Maps as service design: The Incidental

Added on 23 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“From the early brainstorms we came up with idea of a system for collecting the thoughts, recommendations, pirate maps and sketches of the attendees to republish and redistribute the next day in a printed, pocketable pamphlet, which, would build up over the four days of the event to be a unique palimpsest of the place and people’s interactions with it, in it.” (dark)

The Social Buzz: Designing User Experiences for Social Media

Added on 23 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The emergence and rise of social media [1] have been nothing less than phenomenal. In the perennial battle between patterns of intellect and patterns of society, the rapidly spreading influence of social media has initiated the most significant shift toward dominance of intellect [2] in recent times. A groundswell [3] has unmistakably occurred. Social media’s rise has induced a paradigm shift and changed the way the common man perceives the Internet immensely. Social networking is now the number one reason people get online. [4] Getting the world out of the socioeconomic rut it was in required something of this magnitude to come along.” (Junaid Asad – UXmatters)

Reusing the User Experience

Added on 23 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Developers often report a sense of déjà vu when creating software—a sense they’ve already designed or coded a function. Of course, the feeling that he or she is doing unnecessary work is particularly frustrating when a developer is under pressure! The reuse of software components can help to address this problem. Components are proven, reusable units of design and code that meet a specific need. As such, they enable a developer to think about solving problems at a higher level of abstraction, making the development process more efficient. For example, rather than writing a function to print a file, a developer can find and reuse a pre-existing component that meets the requirement.” (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)

Innovation Workshops: Facilitating Product Innovation

Added on 23 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“As leaders of UX organizations, we want our teams of designers and researchers to design products that change the world—to engage in strategic design. Often, though, UX designers and researchers get stuck with incrementalism—designing minor new features for which another functional group has provided the requirements, expecting UX to design them—regardless of whether the UX team agrees with the product direction. Perhaps we find ourselves immersed in organizations or work routines that do not provide space to think differently. This column reveals some tools that can help your team to innovate.” (Jim Nieters – UXmatters)

Content First

Added on 22 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Kristina Halvorson quotes the origin of the phrase information architecture. Then Tufte came along. Designers took it upon themselves to craft information that was understandable and digestable. Then the web came along. To begin with, it was treated as a visual medium. Jesse James Garrett changed the emphasis to user experience. But where is content in Jesse’s diagram? It’s on the second level. Then it disappears. We were approaching content on the same level as functional specs; a feature than can be ticked off a list. But content is a living, breathing thing that evolves over time. Once you put it online, you are required to feed it and take care of it.” (Jeremy Keith – Adactio)

The Service Designers

Added on 19 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we’ve entered a service economy. It’s not only products that are designable experiences; services are creating new challenges for designers and are increasingly demanding attention. As the line between products and services blurs (if it ever was there before), the emergence of service design has risen to demand a need for new ways of working to make for more meaningful services—whether those services are tangible, intangible, or a combination. Four designers engage in 10-minute discussions about the service sector and its different design challenges.” (The UX Workshop)

Blind Search

Added on 16 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“(…) the search engine taste test. Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query. The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results? – I work for Microsoft. This site is not affiliated with my employer, it is not a Microsoft initiative, it’s simply me having fun in my spare time.” (Michael Kordahi) – courtesy of rnagtegaal

Content Strategy: Content is King! (preso)

Added on 16 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Why do users visit a website? Most likely it’s for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design? Delivering the right content to meet user needs requires attention throughout the process — it must be planned, analyzed, produced, edited, managed, and maintained. Even though content is the centerpiece of the user’s experience, it rarely gets the attention it deserves during site design and development. This workshop addressed how to integrate content strategy into the website design process, ensuring that the content that gets created is what users need.” (Karen McGrane)

Designing a Unified Experience: Bringing Interaction, Visual, and Industrial Design Together

Added on 12 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.” (Kim Goodwin – The UX Workshop)

EuroIA 2009 Programme: What’s Happening

Added on 10 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“This year we will explore the theme of ‘Beyond Structure’. That’s because websites have moved to a new level. Any random page can be accessed from Google. Pages themselves may consist of information from many sources. And even the concept of a ‘page’ is changing thanks to new backend technologies. In other words, we’ve moved beyond the traditional sitemap and into a new and exciting era of web development.” (EuroIA.org)

International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used

Added on 9 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Despite the authoritative nature of international standards for usability, many of them are not widely used. This paper explains both the benefits and some of the potential problems in using usability standards in areas including user interface design, usability assurance, software quality, and usability process improvement.” (Nigel Bevan – Journal of Usability Studies May 2009)

What the heck is the nature of UI design?

Added on 9 June 2009 Peter Bogaards
“In this article, I will offer an answer and then I will take a look at authority, power and weight of UXP on multimedia projects relating on the teams and how it could or should refer to for guidance in their work. I hope my answers to these questions will be helpful as well as provocative enough to drive some reactions and feedbacks from readers.” (Holger Maassen – ux4dotcom)