There are many degrees of failure in the world of design. This is a hard truth that every designer has to learn one way or another. A hard knock lesson that has the ability to be the best teacher a designer could ask for, or completely crush their spirit. Dealing with our failures is never easy, especially when a personal connection is involved. These failures can appear throughout the design process, but each failure can be seen as an opportunity. So where do we go to learn how to deal with and learn from our failures? Reach way back and consult the great Sun Tzu and his masterpiece ‘The Art of War’. … »

Earlier this year we interviewed Mark Baskinger, associate professor at the School of Design of the Carnegie Mellon University. In the interview Mark talks about drawing ideas and shares his thoughts about the differences between industrial designers and interaction designers and how interaction designers can use sketching to communicate their designs better. … »

Ahead of this year’s EuroIA conference I caught up with experience architect, strategist and all-round nice guy Joe Lamantia. We talked about designing for experiences, games design, Killzone and monasteries. … »

As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences. … »

The ability to “play with the data” is a critical capability in analysis. We utilize this technique in many situations: searching for patterns or trends in our observations; or as another preparatory stage for further analysis. Sorting data in some way – alphabetic, chronological, complexity or numerical – is a form of manipulation. … »

Emotion is one of the most powerful elements of an experience, and also the most difficult to design.  Yet games regularly inspire intense emotions, drawing players into the experience they offer, and making these experiences enjoyable and memorable. … »

From now on we’ll be sharing with you some of the videos we’re collecting on Johnny TV. For this first time we would like to show you Don Norman’s lecture from the Stanford’s HCI Seminar lecture series. In it he talks about some of the things that he covers in his book, ‘The Design of Future Things’. … »

Over the last years I have noticed that many books and articles talk about the usefulness (or not) of personas, delving a little into the actual production and design of the persona as well as defending it’s usage. Very few explicitly define some of the activities that occur within the design research phase. It was Jared Spool that mentioned the real value of personas being the actual process of engaging with users and developing empathy towards their circumstances and experience interacting with a product.1 The following article grew out of a conversation with Nathan Curtis of Eight Shapes (author of “Modular Web Design“) when I offered to contribute what I called a “Mood Map” to the Unify Documentation System. Let’s start.

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We often discuss the need for us to be designing for an experience. And we talk about the importance of experience design – and design generally – playing a strategic role in business decisions. But we’re less forthcoming when it comes to discussing what is an experience strategy?
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Want to tackle the Mozilla challenge? Here are three starting points:

1. What do you want to achieve?
2. What’s the situation?
3. What’s out there?

And from that: do you want to work macro or micro? … »