Taking your seat at the strategy table: Three must-have leadership skills

Added on 19 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Strategy for UX. But where’s the UX vision?

“When you take your place at the strategy table as a UX leader, lean in and ground yourself in your deep understanding of customer behavior. Make it central to how you express your product strategy. This customer-focused approach will allow you to provide unique value to the master plan when you practice and evolve the three conventional business skills that I shared from my journey.”

(Sara Ortloff Khoury ~ User Experience Magazine)

So you want to write a digital strategy?

Added on 19 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Moving up the ladder means more strategic thinking, for clients a well.

“A digital strategy is not as intimidating as it sounds. It is just a document outlining how your company or client should handle the different aspects of digital from the website and mobile to email, social media and digital marketing. It doesn’t need to cover everything in huge depth (it would be unreadable if it did), but instead should establish some general approaches to these different areas. This post will provide you with a crash course on where to start and what kinds of things to include. I hope it proves useful.”

(Paul Boag ~ Boagworld)

Rethinking enterprise UX in the age of consumerization

Added on 18 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
A little bit of “CMS, the software UX forgot.

“In today’s digitally savvy world, end-users are making more and more decisions about what they want to get out of software solutions and how they want to experience those solutions. By keeping this in mind, UX teams can be the heroes of their own organizations – building tech experiences that both IT teams and end-users love to use.”

(Michael Ashley ~ UX Magazine)

The UX ownership war is over… and we have lost

Added on 17 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Well, that sounds dramatic and calls for a major reboot of our community.

“I had a profound experience last week, which unfortunately pushed me over to the dark side regarding my perpetually optimistic perspective on how UX design professionals will eventually take a place of equal rank in the boardroom. (…) the future ownership of the UX agenda will become the provenance of people not trained as designers or HCI specialists but of people who have never actually practiced design. At least they will employ designers.”

(Daniel Rosenberg ~ ACM Interactions)

The message gets the medium it deserves

Added on 15 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
I have always been fascinated about how the unique characteristics of a medium define its design space.

“I see this as a core principle of higher order UX; to use the medium in such a way that the medium facilitates the delivery of the message instead of polluting it. It’s that pollution that brings about unanticipated consequences in what the user experiences. This is just as much a holistic experience problem as well as a nitty-gritty design and interaction problem.”

(Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX)

Touchscreens ‘a small step’ in innovation

Added on 12 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Big foot takes smal step.

“One big suggestion gaining traction is the notion of the invisible interface. The idea is that the best design will make all technology move so far into the background that it’s not even noticed and just works without even being thought about. This concept has been around since the 1990s but what this is pushing, from examples so far, is the idea that everything is so intuitive to use that it isn’t even noticed.”

(BBC News)

Content is all that matters on the web

Added on 10 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Couldn’t have said it better. Although,I wouldn’t label people as content consumers.

“The focus and widespread knowledge towards the importance of web design, web development, usability, and user experience is definitely positive, considering that only a few years ago most of the meetings I have had with clients had to start with an explanation of what the term usability meant. However, what is missing in these discussions – what is in desperate need of attention – is web content and the creation of a comprehensive and unified strategy for it.”

(Wojciech Chojnacki ~ Six Revisions)

The hut where the internet began

Added on 8 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Same magazine as ‘As We May Think’. No coincidence.

“In a hut like this — and maybe even one of these huts specifically — Engelbart opened up that issue of LIFE and read Bush’s Atlantic article. The ideas in the story plowed new intellectual terrain for Engelbart, and the seeds that he planted and nurtured there over the next twenty years grew, with the help of millions of others, into the Internet you see today.”

(The Atlantic)

UX and the museum: Converging perspectives on experience design

Added on 4 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Art as experience and how information design can be an important part of exhibition design.

“What started with a conversation over coffee led to a realization that our lines of work had parallel purposes, processes, and goals. We found that we were both passionate about designing for people, regardless of what we were developing. This common vision led us to wonder if our industries are converging on a similar point: designing excellent experiences.”

(Mary Oakland and Shana West ~ UX magazine)

Emotional design with ACT: Designing emotion, personality and relationship (2/2)

Added on 3 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
A kind of anthropomorphism, products with personality.

“We judge products by the personalities we sense through their aesthetics and style of interaction. It takes the skill and sensitivity of designers, marketers and user experience professionals to properly identify the personality that appeals to their target audience, and then consistently design, market, advertise and package that product with the appropriate personality in mind. The A.C.T. Model can help practitioners to more fully and systematically address the requirements that lead to successful products.”

(Trevor van Gorp a.k.a. @trevvg ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Introduction to controlled vocabularies: Terminology for art, architecture, and other cultural works

Added on 2 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
CV, the first step to organize with cats, tabs, and tags.

“An online publication that defines the characteristics, scope, and uses of controlled vocabularies for art and cultural materials, and explains how vocabularies should be integrated in cataloging systems and utilized for indexing and retrieval.”

(Patricia Harpring a.k.a. @PatriciaH500 ~ J. Paul Getty Trust 2010)

Using scenarios to design intuitive experiences

Added on 1 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Using a mind machine intuitively depends on your expertise.

“Scenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user’s experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they’ll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what’s going on at this moment in time and that can be a sticking point. This is where the value of the journey map emerges.”

(Kim Goodwin a.k.a. @kimgoodwin ~ UIE Brainsparks)

You’re doing customer experience innovation wrong

Added on 1 July 2013 Peter Bogaards
Walk the CX talk.

“Everyone talks about customer experience innovation, but no one knows quite what it is or how to attain it. In fact, when we ask customer experience professionals how they’re driving their innovation efforts, we find several misguided approaches that actually thwart differentiation and waste massive amounts of time and money in the process.”

(Kerry Bodine ~ HBR blog)

Insights into site search

Added on 27 June 2013 Peter Bogaards
With optimal design, search goes down, browse goes up.

“This crossover presents a challenge for site search: how do we meet the advanced needs of professional users without confusing members of the public who just want a simple answer? We can’t rely on the page they searched from to define which type of user they are; some people expect to search only within that department, but others have landed in the wrong place and need to find the general results. One of our priorities for this project was to start making search better for advanced users, without getting in the way of less experienced users.”

(Tara Stockford a.k.a. @tarastockford ~ Government Digital Service)