)

Science and Design

Added on 30 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“But as the world grows more complex, more interconnected, with the underlying infrastructure less and less visible, hidden inside electronic and optical mechanisms, conveyed as all-powerful yet invisible information and knowledge, design more than ever needs a body of reliable, verifiable procedures. Science is the systematic method of building a reliable, verifiable, repeatable, and generalizable body of knowledge. Science is not a body of facts: it is a process. Design is the deliberate shaping of the environment in ways that satisfy individual and societal needs. Scientific methods can inform design. Designers can create a science of design.” (Donald A. Norman – IASDR09)

On Authenticity

Added on 29 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Calling something ‘authentic’ may connote original, traditional, indigenous, old, rare, the real thing, or in some crucial way a better example of its category. We use the term today as a messy amalgam of its twin roots: the art historian’s validation of an object and the philosopher’s valuing of the true self. While the concept of authenticity is employed in vague and subjective ways, we want to believe that an item’s authenticity is an absolutely determinable quality, an expectation that (as you’ll see) is not wholly realistic.” (Steve Portigal – ACM SIGCHI Interactions Magazine XVI.6)

Creating a Timeless User Experience

Added on 28 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the kinds of products, websites, and applications that survive and continue to be effective are those that that focus on the user experience. The digital world evolves continually, but we need to manage this by making sure we don’t leave the people who use our applications and websites in the dust. In this article we will explore creating a timeless user experience.” (Francisco Inchauste – Six Revisions)

UX Design Defined

Added on 19 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) User Experience Design is the practice of integrating user-centered design methods, collecting, interpreting and applying meticulous user research, process management for testing elements of a system independently in gradually increasing levels of fidelity, and integrating multiple symbolic systems (languages) to affect and influence users of an interactive system in a predictable and measured way, according to the user’s own criteria for success and happiness.” (Michael Cummings – UXDesign) – courtesy of thehotstrudel

25 tips for writing the user experience

Added on 16 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“While this article tends toward copywriting for the user experience as it pertains to the online world, you can apply it to other aspects of your brand as well. The most important point being to take the user, aka the person, reading what you’re writing into account from the get-go. Communicate for them first and foremost.” (Karen Goldfarb)

User Experience Engineering

Added on 16 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“User experience is becoming a more and more specialized area of expertise, says Mayhew. IT departments need to invest in multidisciplinary teams and then provide a work environment that fosters mutual respect, collaboration, and highly effective teamwork among them. Training can be one very effective way to support this agenda.” (Kurt Marko – Processor) – courtesy of usabilitynews

Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts

Added on 15 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users. An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.” (Alex Wright – NYT)

Interactions and Relationships

Added on 15 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) I was asked to do a session that addressed the everyday reality that managers of user experience live in, to reflect on that reality, and to share some approaches and ideas for that reality. I decided to focus largely on some of the interactions and relationships that comprise that everyday reality, but particularly those by managers intent on enabling experience research and design to play a strategic role in their companies.” (Richard Anderson – riander)

Experience Themes: How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products

Added on 6 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end). The story will be all the better for it because it all hangs together with a central idea that will give it greater impact and meaning.” (Cindy Chastain – Boxes and Arrows)

UX: An art in search of an methodology

Added on 5 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Perhaps like all forms of design, in practice user experience design rarely resembles the execution of a method, so much as it resembles the practice of an art. There is a heavy reliance on intuition, and when a designer does choose to refer to some piece of shared knowledge, that knowledge usually takes the form of a pattern (in the architectural sense) rather than empirical studies or a unified theoretical framework.” (Justin Tauber – Johnny Holland Magazine)

Can UX Be Agile?

Added on 5 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Traditional, heavyweight development methodologies can be very effective at solving well‑defined problems, where the person solving the problem has a clear understanding of the initial and goal states, the available options, and the constraints on the problem. At the opposite end of the spectrum are ill‑defined, so-called wicked problems. When it’s necessary to balance numerous, often‑conflicting factors, traditional development methodologies are much less effective.” (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)

The Ever-Evolving Arrow: Universal Control Symbol

Added on 5 October 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Symbols and icons can be both friend and enemy to UX designers. They can convey a great deal of information in the span of just a few pixels or utterly confuse users, depending on the context. The careful application of icons, however, can greatly enhance software, enabling quick access to a feature or function, using a minimal amount of screen real estate.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

Understanding the Experience of Social Network Sites

Added on 21 September 2009 Peter Bogaards
“This past year social media, and social network sites in particular, have reached new heights of popularity and adoption. It is no longer unusual for clients to request that designers “add Facebook” to their respective sites, mainly for the purpose of increased engagement and community building for their brand as a part of a greater social marketing strategy.” (Alla Zollers – Johnny Holland Magazine)