Good design is hard to do. The very nature of human centred design is confronting, challenging and often uncomfortable. Every project builds up a collection of challenges along the way, which can pose significant risk to the project’s success, and if we don’t tackle them head on they can be detrimental for everyone involved. How can  we share and learn from each other’s challenges? … »

This is part 2 of a two-part post. Read part 1.
In the last installment, we talked about the distinction between Hands contractors and Brains consultants. Hands are brought in by the team as an extra resource to complete work the team already knows how to do. Brains are brought in by the team to provide expertise and insight on the best way to do something the team is struggling with.

Hands and Brains require completely different skills, have different approaches, and run into different challenges. Knowing which you want to be is important. … »

“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. … »

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc chats with Douglas Wang and Itamar Medeiros who both work at Autodesk Shanghai, China. They talk about topics including design in China today, skills a designer should possess, and challenges and opportunities in working as a designer in Asia. This is the first of a series of interviews with designers in Asia to better understand “Design in Asia”. Enjoy the show!

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A few months ago we set up five Flickr groups around several UX topics. Every month we will try and make some sense of the uploaded material. This month we selected the UX Errors group and will look at examples of issues that arise when proper attention isn’t paid to two very important components of successful user interface design: Perceived Affordances and Designing for Task Flow. … »

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. … »