The UX of open source content management

I guess open source applications is the second category UX forgot, just like enterprise aqpplications. Crypto apps for example.

“Ultimately, that’s what makes UX in open source content management such a daunting task. The limitless, unpredictable variance in use cases, combined with an ever-increasing demand for multi-language, “easy to understand” interfaces is difficult to keep up with.”

(Blake Callens a.k.a. @blakecallens ~ OpenSource.com)

Toward a culture of integrated practice

UX design more and more involved with UX culture design and change.

“To set expectations properly, while no one’s learnings in six Mondays would approach the equivalent of earning a graduate degree in Anthropology or Sociology, they don’t need to. However, people do experience significant change toward integrating human experience into their work, along with plain speech and good reason. Let’s call that buy-in. Over time, repetition of such experiences converts their conscious acts into mental pathways and muscle memory. This feeds the unself-conscious mind and heightens creativity. While this experiment is clearly an oversimplification, it offers a powerful demonstration of integrating disciplines into actual practice. The aim of the experiment is to lower or even remove the barrier to entry from UX research.”

(Michael Davis-Burchat, Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong ~ UXmatters)

Practical techniques on designing animation

Animated UIs can improve the UX. I said ‘can’.

“Animation, like any other facet of the web, must be designed. As web developers, we think about the effects of typography, layout, interaction, and shifting viewports, but when incorporating animation we have another factor to consider: time. It’s not just an extra aspect to consider, either: it increases the complexity of each of the aforementioned parameters exponentially. Rather than viewing this as a heavy mass of ideas, we can bake animation into the core of our user experience process to create dazzling, exciting, and engaging work that pushes boundaries and collectively elevates the medium of the web.”

(Sarah Drasner a.k.a. @sarah_edo ~ Smashing Magazine)

Why sound is digital design’s fourth dimension

Sound being a great design material, digitally and physically.

“One of the underappreciated repercussions of transitioning from a world more concerned with the movement of electrons than of gears, pistons, and flywheels is the elimination of noise. Sound, after all, is vibration propagated through some kind of medium (usually air), so the fewer moving parts there are disturbing the atmosphere around us, the fewer vibrations there are to reach our ears.”

(Christian Cantrell ~ FastCo Design)

How important is art direction to the success of a website?

Part of what’s called production values in cinematography.

“Today I want to offer more thoughts about art direction. Despite its benefits, is art direction something we need to do for the sites we create? How important is it to the success of the site? I want to address both questions today. I’m not sure I have great answers or even any answers, but I want to share some thoughts to help both of us answer the questions for ourselves.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo Design)

Coping with the big data dump: Towards a framework for enhanced information representation

Big data requires design as well. Perception of data.

“Easy and efficient access to large amounts of data has become an essential aspect of our everyday life. In this paper we investigate possibilities of supporting information representation through the combined use of multiple modalities of perceptions such as sight, touch and kinesthetics. We present a theoretical framework to analyze these approaches and exemplify our findings with case studies of three emergent projects. The results are a contribution to a larger discussion of multimodal information representation at the intersection of theory and practice.”

(Andreas Kratky, Virginia Kuhn, and Jon Olav Eikenes ~ First Monday 6.1)

Crafting a design persona

Anything you can use to stimulate your empathy.

“Crafting a design persona is an intense exercise that requires the the time and involvement of team members throughout your company. While the work may seem daunting, it is well worth it. By investing in your product’s design persona, you are investing in future advocates of your product—and creating a source of design inspiration for your team.”

(Meg Dickey-Kurdziolek a.k.a. @megak ~ A List Apart)

Heading towards UX excellence: Challenges from the UX Management Roundtable

Or how the middle management of Enterprise UX deals with the wicked problems of the experience landscape.

Disclosure: I work at Informaat experience design (The Netherlands) ~ “There is a growing need for UX managers in many organizations. Employees in this new role are facing big and complex challenges. Informaat organizes on a regular basis sessions of the UX Management Roundtable. In these meetings challenges are addressed and discussed UX managers are facing. Conversations of the roundtable from the past two years have now been documented in a free white paper.”

(Susanne van Mulken, Rob van der Haar, and Peter J. Bogaards ~ Informaat BiRDS on a W!RE)

The fox guarding the usability lab

Look-and-feel designers: “Look at how great our usability lab is. All our products and services have great usability.”

“In this editorial, I focus on the inherent conflict of interest that design agencies have when they are responsible for evaluating their own design work, what can be done to mitigate this problem, and the implications for the UX community. I define a design agency as a consulting firm that is hired to design (from a visual and interactive perspective) digital products.”

(Bill Albert ~ Journal of Usability Studies)

The wicked craft of enterprise UX

“While everyone seems to have different definitions of craft, there are some common threads that suggest a special quality of diligence, pride, and beauty, borne out of shaping some raw material with the utmost personal care - whether it’s your hands covered with flour and sugar while making a pie, or some industrial-machined aluminum grafted with a high-resolution pixel display powered by smart algorithms… to keep your family comfortable while enjoying that delicious pie.”

(Uday Gajendar a.k.a. @udanium ~ Medium)

Good design drives shareholder value: 2014 design value index results and commentary

2015 version coming soon, because ‘the results are in’.

“The 2014 Design Value Index shows us for a second year that corporations that put an emphasis on design as a strategic asset perform significantly better than those that do not. As corporate design capabilities mature, executives are able to direct this power towards their companies’ most challenging problems. This, in turn, allows design-driven companies to grow faster, and often with higher margins, due to the exceptional customer experiences they are uniquely positioned to create. Key trends identified through this work include the rise of user-experience (UX) design as a sub-discipline whose growth is expected to outpace all other design disciplines as the number of digital interfaces expand and the significant investment in internal design capabilities under way in many large U.S. companies today, as we see from DVI companies Intuit and IBM .”

(Jeneanne Rae a.k.a. @JeneanneMRae ~ Design Management Institute)

The psychology of UX

Old and still relevant. Human characteristics are of all times.

“When it comes to designing the UX, we need to take into consideration the necessity for a social outlet within our website or application. Allow for greater social interconnectedness in your designs so that people can go to each other for guidance and advice within your application, such as with ratings, reviews, news and forums. Allow users to forge helpful relationships, be it with similar users or with customer support. Give people an awareness of the size of the community they operate in to give them a sense of belonging as well as the choice of where they want to fit in within the community by establishing their profile.”

(Vanessa Carey ~ Methods & Tools) HT janjursa

Journey Maps: Not the end of the story

Have we found another silver bullet for UCD? And remember, the map is not the terrain.

“Journey maps have been around for the better part of a decade – some would argue longer – but it’s really only in the last three or four years that they’ve come into more common use, and more strategists are advocating their use as a framework for improving the customer experience. Without getting into the specifics of what a journey map is or isn’t in this column – there’s no shortage of material on the subject – suffice it to say that many in our field, including me, strongly believe in the potential of journey mapping for helping companies to achieve human-centric business transformations.”

(Ronnie Battista ~ UXmatters)

Your guide to online research and testing tools

A tool is just a tool, based upon a concept model which might not be true.

“The success of every business depends on how the business will meet their customers’ needs. To do that, it is important to optimize your offer, the website, and your selling methods so your customer is satisfied. The fields of online marketing, conversion rate optimization, and user experience design have a wide range of online tools that can guide you through this process smoothly. Many companies use only one or two tools that they are familiar with, but that might not be enough to gather important data necessary for improvement. To help you better understand when and which tool is valuable to use, I created a framework that can help in your assessment. Once you broaden your horizons, it will be easier to choose the set of tools aligned to your business’s needs.”

(Bartosz Mozyrko a.k.a. @UsabilityTools ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Information architecture’s role in UX design

Fortunately, no more discussions on information design versus information architecture. We’ve come from far away.

Jorge Arango discusses the state of IA and the importance of designers’ understanding of context and perspective – “Information architecture has always been an important part of user experience design, though not always acknowledged as such. With the emergence of social, IoT, and mobile, we have watched IA taking on a more dominant role in product development.”

(Mary Treseler a.k.a. @marytreseler ~ O’Reilly Radar)

What does it really mean to design in the browser?

Design with the digital material at hand. The browser interface being the canvas for it.

“Some insist designing in the browser is the only way to design a website. Some say designing in the browser limits creativity and these people don’t want to give up their graphic editors. What’s going on? Why the split? Why so many for and so many against designing in the browser? (…) I think the main reason for any pushback or misunderstanding is that detractors look at the phrase design in the browser literally and those in favor of it don’t.”

(Steven Bradley a.k.a. @vangogh ~ vanseo design)

Merging service design with user experience design

Designing the flow and the journey as a coherent experience.

“There are as many ways of doing Service Design and User Experience Design as there are design companies working in these fields. This makes it somewhat complex and perhaps pointless to define these design fields. I understand that this blogpost will be a subject of discussion, and I’ll therefore begin by saying that the description that follows is based on my own, professional experiences as to the differences and similarities between Service Design and User Experience Design. (…) I’ll describe the differences and similarities between service design and user experience design and how they can work in symbiosis to generate exceptional services, products, business models and customer experiences.”

(Erik Westerdahl a.k.a. @erikwesterdahl ~ Screen Interaction)