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“The rapid pace of UX design in the agile world can lead to shortsighted design decisions. Focusing on addressing the immediate needs of particular user stories within the limits of a sprint can lead to neglect of larger design questions, which can come back to haunt UX designers later.”
(Damon Dimmick a.k.a. @damondimmick ~ Smashing Magazine) ~ courtesy of willemijnprins
“User experience design just stopped to be a niche and became a standard. (…) User Experience Design lies at the crossroads of art and science. It’s a magical mixture of visual art, hard-boiled psychology and numbers. Non of these nobel ingredients can be omitted, as it may put your whole design endeavor at risk. (…) All my experience taught me that conversion optimization is not a weekend-long job – it’s a way of developing your service. That’s the tiresome reality. The true Dark Side.”
(Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder) ~ courtesy of thomasmarzano
“The emerging focus on user experience will be the key to companies’ success as we move from an industrial to a service-oriented society. Service Design focuses on the methods and processes of a service from the point of view of the user. The goal is to make sure that when a client or customer interacts with the service, from branding to customer service to any point of contact, there is room to make the service more useful, efficient, and effective.”
(AC4D)
“The abilities of today’s network information technologies to create rich, immersive personalized experiences to track interactions and aggregate and analyze them in real time, together with the data collected by the sensors we carry in our smart devices, provides us an opportunity like never before to design adaptivity in order to ultimately offer a better user experience that is both unobtrusive and transparent. This article will cover the fundamental concepts for utilizing smart device technologies and sensor data in order to understand context and introduce ‘adaptive thinking’ into the UX professional’s toolset. I will demonstrate the importance of context when designing adaptive experiences, give ideas on how to design adaptive systems, and perhaps inspire designers to consider how smart devices and context aware applications can enhance the user experience with adaptivity.”
(Avi Itzkovitch a.k.a. @xgmedia ~ Smashing Magazine) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio
“Despite their best intentions, user experience designers and taxonomy and metadata developers have often found that their work is not well connected, even though both are highly interrelated. For example, a design might be proposed that needs segmentation of content by user role, but there may not be metadata associated with content that captures the role, resulting in the need for detailed review of content and hand coding to create the experience. Taxonomists might build a taxonomy for roles without knowing which roles the design uses, leading to over- or under-specification of the taxonomy.”
(Carol A. Hert, Gary Carlson, and Bram Wessel ~ ASIS&T Bulletin, December 2012/January 2013)
“This post is a critique on service design, and especially the thinking and talking side of it. This is based on both my own experiences as someone who has been involved in quite a few service design projects during past years and how those have changed my own view, and what I have seen and heard my colleagues around the world are doing. Of course there’s as many ways to use the toolbox of service design, as there are people who practice it. However, among those who preach and practice service design there’s plenty of enthusiasm and talking, without real life experimentation and implementation of conceptual ideas and actual proof of delivered effects. And that’s a thing I personally have been a little frustrated about.”
“One of the fundamental questions facing the emerging discipline of service design concerns the definition of its object. In this thesis, I posit that the practice of service design, as a recent development within the tradition of industrial design, may be approached primarily as the design of interfaces between service providers and clients.”
“More and more organizations view UX as a key contributor to successful products, connecting teams with end-users and guiding product innovation within the organization. Though it’s fantastic to see this transition happen, there are growing pains associated with becoming a user-driven organization. These are the pitfalls that I see organizations grappling with most often.”
(Elaine Wherry a.k.a. @elainewherry)
“The iPad Mini presents an interesting case study of differences in the use of particular types of mobile devices. People use smaller tablets and eReaders in somewhat different ways: Their usage rates are different. Their use outside the home is more prevalent. And their users hold them differently. For the most part, UX designers and developers are trying to build user experiences that are appropriate to the ways in which people will use an iPad of a smaller size.”
“(…) how service design techniques can produce unique service ideas for the rapidly evolving banking sector. We were lucky to have some fantastic attendees from various European banks and hearing their thoughts on design in their industry was really interesting. I have summarized the content of our workshop and some innovative new financial services in this post.”
(Chris Brooker ~ Service Design Programme)
“While walking back to the infusion center from the hospital cafeteria, my mom briefly stopped and held the wall-railing to catch her breath. Enter a maintenance man 10 feet away who asked “Would you like a wheelchair?” My mom thanked him but graciously declined and we were on our way once again heading to the elevators. We were both moved by his kind and proactive attention. This man exceeded our expectations and two weeks later we’re still talking about him. With four key ingredients, he transformed an ordinary moment into an extraordinary one for us and delivered an exceptional patient experience.”
(Doug Della Pietra a.k.a. @DougDellaPietra ~ Hospital Impact)
“(…) the best services are those that allow us to tell our stories. And the next challenge in design is based on the fact that more and more objects are connected. The amount of data available about all of us and our environment is growing tremendously. But what to do with this data? Our lives are not made up of data, but of choices: a thousand small choices everyday. And stories. Data becomes valuable when it is interpreted by humans. We have to make sense out of it. And we should use it to tell better stories, richer stories from which we can benefit.”
(Louisa Heinrich ~ NEXT Berlin service design)
“As humans, our ability to observe and analyse the contents of the world around us is both unique and astonishing, but so too is our capacity to form verbal and visual concepts. These seem to be the principal factors which have worked to our adaptive advantage in competition with other animal species. We are, in one respect at least, superior to other animals because we have developed a greater variety of systems of communication and expression, and one of these is art.”
“(…) as we approach the end of 2012, the business discipline of customer experience, or CX, has gone mainstream. It’s got its own professional organization, the CXPA. It’s acknowledged as a key competitive differentiator, even by those who prefer spreadsheets to sticky notes. It’s discussed in boardrooms and in media within the context of corporate earnings.”
(Kerry Bodine a.k.a. @kerrybodine ~ UX Magazine)
“It occurs to me at this point that Richard Wurman behaves like a 77-year-old child. I do not mean this to be condescending or dismissive. It is one of the things I like most about him. He seems to have somehow maintained a portion of preoperational egocentrism and the world is richer as a result.”
(Brendan McGetrick ~ Domus) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio
“The key statement of Fitts’s Law is that the time required to move a pointing device to a target is a function of the distance to the target and its size. In layman’s terms: the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target. This is easy to understand, not too difficult to implement and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to contradict such a simple and obvious statement.”
“Today we can also say, translating is designing.”
(Antoine Lefeuvre a.k.a. @jiraisurfer ~ A List Apart)
“Many types of information have their own vocabulary along with conventions for visual communication.”
“Although intranet design is improving, it hasn’t kept pace with increased complexity in enterprise requirements, so measured usability is down slightly.”
“The other driver is the digital content revolution. While best-of-breed technical communication and training departments have been creating multi-channel outputs for years using a write-it-once, use-it-often strategy, traditional publishers haven’t felt the pressure to adopt this approach until the Kindle, smartphones, tablet computers – and of course, the iPad – changed consumer demand.”