Service Design: Setting The Stage For The Consummate Experience

Added on 7 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Mention service design to your UX colleagues and you may find yourself unwittingly engaged in a game of Buzzword Bingo. Whether you call it ‘service design,’ ‘holistic design,’ ‘multi-channel experience design’ or ‘cross-channel design,’ chances are you’re all talking about the same thing. And your next challenge is defining exactly what you mean when you say ‘service design.’ The field of service design is still young and evolving. And its interdisciplinary nature makes it difficult to define. In fact, (…) no common definition of service design exists.”

(Megan Grocki a.k.a. @megangrocki ~ UX Magazine)

Information Overload, Reloaded

Added on 7 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Contemporary information architecture can help reframe how we approach this thing called information overload. In this article (…) Nathaniel Davis, founder and curator of DSIA Research Initiative and DSIA Portal of IA, leads the discussion on behalf of contemporary information architecture. He repositions information abundance and filter failure as signatures of information overload. Davis then suggests how information overload can be quantified as two unique conditions that are ideal for further investigation in theory, research and practice to better understand their influence on providing sound information architecture recommendations.”

(Nathaniel Davis ~ DSIA Portal of IA)

Understanding Our Interaction Design History

Added on 1 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“It’s great that we’re starting to make the history of digital technology available, but I believe we should also be doing the same for interaction design. We need to understand the history of digital design on screens and how it has changed. It’s not because the basic interaction design principles change over time, because they haven’t. The principles we introduced in the CHI course – prominence, relationship, flow, clarity, simplicity and consistency – were just as relevant 25 years ago, they probably just had different names. No, the history matters because how we apply those principles has changed as our technology changed.”

(David Rondeau a.k.a. @dbrondeau ~ InContext)

I don’t care about User Experience

Added on 1 June 2011 Peter Bogaards
“These days we’ve stopped selling UX and started simply doing it. (…) Sure, some agencies or individuals haven’t quite reached that inflexion point yet, but I can tell you that it’s on the way. Demand is far outstripping supply, so if you’re not there yet, you soon will be. User Experience is no longer a point of difference, it’s just the way all good websites are built these days.”

(Andy Budd a.k.a. @andybudd)

user-interface, user-experience & usability explained

Added on 31 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“So in short, when I’m ‘interacting’ with a website I’m using its user-interface design. How I ‘feel’ and my ‘preferences’ when using it is my user experience and how ‘easy and intuitive’ it is for me to perform the functions I came to do, is a measure of its usability. As you can see, it’s really hard for someone to specialise in one of these areas without an understanding of the other two.”

(Bernhard Schokman a.k.a. @bernardschokman ~ myware)

ROI of UX

Added on 30 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“If we can measure the exact ROI of UX, we can demonstrate the value of the UX team, their work and also justify the need for research when it is necessary. Often the complaint around UX is speed. We can speed up the UX process by sketching, measuring features when they are live, and evolving our designs rather than working to create a final and highly polished version at launch. We can calculate the trade-off of using this faster deployment method rather than the more traditional process of doing lots of user testing up-front. There will be times where it isn’t appropriate, and knowing the numbers allows us to justify this to the business. A caveat for the faster deployment method is that the UX team must be very senior and experienced.”

(Marie-Claire Jenkins a.k.a. @missmcj ~ i-thought)
courtesy of rolandnagtegaal

Ubiquitous Usability

Added on 30 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“For too long usability has been the preserve of geeks – a specialism confined to websites and screens, form factors and devices. We need to realise that usability – in other words ‘how easily people can use something to achieve a goal’ shouldn’t just be restricted to the lab and the engineer. It should be something that everyone expects to get, and everybody strives to provide. Usability should apply to all walks of life and everything that we encounter – it should be ubiquitous. It needs to be about the services we use and the spaces we inhabit.”

(Daniel Letts ~ live|work)

Usability testing with children: A lesson from Piaget

Added on 26 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Children are becoming an increasingly important target group on the web. Good usability and high user experience are crucial aspects for a successful website. Early and repetitive user testing is the way to go. If we address children on our website, we need to focus on what they want. We need to include children as a target group in our user testing. In this post, I’d like to take a look at usability testing with different age groups.”

(Sabina Idler a.k.a. @SabinaIdler ~ usabilia)

Responsive Web Design or Separate Mobile Site?

Added on 26 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Religion, nationalism, and sports-team rivalries? They can’t compare to the passion of a nerd’s technical conviction. And so kerfuffles result. Well-intentioned zeal leads to distracting dustups. Alas, complex problems rarely resolve themselves into neat black-and-white principles. The only principle that ever seems reliable is drearily unsatisfying: ‘it depends’. In the mobile world, we have the persistent and circular debate over whether the mobile web should be powered by the very same sites and webpages that render the desktop web.”

(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ Global Moxie)

The Expanding Role of User Experience Design

Added on 25 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.”

(Aarron Walter a.k.a. @aarron ~ UX Magazine)

Capturing Meaningful and Significant User Experience Metrics

Added on 24 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“How many times have you wondered how you can collect meaningful and significant metrics to validate your research? Many researchers struggle with this same dilemma on a daily basis. For example, how can we know the magnitude of the issues we are detecting in a traditional usability lab study? Surprisingly, there are many ways to capture useful UX metrics if you have the knowledge of what solutions to use and how to use them.”

(Kim Oslob ~ UXmatters)

Three Layers of Mobile User Experience

Added on 24 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“In comparison to traditional cell phones, smartphones do a much better job of letting users stay connected on the go. They have bigger screens and higher-resolution displays, and their industrial design is more fashionable. Common features of smartphones include, but are not limited to touchscreens, high-megapixel cameras, global positioning systems (GPSs), and many gaming and entertainment options. Smartphones enable people to engage in a wide range of activities, including communication, entertainment, personal-information management, and social networking.”

(Shanshan Ma a.k.a. @shanshanma ~ UXmatters)

Imaginary Interfaces

Added on 24 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Screen-less wearable devices allow for the smallest form factor and thus the maximum mobility. However, current screen-less devices only support buttons and gestures. Pointing is not supported because users have nothing to point at. However, we challenge the notion that spatial interaction requires a screen and propose a method for bringing spatial interaction to screen-less devices. We present Imaginary Interfaces, screen-less devices that allow users to perform spatial interaction with empty hands and without visual feedback. Unlike projection-based solutions, such as Sixth Sense, all visual ‘feedback’ takes place in the user’s imagination. Users define the origin of an imaginary space by forming an L-shaped coordinate cross with their non-dominant hand. Users then point and draw with their dominant hand in the resulting space.”

(Hasso Plattner Institute)

Designing Maps Applications for Usability on Mobile and Desktop

Added on 23 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Maps API applications are accessed on desktop and mobile devices of many shapes and sizes. Each application has unique goals for conveying information effectively and for facilitating user interactions. Learn how to improve user experience by optimizing the presentation of your map and data and by thoughtful user interface design.”

(Luke Mahé, Jez Fletcher, Justin O’Beirne ~ Google I/O sessions)