Patrick Sanwikarja on July 4th, 2009

When I picked up this book I thought it would be a biography of Steve Jobs, and doubted whether this would make an interesting read for interaction designers. But it turns out, it’s very interesting for designers indeed. Obviously, there’s a lot of biographical information in it, but it’s not a chronological story of Steve’s life… It’s a book about Steve Jobs’ vision on products, user experience and innovation. … »

Vicky Teinaki on July 2nd, 2009

I recently talked to Alex Wright, Director of User Experience at The New York Times, and author of Glut, a book on the history of information architecture from human evolution to the internet.  At the end of August he will be the keynote speaker for UX Australia. I talked to him about how a librarian gets into user experience, why the NY Times doesn’t talk about readers anymore, and how the web might have been better had history been different.
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Steve Baty on June 30th, 2009

We’ve heard it before: we should focus on designing for an experience; experiences are fundamentally different design challenges to a product or services; experiences are designed from the outside in.

We’re also told that we can apply this experience-centric perspective to tackle problems beyond the design of a product or piece of software. But we don’t often see examples of these ideas being put into practice. So that’s what I’d like to share. … »

Adrian Chan on June 29th, 2009

On the phone yesterday with friend and colleague John Cass (SNCR), he happened upon an interesting topic. One for social media professionals of all kinds: designers, builders, funders, pundits. The question came up: doesn’t our expertise, built over years of spending time online, qualify us to see what’s really going on with social media? How it works and doesnt? … »

Jeroen van Geel on June 28th, 2009

For the past weeks people all over the world have been sweating behind their computers. They weren’t just hot because of the weather, but because they dared to take on the Mozilla Labs challenge. People tried to come up with the best possible way to manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance. In the end more than 120 concepts were submitted… Let’s look at a few of them. … »

Joe Fletcher on June 27th, 2009

Everyone reading this knows what a brainstorm is (I hope). I want to review a bit about the process I’ve used to find success in brainstorms, why they are helpful, and how they can be more successful in a corporate environment. If you work in an agency, this may not be as helpful, but might offer an interesting perspective. For those in the corporate environment, I hope this will help give you new ideas and erode old beliefs. … »

Adrian Chan on June 20th, 2009

Josh Porter has a nice post out this week on the importance of taking user behaviors into account in social experience design. In Behavior First, Design Second, he makes use of an example I often use myself: what if twitter removed the follower count from user profiles? But I differ with Josh’s reasoning that some social behavior is hardwired. … »

Steve Portigal on June 19th, 2009

Being open-minded when conducting user research is almost the definition of the activity. In reality many people find it difficult to fully conceal their hypotheses, and the way they both ask questions and listen to answers ultimately limits what they’re able to learn from the research. Recently we interviewed a young man who had moved back to the US from working overseas and was now back in school. My colleague asked a question that was based on the framework of “old Alex” and “new Alex.” But of course Alex (not his real name) hadn’t told us that he viewed his transition in those terms. And Alex didn’t dissuade us from that framework until I explicitly asked him if he thought of himself as having a new and old version. A lack of open-mindedness can also impact how research data is analyzed. … »

Leisa Reichelt on June 15th, 2009

Here in Drupal7 User Experience Project land we’ve been moving from ‘iteration zero’ to the actual production iterations. In iteration zero we’ve been doing a lot of our strategic thinking and documenting, but now it is time to start producing output that the developers who are working with us on this project can turn into something that will be contributed to the Drupal7 Project. … »

Jeroen van Geel on June 12th, 2009

Today was the closing day of From Business to Buttons 09. During the day several good speakers went on stage and shared their knowledge with us on some very different subjects. We had fun, listened seriously and secretly tweeted the brilliance onto the interwebs. And now we bring you a report of some of the talks. … »