“(..) our experts discuss how to write effective usability requirements and metrics for the redesign of a legacy public sector system.” – (Janet M. Six – UXmatters)

“The brutal fact is—we’re in a difficult economy. Every day, we hear about another company that’s laying off employees. Just yesterday, an article on Yahoo! News reported “Mass layoffs involving 50 or more workers increased sharply last year, and large cuts appear to be accelerating in 2009 at a furious pace. In fact, there were layoffs at Yahoo! itself in December. Letting people go is traumatic for everyone involved. It’s traumatic for the employees who are laid off, whose relationships to their livelihoods—not to mention their friends and colleagues—are abruptly severed. It’s painful to the remaining employees, whose friends and colleagues were so abruptly removed. Sometimes companies must make deep budget cuts to succeed, but it’s painful, and those of us who have been through layoffs before agree that it seems to get harder every time we do it.” – (Jim Nieters – UXmatters)

“While there are indeed some UX professionals who—by either personal inclination or circumstance—resemble the specialists and generalists Jared describes, in my opinion, the ideal employee to hire for your UX team is neither a specialist nor a generalist.” – (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)

“(…) customer experience is an organizational mindset. It’s not something a business buys, it’s something a business becomes. Customer experience refers to the totality of experience a customer has with a business, across all channels and touchpoints.” – Thnx for being one of your favs. (Peter Merholz – Harvard Business)

“This issue marks a quiet milestone for us: the beginning of our second year as editors in chief. Year one was marked by six quality issues, a new look and feel, a new website, a new team of contributors and advisors, a presence at more than two dozen premier conferences, and greatly renewed and expanded respect for the magazine. Our second year begins with a bang, with a very strong January+February issue and several additions to the interactions team.” (ACM Interactions Magazine)

“It’s an exhilarating time for the user experience community. Rising awareness of our value plus emerging technologies and transmedia trends have created conditions for a step change in our practice.” (Peter Morville)

“The next wave in Web site design is persuasive design, designing for persuasion, emotion, and trust. While usability is still a fundamental requirement for effective Web site design, it is no longer enough to design sites that are simply easy to navigate and understand so users can complete transactions. As business mandates for Web site design have grown more strategic, complex, and demanding of accountability, good usability has become the price of competitive entry. So, while usability is important, it is no longer the key differentiator it once was.” (Eric Schaffer – UXmatters)

“There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as experience design. One reason for this change in terminology is that it lets us talk about a specific target audience in terms that resonate with business stakeholders more than the generic term user—for example, customer experience, patient experience, or member experience. The other reason for using the term experience design rather than user experience design is that it recognizes the fact that most customer interactions are multifaceted and complex and include all aspects of a customer’s interaction with a company or other organizational entity, including its people, services, and products. Customer interactions encompass much more than the usability of a particular user interface. They include all of the social and emotional consequences of a customer’s interaction with an organization or brand, including trust, motivation, relationships, and value.” (Michael Hawley – UXmatters)

“User experience and its associated fields of expertise—such as usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user interface design—have expanded rapidly over the past decade to accommodate what seems like insatiable demand, as the world moves toward an increasingly digital existence.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

“Video games are often overlooked in the scope of usability testing simply because, in a broad sense, their raison d’etre is so different than that of a typical functional interface: fun, engagement, and immersion, rather than usability and efficiency. Players are supposed to get a feeling of satisfaction and control from the interface itself, and in that sense, interaction is both a means and an end. The novelty and whimsy of the design occasionally comes at the expense of usability, which isn’t always a bad thing—that said, video games still have interfaces in their own right, and designing one that is easy to-use and intuitive is critical for players to enjoy the game.” (Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte – Boxes and Arrows)

“How a person reacts to a Web site determines that user’s experience with the product and can determine a return visit. The usability of a Web site, which usually refers to the elegance, flow-of-content & clarity with which the site is designed, can ensure a positive user experience. User Experience (UX) is part of Business Exchange, suggested by Michael Herman. This topic contains 790 news and 1,139 blog items. Read updated news, blogs, and resources about User Experience (UX). Find user-submitted articles and comments on User Experience (UX) from like-minded professionals.” (Business Week Exchange) – courtesy of tvantongeren

Designing Technology Augmented Urban Playgrounds for Girls – “Recent technological developments have made it possible to apply experience design also in the field of highly interactive product design, an area where involvement of non-trivial technology traditionally made it impossible to implement quick design cycles. With the availability of modular sensor and actuator kits, designers are able to quickly build interactive prototypes and realize more design cycles. In this paper we present a design process that includes experience design for the design of interactive products. The design process was developed for a master level course in product design. In addition, we discuss several cases from this course, applying the process to designing engaging interactive urban playgrounds.” (Aadjan van der Helm et al.)

Modelling the Relationship Between Designer Intent and Consumer Experience – “The design literature contains many diagrammatic models that represent the relationship between how designers intend artefacts to be experienced and how they are subsequently experienced by consumers, users and other stakeholders. Despite the prevalence of such models, they remain largely disconnected from each other, both within and across design disciplines, and also disconnected from the models of communication whose basic structure they share. The existing models are therefore difficult to locate and useful conceptual developments are often overlooked. The consequences of this are that unnecessary effort is expended in developing representations that duplicate those that already exist or new models are developed from inappropriate foundations. To address such issues, this article reviews many of the existing models that can be found in the different disciplines that comprise the fields of communication and design. The most pertinent features of these models are extracted and synthesised into a generic communication-based model of design. This acts as both a guide to what the existing models emphasise and an integrated foundation from which future models might be developed.” (Nathan Crilly, Anja Maier, P John Clarkson – Int’l Journal of Design Dec.2008)

Whitney Hess writes: “I especially enjoyed the recap — I think you hit the nail on the head.” (Keith Instone – Experienceologist)

“User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone’s mind following a series of interactions between people, devices, and events – or any combination thereof. (…) A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances.” (Eric Reiss – FatDUX)

“The term ‘user experience’ or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it.” (Whitney Hess – Mashable)

“FoodUX is a collection of inspirational web gems for user experience designers from the gastronomic and culinary arts.” (Composing Cook)

“User experience is all the rage. First impressions, consistent quality, matching online with offline, all that good stuff. Every year the same design conferences are full of the same talks. The slides might get shinier each year, but it’s the same guys making the same comparisons.” (Des Traynor – Contrast) – courtesy of lucraak