Leonard Cohen versus Jesse James Garrett

Added on 26 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“I think we should be called information architects and that it’s easier to talk about IA with people outside our field in terms of A than to talk with them about UXD in terms of X or D. Mr. Garrett thinks we are now and have always been user experience designers, that UXD is easier for muggles to understand, and that those of us who specialize in and choose the titles of IA or IxD are either fools or liars.” (Dan Klyn – Wildly Appropriate)

Interaction10: How to Design an Experience for Experience Designers?

Added on 26 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Collaborating with a large team of designers, who all worked as volunteers, we decided to approach the conference experience as designers creating a service, taking every aspect of the experience into account. We thought through the lifecycle of the event, in light of the needs and motivations of the 600+ participants at the event, in their various roles from attendees and speakers to sponsors, volunteers, and conference staff. We used our empathy as designers to imagine what was important to each user at each stage of the experience. And while not everything worked out exactly as we planned, based on feedback, I think conference was a success. Here are a few things we learned along the way.” (Jennifer Bove – Fast Company)

What am I?

Added on 26 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“My interests and skills in the universe that is Design tack heavily toward using information to create structured systems for human experience. I’m obsessed with the design challenges that come from linking things that couldn’t be linked before the Internet — creating habitats out of digital raw material. That, to me, is the heart of information architecture.” (Andrew Hinton)

UX at Year X

Added on 24 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Adaptive Path co-founder and principal Jesse James Garrett’s accolades range from creating seminal works on user experience to coining the term AJAX. Ahead of his UX London presentation, he talked to us about The Elements of User Experience a decade on, how service design relates to user experience, and his pick of future UX rock stars. (…) the phenomenal success Apple has had in the last ten years has been a double-edged sword for us.” (Jeroen van Geel – Johnny Holland Magazine)

Designing for the Web

Added on 24 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(…) aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one. If you’re a designer, developer, or content producer, reading the book will enrich your website design and plug the holes in your design knowledge. Now available online. For free!” (Mark Boulton)

Taming Goliath: Selling UX to Large Companies 1/2

Added on 23 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Large companies are the financial backbone of the web industry, but their size and complex organizational structure can make them challenging to work with. Having worked on both sides of the fence, I’ve seen great ideas become the casualties of this struggle between the proverbial David and Goliath, as agencies or freelancers meet face-to-face with Big Business to create web sites. Closing the door to large companies means missing out on important revenue, good work, and more people using our designs, so how can we make large companies work for us?” (Alan Colville – UX Booth)

Content: Not Always King

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The strategy you adopt when tackling a project needs to take this continuum in mind. If your product is about content consumption, content is king and you should do due diligence and start from a content strategy perspective. Users of those products are coming to be informed or entertained and need the content to be front-and-center; the product is in service to displaying the content in as appropriate a manner as possible. The meaning of the content matters; you wouldn’t display a cartoon the same way you’d display an analysis of the stock market. At least, not usually.” (Dan Saffer – Kicker Studio) – Goes back to the old web app (code) versus doc (data) distinction.

User-Centered Innovation is not Sustainable

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Only forward-looking executives, designers, and, of course, policy makers may introduce sustainable innovation into the economic picture. They need to step back from current dominant needs and behaviors and envision new scenarios. They need to propose new unsolicited products and services that are both attractive, sustainable, and profitable.” (Roberto Verganti – Harvard Business Review)

UX Design versus UI Development

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“One of the more interesting tensions I have observed – since getting into user experience design about five years ago – is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves – and sometimes rightfully so – to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint. It’s not the value they add, just the mechanics of delivering the creative concepts.” (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)

Sustainable User Research

Added on 22 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“Traditionally, user research involves directly observing and talking with people in the context of their work or play. Either researchers travel to observe participants in their natural environments or participants travel to a usability lab or focus-group facility. How better to understand how people use a product or technology than to observe them using it firsthand?” (Jim Ross – UXmatters)

There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett

Added on 21 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“The president of a firm that’s synonymous with User Experience and who literally ‘wrote the book’ on the elements of User Experience making an impassioned call for everybody who’s called information architect or interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm does its work is different than every other kind of design approach that’s come before it? It’s a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he doth protest too much.” (Dan Klyn – Wildly Appropriate)

Invisible Revolution

Added on 19 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the story of Doug Engelbart, the man who invented much of the information environment we live in today – the computer mouse, word processing, email, hypertext and so on. In short: Interactive computing. This is his story, and the story of his fellow dreamers, thinkers, doers – revolutionaries – who changed our lives forever.” (Frode Hegland & Fleur Klijnsma)

How UX can get anything they want

Added on 18 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power. The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They’re already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers.” (Scott Berkun)

Starting Out Organized: Website Content Planning The Right Way

Added on 17 March 2010 Peter Bogaards
“So many articles explain how to design interfaces, design graphics and deal with clients. But one step in the Web development process is often skipped over or forgotten altogether: content planning. Sometimes called information architecture, or IA planning, this step doesn’t find a home easily in many people’s workflow. But rushing on to programming and pushing pixels makes for content that looks shoehorned rather than fully integrated and will only require late-game revisions.” (Kristin Wemmer – Smashing Magazine)