“Flat design is nothing but simplicity put into practice. The fact that simple shapes such as rectangles and circles are being preferred over gradients and drop shadows shows that the tide is in favor of simplicity.”
Developing a customer experience strategy
“Digital technologies are disrupting many industries but for each there are also new revenue opportunities to be had. A customer experience strategy is a fast way of uncovering the untapped revenue in your business.”
(Mark Cameron a.k.a. @MarkRCameron ~ Marketing Magazine)
The UX professionals’ guide to working with Agile Scrum teams
“For Scrum and Agile to live up to its full potential, it must address the needs of all team contributors, not just software developers. Giving support and trust to UX contributors will help motivate them to do their best work and leverage more of their skills in the pursuit of excellence.”
(Aviva Rosenstein a.k.a. @uxresearch ~ Boxes and Arrows)
Why cards are the future of the Web
“We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.”
Vintage Infodesign: A set of charts, maps and graphics created before 1960
“Wired’s Map Lab is rapidly becoming a must-follow, when the topic in hand is cartography. We mention their insightful articles regularly, especially on our Data Viz News post – we even created a Cartography section for the latest edition, with all the great content being published about this subject. In one of their recent articles, Gregg Miller uncovered several rarely seen maps from San Francisco’s ‘quirkiest’ hidden Library, the Prelinger library.”
Interaction Cost: Definition
“The interaction cost is the sum of efforts – mental and physical – that the users must deploy in interacting with a site in order to reach their goals.”
Great design always means great style
“Many people confuse style with fashion, with the surface features of an object. No, good style runs deep. I work in interaction and product design, and the designers I work with think hard about what lies beneath the skin; about the way a product or service interacts with those who engage it; about the value, functions and utility of the design. We go deeply into the essence of the product. This sense of style is one of the fundamentals of great design.”
Smaller, better, faster, and stronger: Remaking government for the digital age
“The internet is changing our world in more ways than we could ever have imagined. And as it reaches into every corner of our lives, it is transforming our relationships with one another, the jobs we do and the ways we spend our time. For the organizations living through these changes, the operating environment has changed profoundly. Around the world, industry after industry has been turned on its head by the internet and the things that digital technology makes possible. But when we look back over the last two decades, nowhere has the internet revolution been felt less than in the business of government. To its credit, the current administration has made a real effort to up the pace of reform. Much progress has already been made, spearheaded by the new Government Digital Service. The Government Digital Strategy lays out what more there is to do over the next two years. That the government goes on to achieve the goals it has set itself is tremendously important. It is also only the beginning.”
(Chris Yiu with Sarah Fink ~ Policy Exchange)
Flexible usability testing: Ten tips to make your sessions adapt to your clients’ needs
“For testing assignments where client teams are ready, willing and able to take immediate action, being flexible with tasks within and between participants can offer better bang for your buck.”
(Jakob Nielsen‘s Alertbox)
Content as medium
“The industry seemed to assume that it was the very physicality of books, newspapers and magazines that we craved – or that we required in order to comprehend the idea of a digital equivalent. The industry was wrong. Digital newspapers that were actually much more like TV news-channel tickers have now all but disappeared.”
(Matt Gemmell a.k.a. @mattgemmell)
How we do user research in Agile teams
“Getting user research into Agile teams in a way that is timely, relevant and actionable is a challenge that teams the world over are tackling. Working effectively in agile has recently been the driver of some fairly significant changes to the way our researchers work at GDS.”
(Leisa Reichelt a.k.a. @leisa ~ GDS)
Design is about relationships
“It’s easy to get so caught up in theory and process that we forget that design is about relationships. It’s not about Photoshop comps or bytes of code. It’s about people. And content. And, especially today, their devices. It’s about the interplay between content and form, between real-time data and how, when, and why we share and consume it. It’s about enabling connections where they couldn’t have existed before. It’s about focusing on creating experiences that are more meaningful, more delightful, and ultimately, more human.”
(Josh Brewer a.k.a. @jbrewer ~ Designers & Geeks)
Information architecture: More than just a pretty menu
“The good news is there’s no magic involved. Anyone who can focus on both the big picture and detailed elements simultaneously has the potential to be good at IA. (…) In other words, it’s now easier than ever to do it yourself when it comes to creating or updating your site’s IA.”
The language of dynamic and interactive graphics
“This blog post explores if and how the framework for the analysis of static graphics offered by Yuri Engelhardt in his PhD thesis, The language of graphics: A framework for the analysis of syntax and meaning in maps, charts and diagrams (2002), might be usefully extended to become applicable to dynamic and interactive graphics as well. This brief exploration will center on a discussion of one example of a dynamic graphic: Gapminder World.”
Enabling new types of web user experiences
“The goal of this document is to rise above the current alphabet soup of technical standards and create some conjecture and possibly even motivation around how these standards can work together. The web can be so much more that what native apps can do. It can offer interactivity like water, pouring out of any device with nothing but a click. This is the super power of the web and isn’t appropriately appreciated as the key differentiator from native apps.”
(Scott Jenson a.k.a. @scottjenson ~ W3C Blog)
Seeing the elephant: Defragmenting user research
“I encountered a series of robust, expensive, well-staffed teams of researchers – many with doctorates – employing just about every imaginable method to study the user experience.”
Cognitive science and design: Biological computation
“This session will provide an in-depth look at human perception and cognition, and its implications for interactive and visual design. The human brain is purely treated as an information processing machine, and we will teach the audience its attributes, its advantages, its limitations, and generally how to hack it. While the content will provide a deep review of recent cognitive science research, everything presented will also be grounded in example design work taken from a range of Google applications and platforms. Specific topics will include: edge detection, gestalt laws of grouping, peripheral vision, geons and object recognition, facial recognition, color deficiencies, change blindness, flow, attention, cognitive load balancing, and the perception of time.”
(Alex Faaborg a.k.a. @faaborg)
The paradox of wearable technologies
“Welcome to the new world of wearable computers, where we will tread uneasily as we risk continual distraction, continual diversion of attention, and continual blank stares in hopes of achieving focused attention, continual enhancement, and better interaction, understanding, and retention. Google’s latest hardware toy, Glass, which has received a lot of attention, is only the beginning of this challenge.”
User-centred design research for international users
“It is helpful to consider the principles of user-centred design when building any website, but it is of particular importance when creating a site that is intended to appeal to a global audience. At a high level the process is simple: understand your users’ needs, try to build those requirements into your digital solution, the test your design throughout to validate your assumptions or revise accordingly, and only release the product when you are certain you have met as many of these as possible. This should ensure that most potential usability issues have been removed, and that the user has a memorable, persuasive, and compelling experience of the brand and the useful services it offers.”
(Chris Rourke a.k.a. @crourke ~ .net magazine)
How emotional design can give your website much more impact
“While emotional design isn’t currently in scope of many (corporate) interaction design projects, it should be. Because interaction design is about how it works. You can interpret this in many ways, but we think ‘how it works’ also means what your product ‘does’ with the user, i.e. how it feels. In this article I’ll give you an idea of the potential of emotional design. We’ll be looking at copywriting and visuals but especially looking at interaction, since we’re interaction designers.”
(Flin Nortier a.k.a. @flin84 ~ The Next Web)