Pragmatic Personas

Added on 18 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Knowing who will use your software is important to the software development process. Having the end user in mind helps you develop features that fit the user’s needs. And, figuring out your end user, as Jeff Patton reveals, is indeed easy. In this column, Jeff details stereotypes to avoid, questions to ask, and how to implement this pragmatic persona in your development process.” (Jeff Patton ~ StickyMinds)

Developing Your Interviewing Skills, Part I: Preparing for an interview

Added on 17 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Bad interviews can result in missing data, incomplete detail, misleading results, partial insights, and lost opportunities. Your reports, presentations, and recommendations document what you’ve learned from your research and the decisions you’ve made based on it, so you need to ensure your research is the best it can be—that you get good interviews.” (Mia Northrop ~ UXmatters)

Designing for the Mobile Web: Special Considerations

Added on 17 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“(…) I’ll cover design for complex contexts of use in my discussion of constraints on mobile Web sites. In practice, being aware of these constraints lets us approach these problems with caution and come up with better design solutions for mobile devices. Based on my analysis of more than 20 mobile Web sites, I’ll point out some ways of working within these constraints.” (Shanshan Ma ~ UXmatters)

Barriers to Holistic Design Solutions

Added on 17 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Face it, most UX design work consists of incremental improvements over the previous version of a product, and we rarely get to design holistic solutions that elegantly meet the needs of our target audience across systems, services, and devices—or wherever such needs crop up. Further, time-to-market pressures and narrow, predefined solution spaces usually constrain the occasional opportunities we may get to design a first-release product. This leaves so many UX professionals dissatisfied, because they know they could have done a better job or, worse, they may even have envisioned exactly how their design could have been better, only to find insurmountable barriers to their vision’s ever seeing the light of day.” (Christian Rohrer ~ UXmatters)

Content Strategy Design Patterns

Added on 17 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A content strategy plans the full lifecycle of content: how it will be created, delivered, maintained and archived or destroyed. This project focuses on web content: all forms of digital language and media found on websites. As an integral part of User Experience, web content strategy must take account of search engine optimization, user interface design, user needs, business needs, and other aspects of online strategy. (…) To paraphrase IAWiki, “Design Patterns are solutions to common problems. As problems arise in a community and are resolved, common solutions often spontaneously emerge. Eventually the best of these self-identify and become refined until they reach the status of a Design Pattern.” (Contentini)

All about UX: Information for user experience professionals

Added on 13 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“This is an independent site to share and, one day, also collect information about user experience. There has been an active group of researchers collecting user experience evaluation methods, frameworks, and definitions for several years now. We promised to bring the results back to the people who have helped us in this work. Finally, we are able to share the results! We are aware of the immaturity of this site on the day of its birth, but the site is supposed to grow as more information reaches the maturity level high enough for publishing. It is great to get the existing information online now.” (About AllAboutUX)

User Testing with Kids: Lessons from the Field

Added on 12 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“At a project’s start, the possibilities are endless. That clean slate is both lovely and terrifying. As designers, we begin by filling space with temporary messes and uncertain experiments. We make a thousand tiny decisions quickly, trying to shape a message that will resonate with our audience. Then in the middle of a flow, we must stop and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This typical halt in the creative process begs the question: What does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use this feedback to improve our creative output?” (Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein ~ d.news)

Design Criticism and the Creative Process

Added on 11 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“At a project’s start, the possibilities are endless. That clean slate is both lovely and terrifying. As designers, we begin by filling space with temporary messes and uncertain experiments. We make a thousand tiny decisions quickly, trying to shape a message that will resonate with our audience. Then in the middle of a flow, we must stop and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This typical halt in the creative process begs the question: What does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use this feedback to improve our creative output?” (Cassie McDaniel ~ A List Apart)

Tagging Human Knowledge

Added on 11 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness. In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.” (Paul Heymann ~ Videolectures.net WSDM 2010)

The Dark Side of Usability

Added on 10 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“By crafting simple and user-friendly interfaces we relieve our users of the need to think – or more accurately, to think about the more trivial and mechanical parts of the task, things which can be outsourced to the machine. But by doing so we are at risk of indadvertedly surrendering more than we planned for, as we are lured into thinking that interface will do our work for us—and so we spend less time thinking about the problem, less time planning.” (Dmitry Fadeyev ~ Usability Post)

Storyboarding iPad Transitions

Added on 7 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“If your clients are not yet asking you to design transitions, they will likely do that on your next project. Transitions are hot, and not just because they entertain the eye. In confined mobile computing interfaces, on tablet devices or in complex virtual environments, transitions are an authentic, minimalist way of enabling way-finding, displaying system state and exposing crucial functionality – in short, they are key in creating a superior user experience.” (Greg Nudelman ~ Boxes and Arrows)

The Essence of Interaction Design (Part I): Designing Virtual Contexts for Interaction

Added on 5 January 2011 Peter Bogaards
“With this column, I’m introducing a multipart series on what I consider to be the essence of interaction design for application user experiences. First, I’ll lay the groundwork for this series by describing the role of interaction design, then I’ll embark on my exploration of the essence of interaction design by discussing the design of virtual contexts for interaction.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit ~ UXmatters)