New report on service design impact in public sector

Added on 3 November 2016 Peter Bogaards

Service design into the challenging environment of the government.

“Service design is also taking a role in the process of cultural and organizational change. It collaborates with other experts in this field in order to enable change by reframing the challenges, by engaging stakeholders in development of scenarios of futures that do not yet exist and by prototyping envisioned scenarios. These processes change the role of public servants from experts to partners. It is no longer the public service that is doing something for the citizens but doing it with them. This new way of thinking and working demands not only a change in mindset, but also in the way of doing things. Service design helps to build these new capacities. Very often it is a combination of teaching and learning by doing, in the process of capacity building small service design projects can be approached that create a sense of what service design can do and how to do it.”

Putting People First

Institute-wide task force on the future of libraries

Added on 3 November 2016 Peter Bogaards

Library, the computational version.

“In this report, we describe a bold new vision for the library as an open global platform rooted in our shared values and mission; supported by innovative approaches to community and relationships, discovery and use, and stewardship and sustainability; and informed and enabled by an expanded emphasis on research and development.”

MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries ★

The state of UX in 2016

Added on 3 November 2016 Peter Bogaards

Annual state of UX affairs: growth, stagnation, or decline.

“(…) it shows that organisations that aim to use human-centred design to lead their markets and capitalise on the potential of digital technologies do so by creating empowered, appropriately-staffed UX operations. And for all the companies still sprinkling a little UX on existing processes? Well, don’t expect to change the world. Or your industry. Or even stave off the competition. It’s a digital world we’re living in, and UX design will be an integral part of it for a long time to come.”

Leah Buley a.k.a. /leahbuley | @leahbuley ~ Creative Bloq ★

Grand challenges for HCI researchers

Added on 27 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

When the context changes, the challenges rise.

“The remarkable impact of human-computer interaction research and user experience design compels researchers, practitioners, and journalists to ask: What is the next big thing? Therefore, it may be useful for our community to lay out grand challenges that steer the direction of future research, design, and commercial development. As HCI researchers, we are profoundly aware of the immense problems of our age: Growing human populations consume natural resources, flourishing cities require housing and transportation, families demand education and safety, and rising expectations from patients put pressure on healthcare and social systems.”

Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Maxine Cohen, Steven Jacobs, Niklas Elmqvist, and Nicholoas Diakopoulos ~ ACM Interactions Magazine ★

Designing conversations for socially-conscious design

Added on 24 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

Design is inherently social. It’s about conversations. Conversations by the people.

“Design is inherently social. It almost always involves conversations. Designing conversations-for-design should be an explicit part of the design process, just as much as designing the-design-process should be. In brief, conversations are vital foundations for socially-conscious design. (…) A theory of conversations grows out of cybernetics, a major branch of systems, and its roots reach back to Gordon Pask, who was Ranulph Glanville’s mentor. At RSD3 in Oslo, Glanville said, Cybernetics is the theory; design is the action. We need both theory and action to tame the challenges that really matter. A theory of conversation contributes rigor and dependability to socially-conscious design.”

Paul Pangaro a.k.a. /pangaro | @paulpangaro ~ Opening keynote at RSD5 symposium

Changing routines: Designing projects for meaningful work

Added on 24 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

The more meaning, the better.

“We need a deliberate and constant investment in routines involving learning, improving, and maturing as part of integrated practices and a clear identification of the project roles necessary so that teammates can build trust with one another, help others on the team, and keep the team together over time. This effort may include defining a well-understood, comfortable, open, inviting project language. When a team defines a project’s purpose and artifacts together then iterates them over time and even across successive projects, the learning environment matures iteratively as part of the project experience.”

Daniel Szuc, Jo Wong, Michael Davis Burchat, and Jennifer Fabrizi ~ UXPA Magazine ★

Time to re-think Design Thinking

Added on 14 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

It’s no silver bullet but through critique the concept will only get stronger.

“Faced by growing competition and nimbler start-ups, many organizations are struggling. They suffer from a crisis of innovation. Unable to differentiate their brands, their products and their services in a digitally disruptive world, organizations’ future success depends on better managing and responding to change. Their very existence hinges on their ability to continuously and rapidly innovate. In order to do so successfully, they must place people at the heart of everything they do. They must harness the power of design. Business leaders once distinguished business strategy from customer experience but, today, that mindset is changing: business strategy has become experience strategy.”

Olof Schybergson and Shelley Evenson ~ Huffington Post ★ courtesy of @marcovanhout

Jared Spool on UX Design

Added on 14 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

The need for designers starts to get intop formal education as well.

“The design industry is torn over the issue of certification. Today anyone can be a designer. Basically, you’re a designer if you put it in your Twitter bio. We probably have more people saying they’re designers than we have designers. On the other side we have folks like yourself who have now produced an entire curriculum that outputs a pretty well-defined industry-ready designer.”

Des Traynor a.k.a. /destraynor | @destraynor ~ Intercom ★

User experience in libraries: Applying ethnography and human-centered design (Book review)

Added on 11 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

UX in specific contexts, now libraries.

“It’s easy to acknowledge and broadly accept the general concepts of user experience and human-centered design in relation to libraries, but the real work illustrated in User Experience in Libraries is hard to do. It requires support, buy-in, and dedication of time and resources. As with so many things, the question becomes how to get this book, these powerful chapters, into the right hands. How do we move beyond the echo chamber of passionate advocates? There are no answers offered in this review, other than for practitioners to keep talking and sharing. If we’re lucky, with its honesty and rational approach, ‘User Experience in Libraries: Applying Ethnography and Human-Centered Design can break through’.”

Heidi Steiner Burkhardt a.k.a. /heidisteiner | @heidi_sb ~ Weave: Journal of Library User Experience 1.5 ★

Beyond the conversation: Context-fluid experiences and augmented cognition

Added on 4 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

How to frame fluidity into a design challenge.

“What we can do currently, however, is think about how to best make use of the available data acquisition methods to create context-sensitive applications for context-fluid experiences. As designers, it is our job to continue to facilitate and improve the two-way conversation between our technology and its users. Let’s work toward creating meaningful feedback loops between human and computer, thus optimizing the context-fluid experience.”

Cameron Miller a.k.a. /cameronalexandermiller | @ChancesAreCam ~ Boxes and Arrows ★

The interaction-attention continuum: Considering various levels of human attention in interaction design

Added on 1 October 2016 Peter Bogaards

Attention, the 21st century human currency.

“The article discusses the need to develop interaction designs that are usable at various levels of attention, providing a continuum to facilitate designer-researcher in applying this notion. This continuum and the design considerations we derive from case studies are relevant when designing interactive systems for everyday routines.”

Saskia Bakker and Karin Niemantsverdriet ~ International Journal of Design 10.2 ★

On information design (.pdf)

Added on 28 September 2016 Peter Bogaards

InfoDesign is alive and kicking.

“The book you have before you is sediment, an old-fashioned document that registers an event that, in Slovenia, could well represent a utopian or at least an optimistic step into cutting-edge thought, while, in its English version, it contributes important knowledge to the existing, internationally recognized discipline we call information design. In late 2009, Slovenia’s Museum of Architecture and Design began its fourth series of lectures in the theory of architecture and design; like the ones before it, this lecture series was founded on the idea that when talking about professional disciplines on the local scale we need to speak from the experience of what is happening globally and must open new doors and seek ideas more at depth than at breadth.”

Edited by Petra Černe Oven and Cvetka Požar ~ courtesy of @pco_paralaksa

Beyond the lab: Gathering holistic, qualitative user experience data

Added on 27 September 2016 Peter Bogaards

Making UX measured. The power of numbers.

“The field of User Experience is increasingly under pressure to gather qualitative data in shorter amounts of time. As a UX professional, I’m on the hunt for novel methods and approaches that facilitate the collection of meaningful information about users’ emotions and engagement. A central tenet of User Experience is the importance of gathering revealing, informative, powerful data about the user experience by engaging with users. For example, during usability tests, users interact with Web sites, applications, products, and concepts and give us detailed feedback as they go. Whether you are a UX designer, developer, marketer, engineer, or in executive leadership, seeing users use your product first hand is invaluable.”

Heather Wright Karlson a.k.a. /hwrightkarlson | @uxheat ~ UXmatters ★

Task Performance Indicator: A management metric for customer experience

Added on 27 September 2016 Peter Bogaards

Making CX measured. The power of numbers.

“It’s hard to quantify the customer experience. “Simpler and faster for users” is a tough sell when the value of our work doesn’t make sense to management. We have to prove we’re delivering real value—increased the success rate, or reduced time-on-task, for example—to get their attention. Management understands metrics that link with other organizational metrics, such as lost revenue, support calls, or repeat visits. So, we need to describe our environment with metrics of our own.”

Gerry McGovern a.k.a. /gerry-mcgovern | @gerrymcgovern ~ A List Apart ★

Innovation and UX: Towards an adaptive and motive-based approach

Added on 19 September 2016 Peter Bogaards

Holism as a mindset for UX thinking.

“UX is more than just key performance indicators (KPIs). Yes, they are helpful for standardized testing or measures of satisfaction, but commonly used UX KPIs do not show the whole picture when assessing user needs and experiences. This is because current UX KPIs like efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability constrain the perspective to the already known and pre-defined UX dimensions. They neglect other at least equally important aspects of the user’s reality. A holistic UX approach is needed that incorporates user needs and motives and allows technical product innovations to be truly human-centered.”

Clemens Breuninger, Benjamin Dennig, and Sebastian Klein ~ UXPA Magazine ★