IA Deliverables
“The profession is still judged, by and large, by the quality of our documentation. Most recruiters and hiring managers seem more interested in the quality of annotation than the quality of thinking.” (Karen Loasby– IA Play)
Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process
“(…) prototyping is a high silver content bullet. When aimed well, a prototype can answer design questions and communicate design ideas. In this article, I talk about the dimensions of prototype fidelity and how you can use them to choose the most effective prototyping method for the questions you need answered.” (Fred Beecher – Boxes and Arrows) – courtesy of jjursa
interactions: Looking Broadly to the Future
“This issue explores the future, where traditional boundaries of interaction are broken, creating a view of design as a larger, more culturally embedded, and ultimately more widely dispersed activity. We hope you enjoy the breadth of these efforts as presented in this issue of interactions.” (ACM SIGCHI Interactions Magazine)
Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up
“(…) be wary of the standard reports that come with your analytics application. They certainly have value, but these reports also provide a false sense of security—as if they were designed with your needs in mind. Nothing could be farther from the truth: Top-down, goal-driven analytics should be centered on your KPI, and your organization’s goals aren’t the same as everyone else’s.” (Louis Rosenfeld – A List Apart 292)
Elements of a Networked Urbanism
“Over the past several years, we’ve watched as a very wide variety of objects and surfaces familiar from everyday life have been reimagined as networked information-gathering, -processing, -storage and -display resources. Why should cities be any different? What happens to urban form and metropolitan experience under such circumstances? What are the implications for us, as designers, consumers and as citizens?” (Adam Greenfield – dConstruct)
The Importance of Website Content in Online Purchasing Across Different Types of Products
“Several authors have suggested that the importance of website content elements in online purchasing varies across different types of products. Our aim is to empirically test this proposition. Here, we focus on goods versus services and hedonic versus utilitarian products. After reviewing the literature on the role of website content, we hypothesize which elements are more important for which type of product. The results of an empirical study confirm most of the different roles across different types of products. This suggests that retailers would profit from taking the differences in product types into account in designing their online stores.” (Tibert Verhagen and Jaap Boter – VU Amsterdam)
Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign
“Users hate change, so it’s usually best to stay with a familiar design and evolve it gradually. In the long run, however, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness, calling for a new UI architecture.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Understanding the Experience of Social Network Sites
“This past year social media, and social network sites in particular, have reached new heights of popularity and adoption. It is no longer unusual for clients to request that designers “add Facebook” to their respective sites, mainly for the purpose of increased engagement and community building for their brand as a part of a greater social marketing strategy.” (Alla Zollers – Johnny Holland Magazine)
UX in the Boardroom: A Solid Case for Investing in UX
“Some think the best way to demonstrate the value of usability in a corporate setting is to emphasize the resulting cost savings. While that may be sage advice in some organizations and industries, following it in the information technology and government arenas would cost you respect and a meeting. For some years, I was guilty of following this tack—before I discovered what really matters to executives, learned how finances and budgets work, and realized the true value of user experience lies not in cost savings at all, but in intangibles.” (Kate Walser – UXmatters)
Designing Tables 101
“In this column, I’ll review some of the basic principles of good table design from an information developer’s perspective, then discuss their visual design and interactivity. These principles and my examples provide the bare essentials of table design. When designing tables, a key information design objective is keeping them simple, so if you start needing more than this column provides, you might be making things unnecessarily complicated for your users.” (Mike Hughes – UXmatters)
Audience Segmentation Models
“Understanding the people who will ultimately engage with a product or service provides the foundation for user experience design. Modeling those people and segmenting our models into meaningful groups lets us explore different clusters of needs, then address our solutions to meeting the needs of people belonging to specific clusters.” (Steve Baty – UXmatters)
NING: Agile Experience Design
Integrating the Agile and Experience Design Practices – “Our goal is to explore, evolve, and empower the emergent discipline that fuses Agile Software Development with User Experience Design.” – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst
CHI Conversations
“CHI Conversations covers Computer/Human Interaction, including design, human factors, cognitive psychology, social science, and more. Our initial series is BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of ACM SIGCHI.”
Why low-fidelity prototyping kicks butt for customer-driven design
“In my discussions with designers, one of the interesting recurring conversations is the tools and process they use to prototype and mock up experiences. In particular, there’s a lot of divergence on how high or low-fidelity to go with a prototype.” (Andrew Chen) – courtesy of uxtweets
Vinay Venkatraman on Interaction Design
“Vinay Venkatraman, an interaction designer, is one of a rapidly expanding group of scholars and professionals around the world working to define the way our stuff behaves. Although it’s natural for most people to understand the need for interaction with gadgets like software and mobile devices, the field is actually remarkably broad. In an increasingly interactive age, the success of systems, services and even whole corporations and organizations often comes down to an effective interface, created with human behavior in mind.” (WorldChanging) – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst
(Preso) Designing Social Interfaces: 5 steps, 5 principles, 5 anti-patterns
“In this presentation we share a family of social web design principles and interaction patterns to help user experience designers and strategists grapple with the social dimensions of their products and services. The family of patterns, principles, and practices provides a framework and starting point for the conceptual modeling of any interactive digital social experience.” (Erin Malone & Christian Crumlish)
Warren Buffett Cell Phone Skills: Did They Doom Lehman?
“Fast forward 10 months. Buffett, who admits he never has really learned the basics of his cell phone, asked his daughter Susan about a little indicator he had noticed on the screen: ‘Can you figure out what’s on there?’ It turned out to be the message from Diamond that he had been waiting for that night.” (WSJ)
Preso: Visualization Tool or How communicate the service design concepts
“(…) the slide comes from the input package materials for the workshop CHITA08, mobile services and digital communities, that is taking place at Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China, as a research and didactic experience beetween School of Design at Jiangnan and Design Faculty at Politecnico di Milano.” (Francesca Valsecchi) – courtesy of wichertvane
Playfulness, Usability, & Context: The Three Pillars of a Delightful User Experience
“When I bought my first iPhone almost three months ago, I also acquired a new obsession with the role of playfulness in user experience design.” (Fred Bleecher) – courtesy of hotstrudel
User Experience Vision Videos
“As powerful networked device capabilities continue to enter mainstream use, several technology companies have released ‘vision’ videos portraying how capabilities like augmented reality, flexible OLED screens, and rich sensors can alter our lives in the future.” (LukeW)