Designing Interactions: The Book

Added on 6 October 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Bill Moggridge introduces us to forty influential designers who have shaped our interaction with technology. The early chapters are mostly about invention of precedent setting designs, forming a living history. The center section is structured around topics, so that you can find several opinions collected together for comparison, about designing in a particular context. The later chapters move more towards the future, with trends, possibilities and conjectures. The introduction and final chapter combine to describe the approach to designing interactions that has evolved at IDEO. The book is illustrated with more than 700 images, with color throughout.” (Bill Moggridge) – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Design and Emotion 2006 Conference Proceedings

Added on 5 October 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The Design and Emotion Society and Chalmers University of Technology invite you to the fifth conference on Design and Emotion, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden on September 27-29, 2006. Emotions arise towards people, towards places, towards food, and towards things. Emotions influence our well-being as well as our purchase decisions. From a design perspective, we need to know more about how artefacts elicit emotions. We also need to know more about the way we can identify the relevant emotional aspects and how we can evaluate the emotional impact of a particular design. The International Conference on Design and Emotion 2006 is the arena for these topics.” (D&E 2006 – Design & Emotion Society)

Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture

Added on 5 October 2006 Peter Bogaards
Book excerpt – “Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller – all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community – and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics.” (Fred Turner – EDGE)

12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards

Added on 4 October 2006 Peter Bogaards
“#1: Everything you know is wrong… sort of; #2: It’s not going to look exactly the same everywhere unless you’re willing to face some grief… and possibly not even then; #3: You will be forced to choose between the ideal and the practicable; #4: Perfection is not when there’s nothing to add, but when there’s nothing to take away; #5: Some sites are steaming heaps of edge cases; #6: Longer lead times are inevitable; #7: Coherent and sensible source order is the best of Good Things; #8: Descendant selectors are the beginning and end of genuinely powerful CSS rules; #9: In the real world, stylesheet hacks will get your project across the finish line; #10: Working around rendering bugs is like playing Whack-a-Mole; #11: When you’re drowning in CSS layout problems, make sure of the width and height of the water, float without putting up a struggle, and get clear of the problems; #12: Background images will make the difference between the plain and the tastefully embellished.” (Ben Henick – A List Apart)

Metrics for Heuristics: Quantifying User Experience

Added on 2 October 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Cooperative selection of success measures early in the project’s definition or discovery phase will align design and evaluation from the start, and both the information architect and web analyst can better prove the value of their services and assure that the project’s focus remains on business and user goals. To provide a useful context for design, Rubinoff’s user experience audit is one of several tools information architects can use to evaluate a website.” (Andrea Wiggins – Boxes and Arrows)

A Discussion with Danah Boyd

Added on 28 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“(…) Boyd is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, explores how young people negotiate the presentation of self in online mediated contexts. Her research focuses on how this young audience engages with ‘digital publics’ – connected social spaces such as MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube.” (Ibiblio’s Speaker Series) – courtesy of boingboing

PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week Weblog

Added on 27 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The Cross Media Week Foundation is mandated to bring top creative professionals from around the world together in Amsterdam to create new partnerships and opportunities, as well as to establish international networks. The Foundation supports the City of Amsterdam’s TopStad programme which aims to establish Amsterdam as one of Europe’s most creative cities. PICNIC ’06 Cross Media Week is the Foundation’s first major initiative.” (PICNIC ’06)

Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications

Added on 26 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The Roadmap for Accessible Rich Internet Applications addresses the accessibility of dynamic Web content for people with disabilities. The roadmap outlines the technologies to map controls, AJAX live regions, and events to accessibility APIs, including custom controls used for Rich Internet Applications. The roadmap also outlines new navigation techniques to mark common Web structures as menus, primary content, secondary content, banner information and other types of Web structures. These new technologies can be used to improve the accessibility and usability of Web resources by people with disabilities, without extensive modification to existing libraries of Web resources.” (W3C WAI-ARIA)

Strategy06: A UX Professional’s Experience of the Conference

Added on 26 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Strategy06, the second annual IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) Institute of Design Strategy Conference, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA), Illinois, on May 17 and 18, 2006. The organizers characterized this conference as ‘an international executive forum addressing how businesses can use design to explore emerging opportunities, solve complex problems, and achieve lasting strategic advantage’.” (Pabini Gabriel-Petit – UXmatters)

Applied Empathy: A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires

Added on 26 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“The design community keeps making a lot of noise about designing for people/users/customers. However, while this notion is well-intentioned and even conceptually correct, I find much of it boils down to empty rhetoric. What exactly are we doing? More user research? More usability testing? Certainly these are valid approaches to finding out about people’s needs, but they’re only a small part of an optimal solution. Are we using hollow tasks and tools like personas and scenarios? Those approaches typically take design farther away from the people for whom we are designing products rather than closer. How about focusing on usability and the user experience? That gets at only part of the issue and tends to come from the perspective of the product—as opposed to the more universal needs and desires of actual people” (Dirk Knemeyer – UXmatters)

Masters of Design: Is design a craft, a tool, or an obsession?

Added on 25 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“These days, it’s a bit of all three. But it’s also starting to look a lot like a business fad: Declare you’re a design-centric organization and – voila! – you’re the next Apple. We know it isn’t that simple. So here’s our annual roundup of the creative businesspeople dialing in to the power of design. The final cut: the CEO who rescued Puma, the architect who imagined Google ‘s stunning new offices, the graphic artist behind some of America’s best-known brands, and the product designer who predicts our appetites – and satisfies them. You’ll also meet five talents on the fast track to bigger things, hear sage advice on what design can (and can’t) do for your bottom line, and get an eyeful of some amazing examples of the craft. Tool. Obsession. You get the idea.” (Fast Company) – courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst

Understanding Your Content

Added on 24 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“What are content audits and content maps, and why should they matter to companies who publish information on the Web? Chiara Fox, a senior information architect for Adaptive Path, defines the art of Content Analysis in the scope of web application design and migration. She identifies several milestones and key deliverables that most companies can use on their next (re)design project.” (IT Conversations)

engageID with Mark Vanderbeeken

Added on 22 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Experience design is based on the idea of giving people a role in the design of the products and services that matter to them. Both in the US and in Europe, it is believed that this approach will lead to better products and services and therefore to better economic returns. However, in Europe there is perhaps a more explicit social or ethical drive: by giving people this co-creative role we can establish to a more socially inclusive society. A lot of innovation in Europe comes from public institutions, from the European Commission on down. (…) Design and participatory co-creation for social renewal is a complex challenge, but one that fits very well with the European way of doing things.” (Enric Gili Fort – engageID) – great interview Mark!

Polar Bear Book (3rd ed.): Survey results

Added on 21 September 2006 Peter Bogaards
“Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld are working on a third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the ‘polar bear book’. In order to make sure they include the best ideas and examples, they are conducting a series of community surveys. Five surveys have been completed. Many thanks to those of you who took the time to share your thoughts and insights.” (Information Architecture Institute)