How Buildings Learn TV series
“In 1997, the BBC aired a three-hour documentary based on Stewart Brand’s book, ‘How Buildings Learn’. Brand has posted the whole program on Google Video in six 30-minute parts.” (via Jason Kottke)
Using Persona Advocates to develop user-centric intranets and portals
“Intranets and portals are all—or mostly—about serving and enabling users. What information do they need and what tasks must they accomplish? How will they look for information? How does it need to be organized and presented for them to understand and use it? Do users have expertise in different subject areas or varying levels of technical vocabularies? Do they need instant information gratification or will they patiently research until they explore all possibilities? Do users know what information they are seeking or do they need to be able to browse for something that will catch their eyes and provide the ‘Aha!’ experiences. Grasping complex information needs and uses can indeed be daunting. One powerful design tool, personas, can help make sense of these needs and provide a framework for building Intranets that will satisfy a variety of needs. Effectively developed and used, personas enable Intranet teams to hone in on user needs and build interfaces and user experiences that end-user audiences can and will use.” (Howard McQueen) – courtesy of jamesrobertson
Adaptive Path explores the future of the browser
“Aurora is a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.” (Mark Vanderbeeken – Experientia)
Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens
Video registration of Donald Normans presentation – “In his latest book, The Design of Future Things, Norman offers a consumer-oriented theory of natural human-machine interaction that can be put into practice by the engineers and industrial designers of tomorrow’s thinking machines.” (From Business to Buttons 2008 recorded sessions)
Service Design and Experience Design: Starbucks vs Le Pain Quotidien
“What is service design? Particularly those that is delivered through a digital interface or through a peer-to-peer network. It requires a very different approach from traditional operations management and the economics is very different. Service is becoming a key part of any customer experiences. Many still find the concept a little abstract. Little attention is paid to service innovation or seeing services as structure.” (Idris Mootee – innovation playground)
Winning Considerations for Interactive Content
“User interface designers have more interactive options than ever for presenting content. So, we can make meaningful strides toward offering users the right content in the right place, at the right time, in the right amount. However, these rich options for interactively presenting content also come with a challenge.” (Colleen Jones – UXmatters)
Facial expressions: Reflections of user experience
“(…) Phillip Toledano, a photographer from New York who takes stunning portraits of real people playing video games. The immersive nature of videogames can engage users into user experiences which can almost be described as extreme. Toledano’s portraits depict this rather clearly. He managed to capture the whole range of emotions: frustration, joy, fear, surprise, hatred…” (Pierre-Alexandre Lapointe – YuCentrik)
Jensen Harris Tells Dan About Microsoft Office’s Ribbon Interface
“When you want to convince a developer to help you make a change to the product, nothing is as compelling as bringing the developer into the lab and having them watch people fail.” (Dan Harrelson – Adaptive Path)
The Hyperlink as Organizing Principle
“What does a hyperlink mean? The question itself is problematical. We might be satisfied with the simpler and related question of what a hyperlink is and what a hyperlink does. But in trying to understand what the larger social effects of hyperlink networks are, it is not enough to be able to define a hyperlink, we need to understand its nature, its use, and its social effects.” (Alexander Halavais – in Turow T. and Lokman Tsui (eds.) 2008, The Hyperlinked Society)- courtesy of davidweinberger
What’s Design Mean to You? Interview with Vinay Venkatraman
“Design is one of the professions that bridges the analytical way of doing things with the synthetical way of doing things. If you consider analysis to be breaking a thing down into finite elements, and looking at relationhips inside it and making sense out of it, you can say that synthesis is about the interrelationships and the combinations of things. I think that designers have this unusual intuition for what could be meaningful in this analytical [information]. It’s less rational, and more emotional in its approach.” (Matt Balara – Interviews)
In search of a beautiful mind
Video included – “He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was.” (Linda Matchan – The Boston Globe)
Weekly User Testing: TiVo Did It, You Can, Too
“TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo’s experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused.” (Jakob Nielsen – Alertbox)
Interaction Design and Service Design: Expanding A Comparison of Design Disciplines 
“Interaction design encounters service design in business innovation, e-government, and a whole range of other settings. There is a range of service settings in which interactive artefacts are used to perform service, and a set of business innovation strategies combining process innovation and interactive technology. In the meeting between these the service perspective becomes a challenge to interaction design, and technology usage becomes a challenge to service design.” (Stefan Holmlid – Nordic Design Research Conference)
Better Ballots
“The notorious butterfly ballot that Palm Beach County, Florida election officials used in the 2000 election is probably the most infamous of all election design snafus. It was one of many political, legal, and election administration missteps that plunged a presidential election into turmoil and set off a series of events that led to, among other things, a vast overhaul of the country’s election administration, including the greatest change in voting technology in United States history.” (Whitney Quesenbery et al.)
Ryan Freitas talks with Mitch Kapor
“As always, Mitch has plenty of wonderful things to say. There’s a significant history lesson, some pointers on entrepreneurialism, and some very frank perspectives on the principles of design.” (Ryan Freitas – Second Verse)
Playing with Complexity
“(…) in the presentation I argue two things: one — that the more sophisticated applications of interactive data visualization resemble games and toys in many ways, and two — that game design can contribute to the solutions to several design issues I have detected in the field of data visualization.” (Kars Alfrink – Leapfroglog)
Engaging Personas and Narrative Scenarios
“Personas and scenarios help designers to imagine the users and aid development of design ideas. The concept of engaging personas and narrative scenario explores personas in the light of what what it is to identify with and have empathy with a character. The concept of narrative scenarios views the narrative as aid for exploration of design ideas. Both concepts incorporate a distinction between creating, writing and reading.” (Lene Nielsen PhD thesis 2004)
Designing a Different Kind of Intranet: An Intranet for a UX Team
“Most of us who are working as part of a design team in a services company, a product company, or even a design boutique have to live with a generic intranet. In this article, I’ll describe how to leverage your company’s intranet and how to build a community around an intranet for a UX team.” (Anirban Basu Mallik – UXmatters)
Convergence and Emergence: 2008 IA Summit
“It is clear that the discipline of information architecture is undergoing change. I was amazed at the range of job titles I encountered. Very few people actually had the title information architect. This must be a sign that the rapid development of the Web and the technological advances that are occurring are just moving so fast what we do is very hard to define. It is just a label, and we shouldn’t become too hung up on it, but I think the IAI need to be aware and wise to the developments that are going on in other disciplines such as IxD and UX in general.” (James Kelway – UXmatters)
Now Let’s Do It in Practice: UX Evaluation Methods in Product Development
UXEM workshop in CHI’08 (April 6th, 2008 in Florence, Italy) – “The aim of the workshop is to transfer knowledge from practitioners to academics about challenges with putting UX evaluation into practice, and from academics to practitioners to inform and inspire practical UX work with research findings of UX evaluation methods. Participants will gain an overview of the current state of practical approaches, tools, and methods for UX evaluation, as well as insights into the importance of UX evaluation in product development. The main outcomes of the workshop are a model of different UX evaluation methods across product development process and a list of UX evaluation challenges in product development. ” (Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Virpi Roto, and Marc Hassenzahl)