As interaction designers, we’re keenly aware of the explicit meanings in words and images. But how many of us also focus on the what is suggested by our words and images?
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People love statistics, especially about themselves. With the rise of personal informatics we see the question “How am I doing?” getting ever more popular. I was wondering if we could use this to create a game out of email that would make life easier and happier at the same time. … »

I currently work at a very small company, less then 20.  But compared to the other stories I’ve heard lately from interaction designers like myself, our company gets surprisingly consistent results from our developers in regards to design.  Following are 12 lessons I’ve learned that have helped me get better results from our in-house developers.

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No single user is “special” – or maybe all users are? Either way you look at it, we as interaction designers will encounter contexts of use or knowledge domains out of the ordinary at some point or other during our career. In my experience, designers need not apply magic tools when designing for special situations. It is however beneficial to bear in mind some core differences between specialized use contexts and the mainstream use of a mass consumer product such as a social networking site or a mobile phone. And that’s what I want to focus on in this article. … »

One of my favorite books about community is a work by Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power. It’s a beautiful and thoroughly insightful study on people assembled in different ways and for a kaleidoscopic set of reasons. I turn to the book often when thinking about how social media both separate and connect us, using it as an imaginary frontier of sorts for what mediated crowds might or could do. … »

I started wondering last evening what twitter would be like if in addition to followers we could also see who was actually being paid attention to. The groups many of us use in clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic, for example. So in the midst all of our positive talk of transparency and authenticity, I found myself chuckling at the opacity we in fact rely on to make it through the day. … »

Recently I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal about online ratings. The article, which surveys a number of online properties, cites the tendency to 4.3: On the Internet, Everyone’s a Critic But They’re Not Very Critical. The article’s authors pretty much capture what many of us get intuitively about why online ratings really don’t work, but I thought I’d break this down from a social interaction design perspective to get at some of the causes of this. … »

In my previous incarnation as a philosopher, I spent a lot of effort trying to argue for a different, phenomenological approach to the sciences of cognition – the very sciences at the root of the study of human-computer interaction. I find myself turning back to that train of thought in light of recent discussions I’ve had around establishing a methodology for user experience design.

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When you’re knee-deep in wireframes or CSS it’s all too easy to end up in a bubble of IxD books and blogs. One option is to take inspiration from vintage art and nature, but what about what other smart people are doing in their respective disciplines? In other words, why not steal from them? Here are my picks of a few other fields with ideas worth appropriating, or at least glancing at.

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Given just a bit of information, we naturally crave more. Given a puzzle, we have to solve it. So, as interaction designers, how are we using this bit of insight into human behavior?

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