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“This column focuses on three key aspects of aligning User Experience with a company’s business functions and, thereby, breaking out of the mold of user interface design: understand the company, the competition and the customer.”
(Paul Bryan a.k.a. @paulbryan ~ UXmatters)
“The reality is that you don’t need to have the title of a UX professional or consultant to make a contribution in the field of user experience. If you are passionate about making a difference for the users who will eventually use the product you are working on and have the skills you need to do the work, that’s really all you need to contribute to the product’s user experience. Simply decide for yourself that this is what you want to do, no matter what title you happen to have in your organization. In this article, I’ll give some advice to people who want to work as UX professionals. While most of these tips provide general guidance to anyone who wants to become a UX professional, some apply specifically to technical writers.”
(Delia Rusu ~ UXmatters)
“A mix of factors, ranging from commoditization to evaporating barriers to competition, are conspiring to push design to the fore of business thinking.”
(Cliff Kuang a.k.a. @cliffkuang ~ FastCo.Design) ~ courtesy of ronverwey
“Let’s take a quick look at the left brain-right brain theory to recap which part of our brain is responsible for what. Then, we’ll shed some light on how you can consider different ways of thinking in your design in order to optimize the experience for your visitors.”
(Sabine Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ Usabilia)
“Companies all over the world clearly need user experience designers, but even more, they need an excellent User Experience.”
(Marcin Treder a.k.a. @marcintreder ~ Designmodo) ~ courtesy of uxfactory
“Native applications are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history. We will look back on these past 10 years as the time we finally grew out of our desktop mindset and started down the path of writing apps for an infinite number of platforms. As the cost of computation and connectivity plummets, manufacturers are going to put ‘interactivity’ into every device. Some of this will be trivial: my power adaptor knows it’s charging history. Some of it will be control related: my television will be grand central for my smart home. But at it’s heart, we’ll be swimming in world where every device will have ‘an app’. What will it take for us to get here, what technologies will it take to make this happen? This talk will discuss how the principles of the open web must apply not only to prototocols but to hardware as well. How can we build a ‘DNS for hardware’ so the menagerie of devices has a chance for working together?”
(Scott Jenson a.k.a. @scottjenson ~ dConstruct 2012)
“A tribute to esteemed museum director Bill Moggridge, who passed away on September 8, 2012 following a battle with cancer. Hear about his pioneering work and influence in the field of design from Tim Brown and David Kelley of IDEO, Bernie Roth of Stanford University and Caroline Baumann and Cara McCarty of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.”
“Digital touchpoints like websites, mobile phones, tablets can drive revenue, lower costs, build brands, and engender customer loyalty. This shouldn’t be new news to anyone reading this. But to achieve these potential benefits, you need to deliver digital interactions that meet your customers’ needs in easy and enjoyable ways. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. Companies struggle on a daily basis to identify what digital experience improvements they need to make – and, once that’s nailed down, how exactly to make them.”
(Kerry Bodine a.k.a. @kerrybodine ~ Forrester Research)
“To make sense of all these different voices, it would be interesting to have some sort of common language. Maybe not as complex as a “language”, just a proto-taxonomy would already do a great job at organizing the service research efforts. Giving to the referred disciplines a basic set of concepts where they all could recognize and differentiate themselves would most probably foster collaboration among them. But, the problem would be to get the communities that evolve around each one of these disciplines to develop it. And then accept it. And then adopt that unique framework.”
(Mauricio Manhaes a.k.a. @mcmanhaes ~ Service Design Network)
“Wireframes just aren’t up to the job of showing subtle interaction details—the things that make the difference between an application that is a delight to use and one that frustrates and annoys. And even if you’re using a more sophisticated prototyping tool, you’re still not doing yourself any favors, because these tools don’t allow your designs to adapt to the multitude of different screen sizes that are out there.”
(Martin Polley a.k.a. @martinpolley ~ capcloud)
“Today, organizations interact with their customers through multiple digital channels such as call centers, mobile devices, applications, and Web sites. It is not enough to create a strategy for these channels from business, technology, and marketing perspectives. Rather, it is essential that an organization’s UX strategy be at the core of user-centered design. A UX strategy establishes goals for a cohesive user experience across all channels and touchpoints.”
(April McGee ~ UXmatters)
“Many organizations are moving from waterfall to agile software development methods. They often combine this shift with a move to user-centered design (UCD). This makes sense because, in addition to bringing great intrinsic benefits, UCD has a lot in common with agile. Both encourage a multidisciplinary approach, are iterative, encourage feedback, discourage bloated and overly rigid documentation, and value people over processes. However, the combination of agile and UCD all too often leads to UX design becoming the main blocker in the development process. Why is this?”
“Design Thinking is one of the more recent buzz words in the design community. In this introductory article, I will investigate what Design Thinking is, what its main characteristics are, and take a look at the process and the methods associated with it. I will also take a brief look at the history of Design Thinking. (…) I have accumulated my knowledge of Design Thinking from presentations at SAP and conferences, and by reading of books and articles. I wrote this article to help readers gain a general understanding of the concepts of Design Thinking across different proponents of the approach. Since I do not have any practical experiences with this approach, I will refrain from evaluating it, which was not the purpose of my article.”
(Gerd Waloszek ~ SAP Design Guild) ~ courtesy of @sly
“Startups really aren’t thinking about what the user wants, and how to help them accomplish that goal. Focusing on that is the only thing that will actually make your users happy.”
(Harrison Weber a.k.a. @HarrisonWeber ~ The Next Web)
“(…) it is imperative that companies focus on service design to gain competitive advantage.”
“Proceedings from the Designing Solutions to Wicked Problems symposium held on the 9th and 10th November 2009 at the Melbourne Town Hall with a compendium of provocations and commentaries. (…) We can aspire to design that contributes to a more sustainable future that delights the eye and the soul, and that transforms the everyday as much as it does the uncommon. Design at its essence is focused on the creation of meaning and solutions. To focus on those problems for which no easy solutions have yet been found is the true challenge which great design should meet.”
(Terry Cutler editor ~ DRI Research Institute)
“I’m a big fan of the Lean Startup movement and love the underlying principle of testing, learning, and pivoting by experimenting with the most basic product prototypes imaginable – so-called Minimal Viable Products (MVP) – during the search for product-market fit. It helps companies avoid building stuff that customers don’t want. Yet, there is no underlying conceptual tool that accompanies this process. There is no practical tool that helps business people map, think through, discuss, test, and pivot their company’s value proposition in relationship to their customers’ needs. So I came up with the Value Proposition Designer (…)”
(Alexander Osterwalder a.k.a. @AlexOsterwalder ~ Business Model Alchemist)
“We all know basic tenets of user-centered design. We recognize different research methods, the prototyping stage, as well as the process of documenting techniques in our rich methodological environment. The question you probably often ask yourself, though, is how it all works in practice?”
“Let’s face it, content development is still a massively frustrating process.”
(James Deer a.k.a. @jamesdeer ~ Six Revisions)
“This report provides clear foundations for the future of content strategy. It means Content Strategists can no longer afford to specialise in just Digital or even Social Media. You will need to expand your skill set to include a deep understanding of above the line, mobile, games and offline experiences. Transmedia Storytelling is not a fad; it’s the convergence of media channels to meet the need of the user.”
(Kohlben Vodden a.k.a. @kohlben ~ WhatWorksWhere)