An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays

Added on 4 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Jeremy Keith outlined the problem of digital preservation on the Web and provided some strategies for taking a long term view of our Web pages. (…) Preserving our culture requires holding on the little things that define our history. It’s not a technical problem to preserve our culture and our story. But we need people to want to do so.” (LukeW)

More Meaningful Typography

Added on 3 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Designing with modular scales is one way to make more conscious, meaningful choices about measurement on the web. Modular scales work with – not against – responsive design and grids, provide a sensible alternative to basing our compositions on viewport limitations du jour, and help us achieve a visual harmony not found in compositions that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers. As we’ve seen in this article, though, modular scales are tools – not dogma. The important thing for our readers, our craft, and our culture is that we take responsibility for our design decisions. Because in so doing, we’ll make better ones.” (Tim Brown ~ A List Apart)

Three Questons: The Content Strategy Discipline

Added on 2 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Most of the content strategy literature tries to define the discipline in terms of the deliverables practitioners produce–audits, plans, style guides and other resources, UX recommendations, human resource models, tooling recommendations, process engineering flow charts, etc. This is all well and good. But it won’t help to evangelize the practice of content strategy, or help define what unifies all these activities.” (Writing for Digital)

Patterns: Design Insights Emerging and Converging

Added on 2 May 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Patterns are how we capture and share some of the common insights we see bubbling up across projects, as well as out and about in the world. They are a foundation for intuition. A way to elevate insights to the level of cultural impact. And a way to tap into IDEO’s collective intelligence to do better work for our clients – even faster. We’ve had the privilege of tackling some of the toughest design challenges for some of the most innovative companies around the world. And what we’ve found is that many of these challenges are shared by multiple companies across a variety of industries. These are challenges we all have the potential to solve. But we believe that can only happen when we work together. Openly and collectively.” (IDEO) courtesy of ruurdpriester

Content First

Added on 28 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“I’m perplexed by the reasoning that concludes that if a website is suffering from clear usability issues, the solution is to create a splinter site for some users while leaving everyone else to suffer on. Note that I’m not suggesting that everyone get the same experience – far from it. Thanks to progressive enhancement (and let’s face it, responsive design done right is a perfect example of progressive enhancement) we can serve up the content that people want and display it to the best ability of any particular device. That’s the key difference: start with the content, not the device.” (Jeremy Keith ~ Adactio)

Marketing: Don’t be a Hater

Added on 28 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Let’s consider branding an essential part of service design solutions. How does branding help unify cross-channel experiences? How can it make services more enjoyable, memorable, and likely to be used again? Let’s acknowledge the value that marketing brings to the UX conversation by including people from marketing departments in our client stakeholder interviews. Ultimately they will be telling the world about the products and services we create.” (Kim Cullen ~ Adaptive Path)

Better together: The practice of successful creative collaboration

Added on 27 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Savant. Rockstar. Gifted genius. Many of the ways we talk about creative work only capture the brilliance of a single individual. But creativity also thrives on diversity, tension, sharing, and collaboration. Two (or more) creative people can leverage these benefits if they play well together. Cooper’s pair-design practice matured over more than a decade, and continues to evolve as we grow, form new pairs, and learn from each other every day. While no magic formula exists, all of our most successful partnerships to date share remarkably similar characteristics.” (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal)

The UX of this article

Added on 27 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“In many respects, when we talk about, evaluate, and revise products from a usability standpoint, we overlook the most important piece: content. Our tendency is to be concerned only with the wrapper or container, navigation through that container, and the interplay of the elements that make up the container. But what about the content which populates this otherwise dead space?” (Brett Sandusky ~ UX Magazine)

Ten Guidelines for Quantitative Measurement of UX

Added on 26 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Most UX designers use qualitative research – typically in the form of usability tests – to guide their decision-making. However, using quantitative data to measure user experience can be a very different proposition. Over the last two years our UX team at Vanguard has developed some tools and techniques to help us use quantitative data effectively. We’ve had some successes, we’ve had some failures, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried, and we’ve developed ten key guidelines that you might find useful.” (Richard Dalton ~ UX magazine)

Is Marketing The Evil Empire?

Added on 20 April 2011 Peter Bogaards
“UX Magazine attended the 2011 IA Summit in Denver this year to interview conference speakers and attendees. In this video, interviewees respond to the question: Is Marketing the Evil Empire? We were expecting to get at least a couple of embittered responses, but instead found consistent opinions that marketing is misunderstood and should be treated as a partner rather than an adversary.” (Jonathan Anderson ~ UX Magazine)