“In a world where a focus on designing innovative, compelling, valuable, and engaging user experiences is becoming increasingly important, designers of user experiences endeavor to enhance and improve the way they work and achieve the desired outcome. As designers, to be truly innovative, we must open ourselves up to new ideas, surround ourselves with diverse inputs, and be willing to embark on a new journey—regardless of whether we know the destination. Actors and others who create theater would tell you this kind of mindset is part their everyday work culture. So, what can we learn from the way actors and other theatrical artists work that will help us be more innovative, too?” (Traci Lepore – UXmatters)

“Following the release of Aurora, a panel discussion about the project was hosted at UX Week by Leah Buley. The panelists included members of the Aurora team, Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs, and Jamais Cascio a futurist who worked with us at the beginning of the project. If you were unable to attend UX Week, you can see video of the discussion below in which the panelists discuss how the concepts shown in the video were identified, and what methods we used to bring them to life. The panelists also field some questions from Leah and the audience. Enjoy!” (Adaptive Path blog)

“I believe the key here is empathy. It’s not just about knowing what’s wrong with the product, it’s also about acknowledging that to users this is a serious issue, and about being motivated to fix that for them.” (Jasper van Kuijk – uselog)

“An experience designer must love and care about people and the world in which we all live. It’s his mission in the world to proudly spread love and happiness through his creations.” (Andrë Braz) – courtesy of katerutter

“Some of our presenters have posted slides for their main stage talks and/or their workshops. Here’s links to the slides that are currently available. All are in PDF format.” (UX Week – Adaptive Path)

“The showbiz approach to customer experience design: What theatre, film and stand-up comedy can teach us about impressing customers.” (Adam Lawrence)

“The common wisdom is that we now live in the age of information; the freedom and access we have to data is unprecedented in history; and the efficiency and convenience of online commerce, research, and communication has already transformed our lives for the better.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

“(…) aims to tap the collective expertise of the user experience community to develop a guide on how to manage UX teams. Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin – two seasoned user experience team managers – will be sharing their insights and facilitating the discussion as we create this guide.”

Proceedings and papers of the CHI 2008 workshop on April 5, 2008 in Florenze (Italy)

“The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described focused attention as ‘psychic energy’. Like energy in the traditional sense, no work can be done without it, and through work that energy is consumed. Most of us have experienced a mental/emotional state where all of our attention (or energy) is totally focused on an activity. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) named this state “flow,” based on how participants in his studies described the experience. In this state of consciousness, people often experience intense concentration and feelings of enjoyment, coupled with peak performance. Hours pass by in what seems like minutes. We tend to enter these states in environments with few interruptions, where our attention becomes focused by a challenge that we’re confident we can handle with our existing skills. Feedback is instantaneous, so we can always judge how close we are to accomplishing our task and reaching our goal. The importance of the task influences our level of motivation and perceptions of how difficult the task will be.” (Trevor van Gorp – Boxes and Arrows)

“(…) Phillip Toledano, a photographer from New York who takes stunning portraits of real people playing video games. The immersive nature of videogames can engage users into user experiences which can almost be described as extreme. Toledano’s portraits depict this rather clearly. He managed to capture the whole range of emotions: frustration, joy, fear, surprise, hatred…” (Pierre-Alexandre Lapointe – YuCentrik)

“Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team.” (Anirban Basu Mallik – UXmatters)

UXEM workshop in CHI’08 (April 6th, 2008 in Florence, Italy) – “The aim of the workshop is to transfer knowledge from practitioners to academics about challenges with putting UX evaluation into practice, and from academics to practitioners to inform and inspire practical UX work with research findings of UX evaluation methods. Participants will gain an overview of the current state of practical approaches, tools, and methods for UX evaluation, as well as insights into the importance of UX evaluation in product development. The main outcomes of the workshop are a model of different UX evaluation methods across product development process and a list of UX evaluation challenges in product development. ” (Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Virpi Roto, and Marc Hassenzahl)

Proceedings of the International Workshop (Reykjavik, Iceland June 18th 2008) – “The workshop VUUM brings together a group of experienced HCI researchers and practitioners to explore a long-standing research problem – the meaningfulness of measurable constructs and the measurability of nonmeasurable ones. One may argue that basically everything can be measured, but some things may be more ‘measurable’ than the others; how to estimate the threshold of measurability remains unclear. The sixteen interesting submissions in this volume touch upon the basic issue of the formal-empirical dichotomy. Many arguments can be boiled down to the fundamental problem that our understanding of how people think and feel is still rather limited, which is essentially inferred from people’s behaviours. Psycho-physiological and neuro-psychological data seem promising, but the issue of calibration and integration is a big hurdle to overcome. Nonetheless, we are convinced about the value, meaningfulness and usefulness of this research endeavour.” (Effie Law et al. – MAUSE COST Action 294)

“If the user experience practice in your company was weak before Agile, Agile development isn’t going to help things. If your user experience practice was strong before Agile, it’ll remain strong after Agile, and evolve to adapt.” (Jeff Patton – Agile Product Design) – courtesy of thehotstrudel

“Here’s my new quest: To dramatically increase the focus on customer experience within companies by getting everyone to understand that great customer experience is really good business.” (Bruce D. Temkin – Customer Experience Matters)

“How do you redesign the website for a venerable news brand with a distinct identity and a loyal readership? What’s more, how do you face challenges like the commoditization of online news, the rise of user-generated content, and other emerging technology trends, while still upholding journalistic standards? In this seminar, we will discuss the process we followed during the recent redesign of The New York Times, including research we conducted, forward-looking concepts we developed, and prototypes we created and refined.” (Karen McGrane and Kevin Kearney – Businesstobuttons)

“As the business value of design becomes clearer, creative managers building the next generation of products and services are confronted with an increasingly demanding set of challenges. MX brings thought leaders from IDEO, Google, The Mayo Clinic, Cisco, and many others, to show you what it takes to get great experiences out into the world. MX goes beyond typical design management discussions that remain focused on traditional concerns of print and brand, toward a new frontier of innovative products and service-oriented experiences.” (Adaptive Path)

“Over the past three decades of computer/human interaction, we’ve seen digital technology evolve from a curiosity to a convenience to an integral part of our everyday lives. For UX professionals, the demand for our skill sets and the opportunities to practice seem only to grow, whether we be designers or developers, usability specialists or information architects, working in fields as diverse as Web, mobile, desktop, and embedded software systems. The UX professions are at a stage that could very well be a tipping point—where the rapid rise of digital devices, services, and connectivity converge to create a massive need for UX professionals. The mobile space alone could generate demand that we can only begin to imagine.” (Jonathan Follett – UXmatters)

“Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.” (Joe Lamantia – UXmatters)