A definition of user experience

Added on 11 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
“User experience (UX) represents the perception left in someone’s mind following a series of interactions between people, devices, and events – or any combination thereof. (…) A good user-experience designer needs to be able to see both the forest and the trees. That means user experience has implications that go far beyond usability, visual design, and physical affordances.” (Eric Reiss – FatDUX)

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Added on 10 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
“The term ‘user experience’ or UX has been getting a lot of play, but many businesses are confused about what it actually is and how crucial it is to their success. I asked some of the most influential and widely respected practitioners in UX what they consider to be the biggest misperceptions of what we do. The result is a top 10 list to debunk the myths. Read it, learn it, live it.” (Whitney Hess – Mashable)

Tap is the New Click (The Video)

Added on 9 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
Video registration – “Even though the technology has been around for decades, only now are we starting to see mass production and adoption of touchscreen and gestural devices for the public. Jeff Han’s influential 2006 TED demonstration of his multitouch system, followed by the launches of Nintendo’s Wii, Apple’s iPhone, and Microsoft Surface, have announced a new era of interaction design, one where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking. But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design desktop and web applications, what do you need to know to design for interactive gestures? This introduction to designing gestural interfaces will cover the basics: usability and ergonomics; a brief history of the technology; some elemental patterns of use; prototyping and documenting; and how to communicate that a gestural interface is present to users.” (Dan Saffer)

The Client Experience

Added on 5 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
“User experience is all the rage. First impressions, consistent quality, matching online with offline, all that good stuff. Every year the same design conferences are full of the same talks. The slides might get shinier each year, but it’s the same guys making the same comparisons.” (Des Traynor – Contrast) – courtesy of lucraak

Engelbart and the Dawn of Interactive Computing

Added on 1 January 2009 Peter Bogaards
Event videos available – “On December 9, 2008 at Stanford University’s Memorial Auditorium, SRI International commemorated the 40th anniversary of the world debut of personal and interactive computing by Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the SRI Augmentation Research Center (…) Speakers at the 2008 event included original participants in the 1968 demo and presentations on Doug Engelbart’s vision to use computing to augment society’s collective intellect and ability to solve the complex issues of our time.” (A 40th Anniversary Celebration)

Jeffrey Zeldman: Understanding Web Design

Added on 23 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Author and Happy Cog founder Jeffrey Zeldman answers the question: what does a web designer need most? Skills and knowledge of software, of course, but empathy – the ability to think about and empathize with your user – is by far the most important. Good useful education is hard to find, and within companies there is often no departmental standardization. Good graphic design is not the same as good user experience design, he explains. In fact, ‘good web design is invisible’ – it feels simple and authentic because it’s about the character of the content, not the character of the designer.” (AIGA Gain 2008)

Web Analytics and Information Architecture

Added on 23 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Web analytics offer quantitative insight into user behaviour. They can be used to benchmark site performance and report to management. But, because web analytics data tells what people do on a web site, analytics data should be used to inform and direct more qualitative user research methods such as focus groups or usability tests that tell us why they do what they do. More importantly, you can use the natural interest people have in web metrics to introduce the more qualitative measures into the business overall.” (Hallie Wilfert – FUMSI) – courtesy of thehotstrudel

Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore…

Added on 22 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“Meredith Davis’s presentation addresses the rapidly growing gap between where we should be going in the practice of design and longstanding assumptions about design education. It is about the disorienting relationship between what and how we teach design in colleges and universities and the circumstances of twenty-first century life and work; about the worldview against which we construct the content and pedagogy of professional design education.” (Meredith Davis – Massaging Media 2)

What makes a ‘User Experience Expert’?

Added on 18 December 2008 Peter Bogaards
“The reason I think this is important is that I’m seeing too many people buy into User Experience methodologies that are half-baked, if baked at all. User Experience, for most people, boils down to making pretty interfaces. Good color palettes, Flash for everything, and anything that sort of looks like a Mac interface are often presented as the whole of good User Experience. I’m not saying these things aren’t good and very, very important; they’re just one small piece of the much larger User Experience field.” (RJ Owen – InsideRIA) – courtesy of thehotstrudel