I confess – I’m for it. And I’ll go even further – I think “making it up as you go along” is one of the greatest, and most important processes of any age. … »

Have you ever needed a user manual to sit on a good chair? Probably not. When we see a good chair, we almost always know exactly what to do, how to use it and what not to do with it. And yet, chairs are made by the thousands, and several challenge these base assumptions to become classics in their own right. The chair is one of the most universally recognized archetypes known to us. In light of recent events in the mobile realm, I believe that the stage is set to probe notions of archetypes in the mobile space. … »

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks chats with Thomas Vander Wal who helped found the Information Architecture Institute; the peer-written webzine Boxes and Arrows; and who also coined the term “folksonomy”. They talk about where we’ve been in the design community and how we need to start asking better questions that focus on what we don’t know, rather than arguing over the merits of the tools that now comprise our respective disciplines. … »

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. … »

Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices. … »

The Johnnies have asked me to write a monthly column about culture and concerns as they relate to cross-border user experience (UX), in Europe and beyond. This is an honour for someone born in Texas, USA (me) but probably seems odd to most everyone else (you). Let me share some background.

My father was Austrian. My mother’s family was German. The “Old World” wasn’t just a place in the memory of an aging grandparent and we certainly didn’t worship our ethnicity (as third- and fourth-generation Americans are apt to do). We travelled extensively every year (Rome and Florence were almost always on the … »

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. … »

UX, experience designer, experience strategy … as far as words go, right now everything around UX design is still up for grabs. However, by focusing on the process ‘The Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making’ by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler neatly sidesteps these sticky issues to deliver a fantastic handbook on the topic. … »

Some while ago Don Norman wrote an article called ‘The Psychology of Wating Lines.’ In it he described how to make the necessary experience of waiting pleasurable. For the past eight months I’ve experienced quite some delays on the airport…. So I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to write how airports and airlines fail Don Norman’s methods to create an enjoyable experience. … »

That is the title of a paper written by Donald Norman, of which the last revision was published on August the 21st, 2008. In it he comes with eight design principles for waiting lines. These principles aim at designing the most efficient waiting line which is the least painful for the people in it. The interesting thing about it is that these principles apply to all services. Therefore they can also be related to the findings of the research about progress bars which we’ve published earlier. … »