Considerations for Mobile Design (Parts 1-3)

Added on 23 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The three parts of the series were split into the following segments: Part 1: Speed (The introduction to the series identified constraints in mobile design imposed by bandwidth, download and upload speeds.); Part 2: Dimensions (This section attempts to establish common limitations across groups of devices based on resolution and physical size. In addition, solutions for serving specific styles to groups of devices are offered, and analyzed.); Part 3: Behavior (Perhaps the least complete of the sections, this article attempts to show how users behave differently on handheld devices compared to desktops. At the same time, this area probably interests me most, but I believe much more testing will need to be done in regard to how gesture-based interfaces can be used in an acceptable way before the ideas explored here become more relevant.)” (David Leggett)

Design Principles for Visual Communication

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Visual communication via diagrams, sketches, charts, photographs, video, and animation is fundamental to the process of exploring concepts and disseminating information. The most-effective visualizations capitalize on the human facility for processing visual information, thereby improving comprehension, memory, and inference. Such visualizations help analysts quickly find patterns lurking within large data sets and help audiences quickly understand complex ideas.” (Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li, and Floraine Berthouzoz ~ CACM)

Ten Ways Mobile Sites Are Different From Desktop Web Sites

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Many believe the basic principles and guidelines that are applicable in the design of Web sites should still apply when designing for mobile platforms. After all, Web design has evolved from basic, text-based HTML pages into today’s Web standards. So, we might expect that mobile sites that follow the same guidelines could easily reach the same level of success with users that desktop Web sites have achieved.” (Shanshan Ma ~ UXmatters)

UX Analytics, Part I: A Call to Action

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“As UX researchers, our goal is to identify customer pain points and obstacles in a given workflow or process, then tell a compelling story about their risks and provide general recommendations for alleviating those risks. But after eight years in UX research – even having mastered the arts of compelling storytelling and building stakeholder empathy – I still never quite saw the results I’d hoped for. Worse, my work required me to move quickly onto the next project, never to hear again about the outcomes of projects past.” (Kristi Olson ~ UXmatters)

Assume an Amorphous User

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Physicists often have to construct clean, clear-cut models to describe messy realities. They do this by cleaning up their concepts about reality, assuming things like frictionless surfaces, lossless mirrors, and yes, spherical objects. UX designers often do the same thing, assuming a spherical user (…) who knows what he wants to do and takes the logical path in achieving his goals. Our scenarios describe happy paths that lead to success for this user.” (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters)

Why UX Professionals Should Care About Service Design

Added on 21 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“I’m very excited to be kicking off my new UXmatters column, Service Design: Orchestrating Experiences in Context, with this discussion of the value of service design to UX professionals. In my column, I’ll explore the concepts of service design and how to leverage its practices to optimize the user experiences our companies and clients look to us to create.” (Laura Keller ~ UXmatters)

Introducing Content Talks

Added on 18 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“When Dan Benjamin asked if I’d be interested in doing a podcast for 5by5, I said Absolutely not! I hate talking about content strategy!” OK, no, that’s not what I said. I accepted on the spot and immediately put together a long, exciting list of smart, interesting people I hoped to interview in the months to come.” (Kristina Halvorson ~ Brain Traffic)

Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation

Added on 18 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The personal web publishing boom has led to an information explosion. It’s a data free-for-all, and it’s just beginning. Andrew Blau is a researcher and the co-president of Global Business Network in San Fransisco. Blau has foretold the changes in media distribution and content creation. Now he’s watching this new, historic emergence of first-person publishing.” (Steve Rosenbaum ~ Mashable)

Seven myths about paper prototyping

Added on 17 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Paper prototyping is probably the best tool we have to design great user experiences. It allows you to involve users early in the design process, shows you how people will use your system before you’ve written any code, and supports iterative design. So why are some design teams still resistant to using it? Here are 7 objections I’ve heard to paper prototyping and why each one is mistaken.” (David Travis ~ userfocus)

The Materials of Digital Products

Added on 17 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A perfect example is developing for the mobile platform. A native iOS app will allow for much greater refinement in performance, motion and visual treatment, but there will likely be greater build costs compared to an HTML5 mobile app. Conversely, HTML5 will allow much greater flexibility in deployment and distribution. Both technologies have their place in mobile, we just need to know when plastic is more appropriate than stainless steel.” (P.J. Onori ~ Adaptive Path)

More, better, faster: UX design for startups

Added on 16 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Startups don’t have capital to burn or luxurious schedules for big-design-up-front. But unless your idea is by-and-for-engineers, design isn’t something you want to skip on your way to market. For a startup, design may mean the difference between simply shipping, and taking the market by storm. But with tight budgets, and aggressive timelines, how to include design and get the best value for the investment?” (Stefan Klocek ~ Cooper Journal)

DIY usability testing: Steve Krug explains it all for you

Added on 16 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“Many discussions about user interfaces see the same type of arguments. Developers like complicated things, with many things on the screen. Designers like pleasant esthetic experience. This problem can be addressed with usability testing. Many sites have usability problems, including Steve Krug’s own site. Steve hasn’t fixed the problem, because it’s cheaper to send an email in support of a struggling user than to fix the actual problem. You don’t have the resources. Easy to find, but hard to fix. Steve makes the argument you should do the usability testing yourself. Most sites aren’t tested, because it costs money, time, and it’s hard to find professionals to do it. So Steve will show how to do it yourself.” (Michiel Berger – SXSW NL Report)

Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed

Added on 15 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We’re supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed.” (Helge Fredheim ~ Smashing Magazine)

Emergent Semantics

Added on 15 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“(…) a set of principles and techniques analyzing the evolution of decentralized semantic structures in large scale distributed information systems. Emergent semantics approaches model the semantics of a distributed system as an ensemble of relationships between syntactic structures. They consider both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols as the result of a self-organizing process performed by distributed agents exchanging symbols and having utilities dependent on the proper interpretation of the symbols. This is a complex systems perspective on the problem of dealing with semantics.” (Philippe Cudre-Mauroux ~ SOKS 2010)

Innovation in Customer Experience

Added on 15 March 2011 Peter Bogaards
“The experience delivered by a product or service can be a source of competitive advantage and business value through innovation. Experience designers – using the empathy they generate with customers during primary research, and the understanding of the customers’ broad context of use they gain – are well-placed to be the source of such innovation.” (Steve Baty ~ Meld Studios) courtesy of jameskalbach