I have been meaning to write about Likes and users interests for quite some time. But the matter is complicated. So rather than wait to write the perfect post, I’m going to lay down some cornerstones, sketch a few concepts and maybe develop some key arguments. … »

Is your design resistant to failure? If a worst case occurs, can the user recover and regain trust in your solution? … »

“To design is to have a ‘project’. Getting the design process moving is to expose and transform this ‘project’ in a conversation with those that it might eventually affect” (Buur, Binder, & Brandt, 2000).

In the early stages of design, rather than evaluate or validate specific user requirements or priorities, we are interested in exploring possibilities. As the opening quote suggests, we seek to engage with the various stakeholders the design project may eventually effect and gain an understanding of the unique design situation from their perspective. In Zimmerman et al.’s  (2004) framework for discovering and extracting knowledge during the design process, this is known as the Discovery phase of design. In this article we introduce Mobile Diaries as a field work method that can be utilised in the early stages of design to immerse into people’s everyday life. … »

The implications of Information Foraging Theory on designing user-centered websites have not gone unnoticed. Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool, among others, have put forth considered recommendations on how to enhance information scent on the web. Most of their guidelines, however, tend to assume that the designer has direct control over the explicit words used in the interface. While this is certainly the case for browse-based websites dependent on site-wide navigation and hyperlinks, it breaks down for search interfaces where both content and navigation are completely dynamic.
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Recently I got a chance to interview none other than Oliver Reichenstein. For those of you who don’t know him: he is the designer of the Web Trend Maps, owner of iA and the voice behind many provoking articles. In September he will be speaking at EuroIA 2010, Paris.

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I’m still in awe of the essence of the Web: connection and collaboration on a previously unimaginable scale. Yet I also feel like these connections waste my time. Not because anything in old media can provide them more effectively, but because the tools that make up the social web are still in a very early stage of evolution and they create a lot of unnecessary waste. This waste is a consequence of the Seven Digital Sins. … »

Using Google earth, I can soar like a bird above mountains and continents and then zoom right down to my own bedroom window with a simple, relatively intuitive interface. So why do I navigate my social world using a Twitter client that looks like a command line interface, and assumes I read every update? I think personal online tools need to do a better job of understanding different levels of network scale, and as our social world become bigger and more noisy, they should make it easier for us to find and jump through proximity wormholes to move from macro-scale networks to micro-scale intimacy and back again as seamlessly as possible. … »

The conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group’s April 2010 study of iPad usability is that it has problems and more standards are the solution. Yes, the iPad is imperfect, but resorting to standards as the solution is an antiquated reaction that fails to consider how interactive systems have evolved. We’re not Usability Engineers anymore (not most of us, anyway); we’re User Experience Designers. Experience is more than just usability.

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While in Phoenix, AZ last month for the Information Architecture Summit, I had breakfast with Crystal Kubitsky, a very smart designer from Comcast, who shared a very smart thought: “Our problem is that technology is moving faster than our psyche.” … »

The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we’re missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist. … »