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“In our work with design teams, we see a lot of teams using prototypes today. We’re also seeing many of those same teams fall into traps that reduce the effectiveness of their prototyping efforts. Here’s five of the most common ones we see.”
“We inhabit many different semantic environments as we go about our lives. For example, religion is one such semantic environment: we use a particular set of words, in particular ways, when we are in church. Semantic environments are also composed of many subenvironments.”
(Jorge Arango a.k.a. @jarango)
“Arguing for ‘separation of content from presentation’ implies a neat division between the two. The reality, of course, is that content and form, structure and style, can never be fully separated. Anyone who’s ever written a document and played around to see the impact of different fonts, heading weights, and whitespace on the way the writing flows knows this is true. Anyone who’s ever squinted at HTML code, trying to parse text from tags, knows it too.”
(Karen McGrane a.k.a. @karenmcgrane ~ A List Apart)
“Design is a key source of innovation and therefore part of the solution to the growth challenge Europe is facing. Every day we see start-up businesses inspired by design and creative thinking, and leading global enterprises using it as a means to boost business development and gain competitive advantage. Worldwide there is also an increasing focus on how design and other creative skills can contribute to a green transition. A major part of a product’s environmental footprint is defined through the early design phase, so many environmental issues can be solved by focusing on reducing environmental impact early in the development process. Rapid urbanisation is another example. The rise of mega-cities with millions of inhabitants is increasing the need for design solutions both technical and social that can meet the challenge of creating sustainable urban environments on a huge scale.”
“Strategy is about trying to take control and trying to win. Strategy is about trying to predict the future or at least enough of that future that will give you a competitive advantage. Strategy is about being specific. It is about helping you get from A to C by doing B. It’s about putting your cards on the table, placing your bets.”
“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest in user support, resource discovery and collaborative work areas.”
(CERN)
“Long listings might need pagination by default, but if users customize the display to ‘View All’ list items, respect that preference.”
“We’ll start with a brief introduction to Service Design and cover a case study from an insurance company to demonstrate its key service design ideas and methods. Gjensidige – Norway’s biggest insurance company – is a large organization dealing with an abstract “product” of insurance and financial services, but with outcomes that deeply affect people at critical moments in their lives. Building on Gjensidige’s strategy to be completely customer centered, we will show you how a service blueprint can bring together groups – like Marketing and IT – that are often misaligned and at times at war. We’ll also show you how cross-channel experience prototyping with customers and staff made two organizations (insurance and banking) feel like one to the customer.”
(Lavrans Løvlie, Andy Polaine, and Ben Reason ~ O’Reilly)
“Contemporary Steampunk culture owes much to the Internet and the communities of practice that have arisen online to share techniques, post tutorials, debate principles, and generally create an ecosystem that supports and celebrates improvisation, exploration, experimentation, and bricolage.”
(Joshua Tanenbaum, Audrey Desjardins, Karen Tanenbaum ~ ACM Interactions May/June 2013)
“Search is a conversation: a dialogue between user and system that can be every bit as rich as human conversation. Like human dialogue, it is bidirectional: on one side is the user with their information need, which they articulate as some form of query.”
(Tony Russell-Rose a.k.a. @tonygrr ~ UX magazine)
“(…) organizations that lag in customer experience can be found more commonly in the airline, Internet service provider and healthcare industries.”
“Put your user in the middle of your flow. Make them press an extra button, make them provide some inputs, let them be part of the service-providing, rather than a bystander to it. If they are part of the flow, they have a better vantage point to see what’s going on. Automation is great, but it’s a layer of cognitive complexity that should be used carefully.”
(David Lieb a.k.a. @dflieb ~ TechCrunch)
“These questions continue to apply in prototyping, building and all the way to delivery of new services and on into business as usual. I’ve used these same questions in co-design sessions, putting them directly in the hands of participants as they work on being a part of their own products and services.”
“Kids are special. There is no doubt about that. But it does not explain why they also need special attention when it comes to user research. Here are 5 reasons why we need to start doing user testing with kids and why it’s very different than what we know from testing adults.”
(Sabina Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ UXkids)
“The past year’s success is the product of a talented, smart, hard-working group, and I take great pride in being a part of this team. Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.”
“I couldn’t end a conversation with one of the fathers of computer graphics without asking him where he thought the field might go in the next fifty years. I should have remembered, though: Sutherland had already explained to me that he’s not into the prediction game.”
(Harry McCracken a.k.a. @harrymccracken ~ TIME.com)
“If our community is going to actively sell the concept of user experience, we need hard data. Yet at every conference I attend, I hear about new tools, new techniques, new processes – but almost never about unassailable scientific results that demonstrate replicability. Sadly, most of the case stories I hear are merely glorified advertising. Moreover, like touching the hot iron as a child, learning about what doesn’t work is also important.”
(Eric Reiss a.k.a. @elreiss ~ FatDUX)
“While sustained behavior and lifestyle changes can lead to improved health outcomes, there may be another pathway to health. Namely, the increased sense of confidence and control that comes from being successful at changing ANY behavior, even if the change is not sustained, can also improve health outcomes. Learn how to avoid the tyranny of prescribed failure experiences. Learn how to prescribe success by aligning with passions, discovering patient-generated solutions, and celebrating success.”
(David Sobel ~ Healthcare Experience Design 2013, the presentation videos)
“Usability findings derived from a broad base of diverse studies have higher credibility than those based on many users with a single stimulus.”
“The methods of experience design uniquely situate experience designers to address employee disengagement in textured ways. By uncovering the root behavioral causes and co-producing solutions with employees, experience designers can create the right kind of resources, which empower organizations to own their desired change over time. As employee experience design is not a tidy activity, this article will focus less on concrete deliverables or step-by-step how-to-recommendations. Instead, a working framework is presented to assist experience designers in thinking through their own process-centric approaches and solutions.”
(Liana Dragoman a.k.a. @ldragoman ~ UX Magazine)