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“Unfortunately, in the field of user experience, people often confuse terms like information architecture, interaction design, visual design, usability engineering, and UX design. In some cases, people use these terms almost interchangeably. This article provides a lexicon of these terms and more clearly defines the role of the user experience designer.”
“Building a quality UX team in any setting is a tough challenge. Trying to build a quality UX team in a services organization presents unique challenges, because a ready pool of qualified applicants simply does not exist. Thankfully, our profession is in demand. The unfortunate side effect is that we can’t easily find the right people to grow our team, even in this challenging economy.”
“I have found that the best way to think of user experience is as the core of a brand: the reactor or the nucleus. Without good user experience your brand means nothing. But what is a brand? Its most basic definition is the sum of the experiences that a person has with a company or organization. You may be wondering what branding has to do with you the interface designer.”
(Shawn Borsky a.k.a. @anthemcg ~ Spyre Studios)
“Journey models are emerging as a welcome and valuable refresh of some old and new tools in our UX arsenal. They are not just another deliverable for your checklist; they’re a valuable method for digging deep into problems of long-term engagement, cultivating empathy, and establishing a problem space in which to generate and test ideas. Their output can serve as a backbone for strategic recommendations and more tactical initiatives. Form and function can vary widely depending on the project and stakeholder needs, but at their core, journey models are stories that focus on the meaningful relationships between individuals and organizations, and highlight opportunities to build a better future.”
(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki and Jamie Thomson a.k.a. @uxjam ~ UX Magazine)
“I think the greatest insight I gained from Karen’s adaptive content talk is the idea that historically, all content has been designed and created for a ‘primary platform’, whose format is well understood. After its initial publication, it must then be reformatted to meet the design realities of any other contexts in which it is to appear.”
(R. Stephen Gracey a.k.a. @rsgracey ~ The Content Strategy Noob)
“The field of service design is still young and evolving. And its interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to define. (…) Regardless of the channel (social media, web, mobile, in-store, product experience) organizations that want to deliver great user experiences have to take time to educate their employees at all levels and at all touchpoints about what the company stands for, what it means to work there, and what kind of experiences they need to ensure for all users. Great service design means everyone involved is on board with creating the experience the audience wants. Take it from me, that can’t happen without a common goal, proper communication, and lots of practice.”
(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki ~ UX magazine)
“Some say the Internet is making us stupid but a mirror just reflects. Online media showing human brutality, corruption or stupidity just reveal what is. The Internet, as a microscope and telescope on humanity, is showing us to us. It isn’t physical, but thoughts cause words and deeds as guns fire bullets. Humanity’s thoughts are now online for us to choose. We, the human race, are choosing what we think and what we think is now online, with web-counters keeping the score. What the Internet electronic mirror shows isn’t always pretty but it is real and to change oneself one must first see oneself. The evolution of computing is a part of human evolution, of a social experiment that has been ongoing for thousands of years. Only by personal evolution, by seeing beyond ourselves, do we help it succeed.”
“Because this state is so desirable, both for productivity and for pleasure, many application (web and mobile) designers are starting to try to design for it as well. This is a daunting task. First, all humans are different. This means in identical situations I hit flow at a very different moment in the ease-to-difficulty continuum than you do. Secondly, flow is extremely easily to disrupt.”
(Christina Wodtke a.k.a. @cwodtke ~ Boxes and Arrows)
“We’re in the middle of a paradigm shift from unstructured content to structured content. It is unsustainable to continually unpick unstructured content, at the last mile, across our broadcast, print and digital channels. This shift is making us revisit the way we capture, structure and store content in fundamental ways. Content modeling is one of those. These pages outline the role of content modeling as a effective communication tool for structuring content.”
(Cleve Gibbon a.k.a. @cleveg)
“Information design has theoretical as well as practical components and information designers need to have theoretical knowledge as well as practical skills. In order to perform sound reflections and make a qualified reflection regarding theory and practice, we need concepts both to structure our thoughts, and to decribe them verbally.”
(Rune Petterson ~ IIID)
“(…) we can neither follow nor ignore design patterns completely. Instead, we need a deep understanding of the rules of human-computer interaction, so that we know when breaking them is OK.”
(Rian van der Merwe a.k.a. @rianvdm Smashing Magazine)
“We talk about good user experiences an awful lot these days, but when it comes to digital interactions, hardly anyone seems to know what that really means.”
“Although achieving Agile UX was a gradual process, we eventually made the shift. In this article, we’ll share some insights we gained and barriers we had to overcome to develop successful approach to UX agility.”
(Carissa Demetris, Chris Farnum, Joanna Markel, and Serena Rosenhan ~ UXmatters)
“(…) social media is very much our concern. That is because social media is firmly a part of the user’s experience, and we are user experience designers. The user experience does not occur within a single channel (such as a website or Facebook page). Users move between multiple channels and so all of these channels need to be designed as one consistent user experience.”
(Paul Boag a.k.a. @boagworld ~ Smashing Magazine)
“UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle.”
(Dain Miller a.k.a. @_dain ~ Webdesigner Depot)
“This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as industry practitioners, who are conducting UX design and evaluation work and who either are applying theories, theoretical concepts and frameworks in their UX research or have concrete plans to do so.”
“The answer is 5, except when it’s not. Most arguments for using more test participants are wrong, but some tests should be bigger and some smaller.”
“Here we have described big data analytics as an emerging type of knowledge work, with plenty of opportunities for study and productivity improvements. However, even for those who are not interested in this form of knowledge work, big data analytics cannot be ignored: It’s an important new avenue to learn about how people interact with computing.”
(Danyel Fisher, Rob DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Steven Drucker ~ ACM Interactions)
“Our overall goal is to lay the foundations for a ‘dramaturgy of performance’ by establishing a framework of concepts—a language, if you like—to help express the different ways in which computers can be embedded into performative experiences. We intend this framework to guide practitioners and researchers who are entering the field of artistic, performance, and cultural applications of computing. However, we also aim to stimulate wider thinking in HCI in general around the changing nature of the extended user experience and the new challenges this raises.”
(Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi ~ ACM Interactions)
“HyperCard’s problem was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for.”
(Matthew Lasar a.k.a. @MatthewLasar ~ Ars Technica)