Components, Patterns, and Frameworks! Oh My!

Added on 22 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Login functionality isn’t new. It’s not awesome. It’s not very challenging to develop. Teams are designing this functionality as if it’s never been built before. But it has been built before. Teams, all over the world, have built login functionality into their applications about a million times. And yet, here we are, doing it all over again. All this re-creation and re-invention isn’t just inefficient, it leaves the team open to problems. Because it’s not the sexy part of their project, it’s likely to get less attention, resulting in an unusable and frustrating experience. This is where the Re-use Trinity — Patterns, Components, and Interaction Design Frameworks — come in.” – (Jared Spool)

UX Deliverables in Practice

Added on 21 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“On May 17 2009, I delivered my invited presentation at the IA Konferenz 2009 in Hamburg, Germany. A first (slightly modified) version is now available. Given that my session was scheduled right after the lunch break on the last day, I had told the organizers that I would try to make it a bit of a show. Of course the real content — a brief overview of theories of UX plus a wider look at some of the deliverables outside of the standard research-design-evaluation triad (which I summarized using a quiz) — was there too.” – (Peter Boersma)

Symposium Contextmapping: The Videos

Added on 20 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“About five years ago, we started the contextmapping research at ID-StudioLab. In these past five years, four PhD students have explored various elements in the procedure. Several hundred students at TU Delft have learnt its principles, as did many design students and practitioners in workshops in the Netherlands, Europe, and Asia. Several dozens of students have explored, varied, modified, and reflected on the techniques, their possibilities and limitations. In May 2009, the first ‘contextmapping’ PhD thesis will be defended. On this occasion, we take the opportunity to reflect on the new techniques for involving users in the fuzzy front end of product design. What was learnt, what are the opportunities and barriers in industrial practice, and what do we think should the next developments be?” – (ID-StudioLab – TU Delft) courtesy of paulvalk

Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research (Chapter 1)

Added on 19 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Remote user research describes any research method that allows you to observe, interview, or get feedback from users while they’re at a distance, in their “native environment” (at their desk, in their home or office) doing their own tasks. Remote studies allow you to recruit quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment, on their own time. Our book will teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top-to-bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.” – (Tony Tulathimutte – Rosenfeld Media)

Survival for the fittest tag

Added on 19 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization – “Folksonomies have emerged as a means to create order in a rapidly expanding information environment whose existing means to organize content have been strained. This paper examines folksonomies from an evolutionary perspective, viewing the changing conditions of the information environment as having given rise to organization adaptations in order to ensure information “survival” — remaining findable. This essay traces historical information organization mechanisms, the conditions that gave rise to folksonomies, and the scholarly response, review, and recommendations for the future of folksonomies.” – (Alexis Wichowski – First Monday 14.5)

Web Strategy: A Definition

Added on 16 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“An effective Web Strategy provides the required guidance and implementation authority required to create and maintain a high-quality Web presence. It also emplaces accountability mechanisms to ensure that Web teams take a mature approach to developing and managing the organization’s most powerful communications and transactional tool.” – (Lisa Welchman)

Future Practice Interview: Ginny Redish

Added on 15 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“For a long time, content was typically left for last and given so little thought. I’m happy to say that the situation is changing. Content and content strategy are hot topics now (…) Content strategy means thinking strategically about your content. It means planning the content, coordinating content over the entire web site, and managing content over time.” – (Louis Rosenfeld – Rosenfeld Media)

25 Incredibly Useful Usability Cheat Sheets & Checklists

Added on 15 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Is your Web site primed for any viewer? How do you know? The nicest thing about a usable Web site is that it’s just a good thing to do for others so they can easily read your online information. The other side to usability is that it can increase your search engine standings so more people can find your Web site. The following list of cheat sheets and checklists are fairly recent; however, some older usability checklists are useful for older sites that haven’t been upgraded.” – (Best Web Design Schools) courtesy of jjursa

Using Verbs As Nouns in User Interfaces | UX Roles in Organizations

Added on 12 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“What are your experience and wisdom on the use of verbs as nouns in naming software functionality? Do you have any other brilliant names for views? (…) We are looking to update our UX team to align with advanced needs, and I am having trouble finding an organizational view of UX roles. I am not sure where UX architects, art directors, information designers, visual designers, user researchers, usability testers, creative managers, interactive designers, and other UX roles fit into the big picture. Do you have any examples of organizational layouts?” – (UXmatters)

Refactoring the User Experience

Added on 12 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The ability to take a broad view of the world and incorporate lessons learned from other disciplines distinguishes the best practitioners in any field. As UX professionals, there is much we can learn from good software engineering practice, which maps a team’s understanding of a problem at a human level onto the implementation of a technical solution. The essence of good software engineering practice is effective user experience—from developing the high-level design documentation that describes how the main elements of a system interact to its implementation in clearly written code. Though the relationship between software engineering and user experience is not always an easy one, software engineers and UX professionals share some common goals. Both have a vested interest in producing systems that are useful and usable.” – (Peter Hornsby – UXmatters)

Fjord 09 Mobile Trends

Added on 11 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“From the ‘Android invasion’ to the ‘War for the world’: Fjord presents 9 mobile trends for 09. This report focuses on technologies and behaviors that have been building up over the last few years and are going to break through to the mainstream in 2009.” – (Fjord)

Online language pathways: understanding how brands need to communicate with their customers online

Added on 11 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“Our study found that language that engages people on web pages is not the same as the language that forms the pathways to a site. Rather, people change or adapt language terms as they refine their search from their original language of intent (their thoughts) to terms and phrases that more closely mirror language they see in their search, coupled with a mechanical style they think will be better understood by search engines. But the language they appear to respond to most favourably when they finally engage with a website is language that more closely resembles their original language of intent – less mechanical, more natural and human. The ‘translation’ from human language into online language seems to be a sub-conscious and iterative or fluid process: people refine or filter their language as their online journey progresses and this is particularly evident during the search journey.” – (Content Delivery & Analysis)

Content strategy and the new face of documentation

Added on 11 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The idea of looking at trends in our profession speak directly to the idea of content strategy. It’s a ‘beyond the document’ look at how we create and deliver content to various audiences. It’s about content re-use and single-sourcing, about content management, about filtering content, about creating better ways to serve content consumers. It’s also about how social media has raised the bar, and how consumers will take matters into their own hands if we don’t step up to the plate.” – (Rahel Anne Bailie – Intentional Design Inc.)

Why is service design so heterogenous? And does it matter?

Added on 11 May 2009 Peter Bogaards
“In the end, I don’t think we should be surprised to see a lot of heterogeneity in service design. Heterogeneity is a strength, not a weakness – it allows service design agencies (and service designers) to constantly reframe their offer, adapt quickly to the market and tackle the most interesting, most complex challenges. Pinning all of that into a simple definition seems rather silly really.” – (Choosenick)