IA Summit 10: Dan Roam Keynote

Added on 12 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In his day one keynote from the 2010 IA Summit, Dan Roam—founder of Digital Roam Inc and author of the best-selling Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures – shares his unique visual-thinking approach with a receptive crowd in Phoenix. Transcending language barriers, his approach helps solve complex problems through visual thinking, and has helped resolve challenges at many businesses: Microsoft, Wal-Mart, and eBay to name a few.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

IA Summit 10: Richard Saul Wurman Keynote

Added on 12 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“With the majority of the earth’s population now living in cities, Richard Saul Wurman realized there was a yawning information gap about the urban super centers that are increasingly driving modern culture. In this keynote presentation from the 2010 IA Summit, Mr. Wurman discusses his 19.20.21 initiative: an attempt to standardize a methodology to understand comparative data on 19 cities that will have 20 million or more inhabitants in the 21st century. He encourages the design community to take initiative and solve big problems rather than make small changes incrementally.” (Jeff Parks – Boxes and Arrows)

Into the groove: Lessons from the desktop music revolution

Added on 9 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Musical instruments provide really intriguing examples of user interface design. While it can take years of training and no small amount of aptitude, an instrument in the right hands can provide highly nuanced control over the many aspects of sound that come together to form one of the highest forms of human expression. And even for those of us who will never achieve such heights of virtuosity, merely using such a ‘user interface’ can result a great sense of enjoyment, immersion and fulfillment (what is often referred to as a state of flow).” (David Cronin – Cooper Journal)

Design to Read

Added on 9 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many people do not read easily. They may have a visual problem or dyslexia. They may have not have had opportunities to learn to read, or be reading in stressful conditions or poor light, or perhaps they are reading in a second language. Is it possible to provide one consistent set of guidelines or approaches that will allow designers to meet all the apparently diverse needs of these people? Or are there compromises to be made?” (About Design to Read)

Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?

Added on 7 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designers primarily concern themselves with how to create a ‘successful’ communication, product, or experience. But with the past 10 years of globalization, digitalization, and ever increasing design complexity, designers have come to realize that to answer the question of design ‘success’ requires that they answer that question of how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it means to be human. This ‘humanness’ can range from how humans control the environment through tools (homo faber); how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking; to moral issues of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities. In this space, the practice and theory of design anthropology has emerged.” (Dori Tunstall)

Using a Collaborative Parallel Design Process

Added on 5 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Genetic algorithms essentially mimic evolutionary biology to find optimal solutions. Initially, they select a population of solutions based on some evaluation criteria, then use some subset of that population—the fittest members—as breeding stock for the subsequent generation of solutions. This process continues for multiple generations, each getting closer to an optimal solution. This article describes my experience with parallel design and discusses how to make parallel design more collaborative.” (Mike Myles – UXmatters)

IDSA Design Research

Added on 4 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“We have launched this site in connection with the release of the spring issue of Innovation Magazine, which is dedicated to design research. All of the articles from the magazine are available here. We encourage you to read these articles and share your thoughts and ideas through the site.”

The Power of Personas

Added on 2 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In this installment, we took somewhat detailed tour of personas. First, we covered how to make them—the processes and techniques involved in developing, validating, and maturing the personas themselves, which has a big benefit to the whole team involved in getting a much better understanding of whom the solution is being developed for. Then we discussed some different uses of personas, how not to use them, as well as how to—chiefly to gain empathy to inform what and how you build so that it makes sense for your target audience as well as a valuable communication tool to keep team members on the same page, speaking the same language, and collaborating in terms of people rather than in terms of technical or hierarchical terms.” (Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little)

Service design goes mainstream

Added on 1 April 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Reading with interest an unfolding flameup at Design for Service caused by Jeff Howard’s post entitled UX Rockstars need not apply. The gist of the conversation is a few folk getting all hot under the collar about disciplines and domains. Especially the emerging challenges in the US by this new fangled idea of Service Design and it seems to be freaking people out. Which is a good thing in my book. The argument was instigated by sweeping statement from an interview with Jesse James Garret of Adaptive Path, that went like this (…)” (Paul Sims – Made by Many)

Case study: Agile and UCD working together

Added on 31 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Large scale websites require groups of specialists to design and develop a product that will be a commercial success. To develop a completely new site requires several teams to collaborate and this can be difficult. Particularly as different teams may be working with different methods. This case study shows how the ComputerWeekly user experience team integrated with an agile development group. It’s important to note the methods we used do not guarantee getting the job done. People make or break any project. Finding and retaining good people is the most important ingredient for success.” (James Kelway – Boxes and Arrows)

Common Ground

Added on 31 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“In the modern, agile world, programmers defend themselves against changing requirements by showing customers the program as often as possible, and by being able to make rapid changes to suit the customers expressed needs. Interaction designers defend themselves against uncooperative programmers by doing ever more detailed design and documenting it with greater accuracy, detail, and precision.” (Alan Cooper)

Developing a UI Design Pattern Library PDF Logo

Added on 30 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Designing good user interfaces is difficult, and thus software development organizations need effective and usable design tools to support design work. In this thesis a tool, a user interface design pattern library which captures knowledge of good UI design and shares it effectively in reusable format to the development organization (…)” (@Janne Lammi 2007)

Taming Goliath: Selling UX to Large Companies 2/2

Added on 30 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Collaborating effectively can be difficult for large companies. Projects can involve multiple locations, people, systems, and other outside companies. Large companies also tend to be departmental rather than project-focused, and this can hinder working together. But, being able to bring people together is key to delivering successful sites for large companies. Here are some tools and techniques to improve collaboration on projects.” (Alan Colville – UX Booth)

Seven Contexts for Service System Design PDF Logo

Added on 29 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational services, multi-channel, multidevice, and location-based and context-aware services. This paper examines the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose a unifying view that spans them, especially when the service-system is information-intensive. A focus on the information required to perform the service, how the responsibility to provide this information is divided between the service provider and service consumer, and the patterns that govern information exchange yields a more abstract description of service encounters and outcomes. This makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the substitutability of stored or contextual information for person-to-person interactions.” (Robert Glushko 2009)