“(…) we’ll cover how moving into product management will change your focus, responsibilities, and challenges; what you will gain and lose leaving user experience work; and some ways to prepare yourself for the move.” (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum – Boxes and Arrows)

“User experience professionals are increasingly becoming interested in the business aspects of what they do. At their core, the user experience roles focus on understanding user needs and creating useful and easy-to-use products that address those needs.” (Jeff Lash and Chris Baum – Boxes and Arrows)

“Experts in the field of so-called human-computer interaction say good design like the YouTube interface is the exception, not the rule. For every slick Apple iPod, there are a dozen washing machines with a baffling array of buttons. And for every simple TiVo interface, there are umpteen TV remote controls that look like something out of NASA’s Mission Control.” (Stefanie Olsen – C|net news.com)

“User Experience is critical for the success of products. Consumers/end users have come to expect an integrated, easy to use experience of web sites and applications. No single individual can perform all tasks necessary for user experience and a team needs to be created that takes corporate politics into consideration and properly balances the goals of the individual team members.” (Mike Oren – Shiny Happy People)

“Readers of UXmatters probably know that user-centered design (UCD) and usability activities have the most positive impact when they’re carried out early in the ideation, design, and development cycle. Probably, many of you have worked in organizations that weren’t very experienced in UCD or usability engineering. You may have experienced something like the following the interchange with a development manager (…)” (Paul J. Sherman – UXmatters)

“A collective gasp was heard around the world following the January, 2007, MacWorld Conference, when Steve Jobs pulled the wraps off the long-rumored iPhone. He proclaimed it a revolutionary product with a brand-new ‘multi-touch’ interface as breakthrough and breathtaking as the mouse interface of the 1960s. Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let’s take a look.” (Bruce ‘Tog’ Tognazzini) – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

“The problem is that ‘brand’ will always be about the impression companies want to make, and are by their nature an ‘inside-out’ proposition – a company figures out its brand and what it means, and does what it can to communicate or otherwise impart that message to people. Brand always starts with the company. Experience, though, needs to be about the people. What do they want to accomplish, achieve, do? For experience to succeed, it must start with the person, and from there, impress upon the company. ‘Experience’ is outside-in.” (Peter Merholz – Adaptive Path blog)

“Fun is a pervasive feature of software development, not only for open source programmers but in the area of commercial software development too: Open source developers that are paid for their work are observed to be very motivated and prepared for future effort, especially if they enjoy their development time. Furthermore, the fun that programmers experience functions as a good proxy for their productivity. Therefore, employers that want to enhance the programmers’ productivity can safely invest in an environment of fun for developers in their company.” (Benno Luthinger and Carola Jungwirth – First Monday 12.1)

“The word design means many things, but to people who design for a living, their profession normally breaks down into specific categories like graphic design, industrial design, and information design. Nathan Shedroff is one of the pioneers in experience design, an approach that encompasses multiple senses, usually in a physical environment. As author of the book Experience Design and president of the Board of Directors for the AIGA Center for Brand Experience, Nathan has important insights for those who design experiences with PowerPoint.” (Cliff Atkinson – sociable media)

“(…) it’s pretty difficult to state a theory of experience design. Theories are rare in every design discipline, but in those where theories exist — like the theory of taxonomical structure in information design or wayfinding theory in environmental design — they’re reliable guides to practice.” (Bob Jakobson – Total Experience)

“Browsing the Web with a small mobile phone may sound absurd at first. The increasing importance of the Internet means, however, that a person should be able to access Web services even when not sitting in front of a computer. Since there are approximately three times more mobile phones than computers in the world, a mobile phone may provide the only way to access the Web for many people. Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. Understanding the user needs in different use contexts is the key to improving the user experience and thereby popularizing device independent access to Internet. In her dissertation research, Virpi Roto has interviewed users of mobile browsers in several countries, and identified characteristics that help improve the mobile browsing user experience if taken into consideration. In addition to user and use context, all the system components should be taken into account: device, browser, network infrastructure, and web site.” (Virpi Roto – Nokia Research Center) – courtesy of vuccosic

“Why bother with the speed boats and the anchors and the propellers? There are several reasons, but one of the most interesting, in my view, is how they appear to help tap what participants actually ‘experience’ in their workplace.” (Richard Anderson – Riander)

“Typically, we design products for a specific end state. For example, someone has an idea that a large beanbag can function as a chair. Or someone imagines how improving a paperless payment system can work more effectively than a manual system that is currently in use. Or customer feedback leads to the optimization of a Web site workflow that helps people complete their tasks more quickly. But in each of these examples, the focus is on things other than the essence of the actual people who will use the products—whether that focus is on the application of a particular material, on using technology to make a process easier, or responding to customers’ feedback to keep them satisfied. As I previously described in Part One of this series, the intentional attempt to satisfy people’s internal needs and desires simply isn’t there.” (Dirk Knemeyer – UXmatters)

Notes and presentation slides – “A special thanks to everyone who made it out to either of these events. As was probably evident, this is a topic I’m somewhat passionate about. And, as is true of any subject dealing with emotions, beauty or pleasure, this is a rich and somewhat subjective discussion. My User Experience Hierarchy of Needs model forms the skeleton of my presentation. Think of it as ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ except for interfaces.” (Stephen P. Anderson – poetpainter)

“The UX Fund is an investment experiment inspired by Jeneanne Rae and the Design Council. We believe that companies that deliver a great user experience will see it reflected in their stock price.” (teehan+lax)

“Creating a ‘killer user experience’ owes a lot to understanding subtle aspects such as User Interface Friction, and that is why I believe it is a very important notion. In many ways, creating an excellent user interface has become the digital equivalent of first-class manufacturing: we need it as users, and we need to understand what contributes to it if we are developing technology.” (Andreas Pfeiffer – ACM Ubiquity)

“The Netherlands’ tenth annual SIGCHI Conference took place on Thursday, June 8th, 2006, in Amsterdam. Titled ‘The Web and Beyond’, the conference focused primarily on interaction design for Web 2.0. The conference drew a capacity crowd to the fabulous art deco Theater Tuschinski.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)

“About the so-called Semantic Web Initiative, Jared stated that, as an historian, he wanted proof of its existence. Only when people can show him the Semantic Web will he have an opinion about it. According to Jared Spool, in general, 99.9% of everything is crap.” (Peter J. Bogaards – UXmatters)

“An information architect’s evaluation of user experience is often highly subjective and gains value with an evidence-based understanding produced by web analytics. User testing and web analytic data are currently the only ways to verify the heuristic assumptions upon which a website is redesigned.” (Andrea Wiggins – Boxes and Arrows)

“(…) I presented a short history of the desktop metaphor as a way of thinking about screen-based user interface design and laid out my thoughts for why magic should be a metaphor for the user experience design of ubiquitous computing.” (Mike Kuniavsky – Orange Cone) – courtesy of adaptivepath