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Design research Medium design methodDesigning interactions, designing media. The academic route. "The article sketches the basic steps of a theoretically informed practical testing of opportunities inherent in the interfaces and procedures of communication. It is an experience-based technique for discovery and problem solving." (Lars Nyre a.k.a. @LarsNyre ~ The Journal of Media Innovations) Posted on March 07, 2014 | Permalink Why so much 'science' used in design is 'bs': Android, Losada and FrankfurtUsing power words doesn't make any opinion any better. "It looks like Google's Android UX team used a now-debunked research paper to guide much of their UX work. Does this mean the Android interface now needs to change? Probably not, and that might be worse. I'll look at what this means and how we can be more careful when using research to inform our work." (MJ Parnell a.k.a. @Neovenator ~ Hopeful Monsters) Posted on March 06, 2014 | Permalink What role do aesthetics play in the design of a website?Aesthetics, beauty, or attractiveness can't be defined by itself. But I recognize it when I see it. "Design does not equal making things pretty, but a significant number of people seem to think it does. They think aesthetics are design and somehow think all the other things designers do just happen on their own." (Steven Bradley ~ Vanseo design) Posted on February 24, 2014 | Permalink Content planning: How to use UX research to uncover hidden needsCS and UX in concert. "Understanding how people think and what makes them tick is the common building block behind both creating content and designing experiences that matter to people. But before you dive into content planning or begin designing an experience, you have to understand what your audience finds meaningful. This is where UX research can provide insight to help inform content marketing efforts." (Caitlin Vlastakis Smith a.k.a. @caitvsmith ~ Content Marketing Institute) Posted on February 18, 2014 | Permalink Bringing design and research closer togetherThe holy trinity of UX: research, design, and development. "The should designers be able to code debate has raged for some time, but I'm interested in another debate: Should designers be able to research?" (Emma Boulton ~ 24 Ways) Posted on February 10, 2014 | Permalink Designing moments of meaning and pleasure: Experience design and happinessLet's be happy. Sure, for the rest of our life. "While society changes its focus from 'well-fare' to 'well-being', design becomes increasingly interested in the question whether it can design for happiness. In the present paper, we outline Experience Design, an approach which places pleasurable and meaningful moments at the center of all design efforts. We discuss reasons for focusing on experiences, and provide conceptual tools to help designers, such as a model of an artifact as explicitly consisting of both the material and the experiential. We suggest psychological needs as a way to understand and categorize experiences, and 'experience patterns' as a tool to distill the 'essence' of an experience for inscribing it into artifacts. Finally, we briefly reflect upon the morality implied by such experiential artifacts." (Marc Hassenzahl et al. ~ International Journal of Design 7.3) Posted on December 09, 2013 | Permalink Nine ways to get the most out of Design ThinkingDT is a mindset, not a silver bullet. "Design thinking is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational, combining very different ways of thinking and acting. This is, of course, easier in theory than in practice. How do you get children's book authors and chemical engineers to click into something greater than the sum of the parts -- rather than devolve into warring camps? Here are some of the lessons I've learned along the way as CEO and rules we all try to adhere to at Lippincott." (Rick Wise ~ Fast.CoDesign) ~ courtesy of riander Posted on November 26, 2013 | Permalink Lost signal: Seven lessons from TV historyMultiscreen experience design coming up, including for our large home screen. "Television is evolving. For those aspiring cord-cutters, its transformation may seem too slow, but the change is continuous and continually accelerating. As we approach the design of TV's future, we remember its past and ask, What's worth saving?" (PunchCut) Posted on November 20, 2013 | Permalink UX and the civilizing processComputers start to evoke all kinds of human reactions, including civil ones. "The concept of a person is arguably the most important interface ever developed. (...) As software becomes increasingly complex and entangled in our lives, we begin to treat it more and more like an interaction partner. Losing patience with software is a common sentiment, but we also feel comfort, gratitude, or suspicion. Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves studied some of these tendencies formally, in the lab, where they took classic social psychology experiments but replaced one of the interactants with a computer. What they found is that humans exhibit a range of social emotions and attitudes toward computers, including cooperation and even politeness. It seems that we're wired to treat computers as people." (Kevin Simler a.k.a. @KevinSimler ~ Ribbon Farm) Posted on November 18, 2013 | Permalink Ten facts about the brain that will help you design better websitesNot only sites, but all information products and services. "Psychology provides a framework for understanding how your users think. This post explains how to use that knowledge to improve your websites." (Joe Leech a.k.a. @mrjoe ~ CreativeBloq) Posted on November 13, 2013 | Permalink Information architecture: Beyond web sites, apps, and screensI couldn't agree more with the urge to extend our scope and need for foundational theories. "Can a craft-like profession of information architecture that lacks internal theory keep up with the growing complexities of ubiquitous ecosystems that comprise both digital and physical objects? I don't think so. To position the practice of information architecture for future success, we must not wait for the future to arrive, but try to anticipate it - and, in some cases, even help to create it. To offer theories of information architecture that transcend Web sites, applications, and screens, we need to pursue original theories of information architecture that address Web sites, applications, and screens, period. If we fail to do this, Toon and the rest of the IA community will have to be satisfied with stolen insights from other fields." (Nathaniel Davis a.k.a. @iatheory ~ UXmatters) Posted on November 01, 2013 | Permalink Replacing the user story with the job storyThese stories will go further than agile, scrum or service design. "I've written about the problem with user stories before. At the time, I found it better to just have the team talk over proposed changes to the product. This worked great when the team had gelled and the product is very mature; however, now I'm working with a new team and building a product from scratch. In this case, because our canvas is blank, we are having trouble getting on the same page when it comes to customer motivations, events and expectations. But today, things have turned around. I've come across a great way to use the jobs to be done philosophy to help define features. I call them 'Job Stories'." (Alan Klement a.k.a. @alanklement) Posted on September 23, 2013 | Permalink Five dangerous ideas for the future of design educationIs it old versus new, young, and upcoming? "Design students lack cultural depth and awareness. Several representatives from leading design agencies expressed variations on this theme. Lack of curiosity and personal development were described as particular concerns. (...) I would take someone who is able to read over someone who is able to draw any day." (Tom Berno a.k.a. @tberno ~ dmi dialog) Posted on September 16, 2013 | Permalink Brenda Laurel delivered keynote at UX Week 2013Always delivers great thoughts in the theatre. "Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976. She currently serves as an adjunct professor in Computer Science Department at U. C. Santa Cruz. She served as professor and founding chair of the Graduate Program in Design at California College of Arts from 2006 to 2012. She designed and chaired the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2001-2006) and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs (2005-2006). Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research (1992-1996), she co-founded Purple Moon in 1996 to create interactive media for girls. In 1990 she co-founded Telepresence Research, Inc., focusing on virtual reality and remote presence. Other employers include Atari, Activision, and Apple. Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design(1990), Computers as Theatre(1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), and Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004). Her most recent writing, Gaian IXD, was the cover article in the Sep-Oct 2011 issue of the journal Interactions. She earned her BA (1972) from DePauw University and her MFA (1975) and PhD. in Theatre (1986) from the Ohio State University." (Brenda Laurel a.k.a. @blaurel ~ UX Week 2013) Posted on September 12, 2013 | Permalink Ok so... "I am a designer"After decades of thought still no clear understanding, other than creative and out-of-the-box. "Design has existed as a discipline for over 60 years, but there still seems to be an enormous gap between what we designers think we do, and what people recognize we can do. (...) Designers are pretty good at thinking creatively and 'outside of the box'." (Maria Beatriz Vivas a.k.a. @VivasBea ~ Behaviorial Design Lab) Posted on August 20, 2013 | Permalink Manipulation and designThat's what you get when business takes on design. "Manipulation is deceptive. Design should be supportive. Theoretically, the two are separated by intention. But increasingly, in practice, the two forces are converging. This may be inevitable, as fields of sales, marketing, and design collide. I hope not. I'm troubled by the collision, and how it manifests in digital products." (Jon Kolko a.k.a. @jkolko ~ UX Magazine) Posted on July 24, 2013 | Permalink Using scenarios to design intuitive experiencesUsing a mind machine intuitively depends on your expertise. "Scenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user's experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they'll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what's going on at this moment in time and that can be a sticking point. This is where the value of the journey map emerges." (Kim Goodwin a.k.a. @kimgoodwin ~ UIE Brainsparks) Posted on July 01, 2013 | Permalink Generating new business by design thinkingBusiness thinking going downhill; design thinking going uphill. An uphill battle that is. "(...) several conclusions can be drawn. First of all, the typical iterative and holistic way of working of design thinking is also a viable option for generating business. Possibly many of you design thinkers will say: we knew that. Point is: our stakeholders needed to learn that! Second, we were amazed by the results of the 'business prototype'. Many new insights arose, and admittingly some of our assumptions turned out wrong. A next step will look different already. For a relatively small amount of money and resources this was learned, instead of the hard way in actual business. Third, and possibly most important: it created a platform all stakeholders could look at, reflect and decide. They could invite others, including even their friends. They could discuss with us. Suddenly it was not a 'good idea', but a viable option." (Guido Stompff ~ Design in Teams) Posted on June 24, 2013 | Permalink It's not enough to change the light bulbs: A conversation with Brenda LaurelBrenda presents a holistic view of technology, humans and the planet Earth. "I see us developing technologies and design practices that reduce cognitive distance for people who use them. I hope that we will continue to create alternatives to the trivial pursuits currently favored by the marketplace. (...) Technology is an extrusion of the human spirit." (Julia Moisand Egea ~ Adaptive Path) Posted on June 19, 2013 | Permalink Design ROI: Measurable designDesign trying to gain legitimacy through business thinking. "The Design ROI project was a research project conducted between September 2011 and September 2012 with the aim of developing a model and a set of metrics for measuring the return on investments in design. The project was funded by Aalto University, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes) and fifteen member agencies of the Finnish Design Business Association (FDBA)." Posted on June 14, 2013 | Permalink Researching user experience: A knowledge ecology modelTacit knowledge on the cognitive principles of instructional design gets revitalized in my brain. "If information is only secondary to knowledge in terms of usefulness to achieve a particular goal or purpose, this finding suggests that the UX field could advance by looking beyond interacting with information and towards a more holistic, ecological view that encompasses both information and knowledge user experiences. A key question here could be: How do we create a user experience that facilitates tapping into the different forms of knowledge found within people's heads? Thinking about people as users of knowledge rather than just users of information opens up a whole new terrain of potential design, thus moving from information user experience to knowledge user experience." (Faye Miller ~ Boxes and Arrows) Posted on June 12, 2013 | Permalink Associating UX changes to the Net Promoter ScoreOr connecting UX with CX in a quantitative way. "A bad experience will impact how likely users are to recommend a website or product to a friend. Fixing those bad experiences is critical to increasing positive word of mouth. Unfortunately, there are usually too many things to fix and just as many opinions on what should be fixed. Development teams need to prioritize." (Jeff Sauro a.k.a. @MeasuringU ~ Measuring Usability) ~ courtesy of barbarakoop Posted on June 10, 2013 | Permalink Designing the business around the experienceGetting lured by the latest gadgets is indeed not the way to go. "When trying to start a business, you are probably going to focus on what your possible target market is first. You will then start to look at gaps in that market and what the various opportunities and outcomes are, which can be achieved based on this research." (Michael Clark ~ Bridging the gap) Posted on June 04, 2013 | Permalink Design process is a mythJust a set of steps a.k.a. process in 'hinzeit'. "Typically, when a product design falls flat, people want to insert a design process to fix the bad design. However (...), a one-size-fits-all design process does not exist. Don't force a process on a design team that everyone must follow. Every designer has their own unique way of solving design problems. Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a better design process." (Marc Hemeon a.k.a. @hemeon ~ Medium Design/UX) Posted on April 11, 2013 | Permalink Designing for culture: A few preliminary thoughtsDiscovering the large body of design management knowledge as helpful to move UX design into large orgs. " I'm convinced, to build an important, new foundation for meta-innovation, that is, a more innovative way to create innovative organizational environments, especially in business settings." (Peter Norlin ~ Lockwood Resource Recruiting) Posted on April 04, 2013 | Permalink User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research: A changing, interconnected worldWhatever it takes to feed your understanding of people, as consumers, users or patients. "When I was in a management role at Yahoo!, we discovered that market researchers were encountering some of the same obstacles as our UX researchers - obstacles to being appropriately involved upstream in the process to have a more strategic impact on the company. So UX research began to partner with market research in an effort to attain that involvement." (Richard Anderson a.k.a. @riander ~ UX Magazine) Posted on April 02, 2013 | Permalink Five must-dos in designing an emotionally engaging experienceIt's so easy. It just takes five. "As customers' expectations change rapidly driven not just from you, or what happens in your industry but also by other companies they deal with who lead the way (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Starbucks etc.) you need to constantly innovate. There are fewer innovations when people are afraid to do errors. We have recently gathered former clients from different parts of the world who had a success with their customer experience programs and one thing was common that led to their success – the room for trial and error they had." (Zhecho Dobrev a.k.a. @Zhecho_BeyondP ~ Beyond philosophy) Posted on March 28, 2013 | Permalink Can object-oriented principles be applied to web design?And does web design also need a Gang of Four? "I thought it would be interesting to explore if a connection between object oriented programming and how we develop visual design patterns exists." (Steven Bradley Glicksman ~ Vanseo Design) Posted on March 19, 2013 | Permalink Rethinking design thinkingDesign thinking says what it is, thinking. "So three cheers for design thinking, for those practitioners and schools that are using these techniques, that encourage breakthrough thinking, and that encourage asking the stupid question. Not all schools teach design thinking in this way. Not all students learn it. Not all designers practice it. But for those who do teach, learn and practice all of the techniques of design thinking, it can be transformative." Posted on March 19, 2013 | Permalink Multi-dimensional analysis of dynamic human information interactionStudies and research for our fields of practice are important parts of our fundaments. "This study aims to understand the interactions of perception, effort, emotion, time and performance during the performance of multiple information tasks using Web information technologies. (...) The results of this study can be employed as a theoretical foundation for designing human-friendly, adaptive user interfaces, which function as intelligent and affective central mechanisms and help users prioritise, monitor and coordinate their needs/tasks/goals effectively and efficiently. This study introduces the emotional factor, which is a newly emerging dimension, in dynamic information seeking and retrieval contexts and enlightens the existing areas of human information interaction." (Minsoo Park ~ Information Research 18.1) Posted on March 15, 2013 | Permalink What is the client's role in user research?Balancing client and user requirements? Out of balance mostly in fav of client. "Successful user research involves close collaboration between clients and researchers to ensure that the research focuses on the right issues and provides acceptable recommendations. So, in this edition of my column, I'll speak directly to the clients of researchers about the steps they should take to stay involved throughout a user research project and ensure its success." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 04, 2013 | Permalink Some thought on user experience in corporate researchThe relevance of user experience design in business contexts is mounting rapidly. "This presentation is divided into two parts. The first part is about setting the stage a bit, and in order to do so I will address the interrelations between some of the changes the telecom industry is facing, and how corporate research and innovation relate to these. In the second part I will illustrate how we at Ericsson Research recon that user experience plays a role in all of this." (Cristian Norlin a.k.a. @cristiannorlin ~ Ericsson UX blog) Posted on December 18, 2012 | Permalink Five UX Research PitfallsBe careful not to fall in any of them. Other mistakes still ahead. "More and more organizations view UX as a key contributor to successful products, connecting teams with end-users and guiding product innovation within the organization. Though it's fantastic to see this transition happen, there are growing pains associated with becoming a user-driven organization. These are the pitfalls that I see organizations grappling with most often." (Elaine Wherry a.k.a. @elainewherry) Posted on December 10, 2012 | Permalink When You Shouldn't Use Fitts's Law To Measure User ExperienceFitts' law is a principle for UI design; not an evaluation method for UX. "The key statement of Fitts's Law is that the time required to move a pointing device to a target is a function of the distance to the target and its size. In layman's terms: the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target. This is easy to understand, not too difficult to implement and it doesn't seem to make much sense to contradict such a simple and obvious statement." (Anastasios Karafillis ~ Smashing Magazine) Posted on December 05, 2012 | Permalink Mining Social Media: Tracking Content and Predicting BehaviorComputational predictability: the algorithmic perspective on human behavior. A kind of Ellerdale project. "The advent of social media has established a symbiotic relationship between social media and online news. This relationship can be leveraged for tracking news content, and predicting behavior with tangible real-world applications, e.g., online reputation management, ad pricing, news ranking, and media analysis. In this thesis, we focus on tracking news content in social media, and predicting user behavior." (Manos Tsagkias a.k.a. @samanos) Posted on November 28, 2012 | Permalink Design Process Kills/Creates CreativityIt's one or the other: magic or no magic. "What is created when we apply a process? When process is used consciously you have evidence of work for each part of the design process." (Daniel Stillman a.k.a. @dastillman ~ Core77) Posted on November 28, 2012 | Permalink What is the emerging role of design in the public sector?Design is now so ubiquitous, it's exploding into all kinds of industries: health, education, business, tourism, and now even government as well. "And so we find ourselves seeking a deeper transformation in the way we organise and build our society. We face a choice about the future we want to create and live within and who should be entrusted with envisioning, contributing and ultimately delivering that future. From the invention of the modern concept of the designer as an agent for change in the industrial era, to the demands of an ever-changing, interconnected global community, our needs for design and creativity have evolved. Designers are increasingly directing their talents to new problems, bringing professional creativity to the biggest and most important challenges of our times. As we acknowledge that the unprecedented demands facing public services cannot be met by increased funding alone, it seems right to look to those dissatisfied optimists for new approaches that will help deliver the innovative solutions we need." (Andrea Siodmok a.k.a. @designcomedy ~ Design Council) Posted on November 23, 2012 | Permalink Avoid Problem Solving For Better CritiquesYou can also call it a critical cognitive walkthrough. "Problem solving in a critique is also a frequent occurrence. It seems to be a common trait of people who are involved in the design, development and overall creation of things, whether they be websites, products, services, or whatever. We can't help but try to solve problems. It's just the way our brains work. But in the context of a critique, problem solving and jumping to solutions can be detrimental for a number of reasons." (Adam Connor a.k.a. @adamconnor ~ Discussing Design) Posted on November 22, 2012 | Permalink The Design for Usability bookA Dutch delight. "The Design for Usability project published a book that provides the product development community with a comprehensive and coherent overview of the results of the project, in such a way that they can be applied in practice. The book outlines the studies conducted in the project, and indicates how the individual research projects are related and which of them can be applied in a coherent mode." (Edited by @jaspervankuijk ~ Design for Usability) Posted on November 16, 2012 | Permalink Behavior Design Bootcamp with Stanford's Dr. BJ FoggBuzzword galore. "(...) it makes sense now to call attention to the distinction between Dr. Fogg's Behavior Theory – the emerging discipline of behavior design – and the widening concept of design thinking. In my mind, both occupy some similar space but are not mutually exclusive or competing thought architectures. BJ and I briefly discussed how design thinking and behavior design relate to one another, and he admittedly has not arrived at a definitive relationship, though he believes they are complimentary. I'm hopeful Dr. Fogg is willing to have an ongoing conversation with me about their relationship, and work with the design community to develop a framework in which behavior design and design thinking can be successfully leveraged together. Held in comparison, behavior design fits quite nicely into the larger Design Thinking or Human Centered Design process, and can be employed with great effect as part of a design thinker's arsenal." (Ryan Wynia a.k.a. @ryanwynia ~ Technori) Posted on October 29, 2012 | Permalink The Importance of Knowing User IntentDo you know what you want? I don't. "Users don't always know exactly what they want. Sometimes they know only that they want help figuring out what they want. This makes figuring out user intent particularly challenging for marketers and product manufacturers." (Jordan Julien a.k.a. @thejordanrules ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 22, 2012 | Permalink The Languages of DesignLanguage, the tool of communication. "It's common in design to discuss the "language of things", the language expressed by physical objects and digital systems. We often consider the visual layout of a website – how it guides a user; what the hierarchy of fields in a form might suggest; or what the look and feel of a product says about a brand or company – but what about that company's words; how do they fit into all this?" (Angus Edwardson a.k.a. @Namshee ~ UX Booth) Posted on October 17, 2012 | Permalink The Power of NetworksNetwork, the underlying concept of the 21st century. "We often take decisions by using the wrong or outdated tools and theories. Network science and tools are readily available to inform decisions in different sectors and organizations. Their adoption for decision-making should be further promoted." Posted on October 17, 2012 | Permalink The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry (EPIC 2012): Conference ProceedingsOr how epic is EPIC? "The EPIC Conference promotes the use of ethnographic investigations and principles in the study of human behavior as they are applied in business settings. By understanding people, what they do, how they do it and how these change over time, we can create better business strategies, processes and products, as well as enhance and simplify people's lives. Beyond this, the conference aspires to promote the integration of rigorous methods and theory from multiple disciplines into business practices; to advocate business decisions based upon sound research; to promote public recognition of practicing ethnography as a profession; and to support the continuing professionalization of the field." Posted on October 15, 2012 | Permalink Theories Behind UX Research and How They are Used in PracticeIt's academic, so it must be (almost) European. "This workshop aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry, as well as industry practitioners, who are conducting UX design and evaluation work and who either are applying theories, theoretical concepts and frameworks in their UX research or have concrete plans to do so." Posted on June 04, 2012 | Permalink Signs UX Research Is Making an ImpactLights at the end of the tunnel. "For a UX professional, one of the hardest things to measure is how much stakeholders and clients have bought into UX research. There is no clear, quantifiable answer to this question. Nevertheless, there are several signs that indicate stakeholder engagement, uptake, and buy-in. This article identifies some of these signs." (Tomer Sharon a.k.a. @tsharon ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 21, 2012 | Permalink Capturing User ResearchAnything you can capture from other people helps. "It's interesting to think of what the future might bring in information-capture technology for user research. In my dreams, an ideal tool would be on a tablet, reducing the massive amount of paper that I currently waste when capturing handwritten notes. It would allow me to view a discussion guide and add handwritten notes using a stylus. My notes would be synced with either an audio recording or a wireless video recording, which would make it easy to jump to any point in a recording that corresponds to particular notes. The application would then take my handwritten notes and automatically convert them to text that I could manipulate in a word processor. Do you know of any tools that would let me achieve this? If not, I can dream. In the meantime, I'll be taking plenty of handwritten notes on paper and backing them up with audio or video recordings." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on April 03, 2012 | Permalink Integrative Thinking, Feeling, and BeingA little more reflective thinking on design. "(...) integrative thinking and design thinking hold a lot of promise. But will these methods lead us to the effective solutions our corporate and community sponsors require, and the authentic connections with customers we hope to create? And will we realize a future of design that includes the increased impact we seek? I believe the answer is 'Yes, yes, and...' Yes, these methods can be effective. Yes, they can drive impact. And they could drive more impact if we apply the behaviors that they require to ourselves and not just to external problems and research subjects. It's not sufficient to think different, we must be different by demonstrating compassion, curiosity, openness, a comfort with ambiguity, and an unconditional positive regard for our experiences with one another." (Tonya Peck ~ Design Management Institute) Posted on March 05, 2012 | Permalink Dealing with Difficult People, Teams, and Organizations: A UX Research Maturity ModelThe baby, toddler, teenager, and adolescent phases of UX research. "An increasing number of organizations and individuals who develop software products, Web applications, Web sites, or other digital products are gaining a better understanding and appreciation for user experience and UX design and research. Subsequent to the introduction of some magnificent products and services that many executives now own or use-such as smartphones, tablets, Web applications, social media, and video games-they have gained a better understanding of what UX design and research can do to boost the success of a business offering." (Tomer Sharon a.k.a. @tsharon ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 06, 2012 | Permalink Thinking Aloud: The #1 Usability ToolBut the thoughts coming out are not always usable. "Simple usability tests where users think out loud are cheap, robust, flexible, and easy to learn. Thinking aloud should be the first tool in your UX toolbox, even though it entails some risks and doesn't solve all problems." Posted on January 16, 2012 | Permalink Industrial HCI Research: A Personal and Professional PerspectiveEvery practice is made by people, not organizations. Focus on people, not brands. "In this article, we give you some personal perspective on the changing role of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers practicing in industry over the last 25 years and look to the future. We identify long-lasting themes and emerging trends and add some insight from our experiences working in IT research and development. These experiences include collaborating as team members on a series of HCI research projects during 15 of over 20 years at IBM Research. We also describe what it has been like having a two-person HCI household over the years." (Clare-Marie Karat and John Karat ~ Journal of Usability Studies Vol. 7, Issue 1, November 2011, pp. 1-8) Posted on December 20, 2011 | Permalink Yes, Experience Can Be DesignedIn the DTDT or 'There is no such thing as...' category. And where does this debate lead us to? It depends. "As experience design has evolved from early ideas about human-computer interaction to our present understanding, we can see how the industry has shaped the tools for studying, influencing, mediating, and sometimes even controlling the way people experience the artifacts they interact with. But that raises a question: can experience really be designed? And it certainly triggers lively debate." (Sorin Pintilie a.k.a. @flyandcolors ~ UX Magazine) Posted on December 15, 2011 | Permalink For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourseReally hope her dissertation changes the discourse. "The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience and the bias towards the organization's perspective in the discourse cause much confusion. In this study experience is taken back to its basis: the encounter between an individual and his or her environment. Different concepts, effects and values of experience are defined to construct a more integrative discourse for the experience economy from the individual's perspective. To reap the benefits that the experience economy offers, the role of organizations has to change from a directing and controlling one to a more supporting and facilitating one. A true recognition of the co-creation that takes place in experiences shows how much latent potential for creating value there is yet to discover." Posted on December 14, 2011 | Permalink Career Advice for User ResearchersLearning from the seniors. "The first thing you should decide is what you want to focus on. There is a great variety of roles in user experience. Some UX professionals are generalists who do everything from user research to UX design - and sometimes even software development. Others specialize on a particular aspect of user experience such as interaction design, visual design, content strategy, or ethnography. And many fall somewhere in between - for example, a UX Architect who conducts user research and is responsible for every aspect of UX design except visual design." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 05, 2011 | Permalink Planning User Research Throughout the Development CycleHow can you ever make something worthwhile if you haven't looked into it, a.k.a. research. "(...) we'll discuss how research planning can reduce costs and decrease the time it takes to perform user research. One of the biggest challenges in performing user research is determining which research approaches to apply and when to apply them. The research methods you choose are dependent upon a variety of factors, including budget, schedule, development phase, business goals, and research questions." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters) Posted on December 05, 2011 | Permalink User Research versus IntuitionWe've banned the term 'user-friendliness' for more than a decade. "User Research allows us to create hypothesis that are aimed at improving the website's user-friendliness, but more common, conversion. Usability testing allows us to test those hypotheses." (Matthew Niederberger a.k.a. @MatthewNL ~ Actual Insights) Posted on November 17, 2011 | Permalink CraftsmanshipKnow your computer design materials in and out: content, code, connectivity, and computation. "(...) craftsmanship comes through intimate understanding of medium and material. The medium of painting is fairly obvious, as is the material of clay. But both the medium and materiality of service design, interaction design, and public policy are vague, abstract, and seemingly invisible. They are, however, not without definition. (...) one of the most fundamental failings of design thinking education is the lack of craftsmanship." Posted on November 10, 2011 | Permalink Design is How It WorksWhere did I read that definition of Design before? "Jay zeroes in on the design process at companies that do design well. The companies come in different shapes and sizes. The point is that design is something at which any company can succeed. Jay will talk about how companies that embrace the idea that design is about creating a great experience are the ones that will flourish in the 21st Century." (Jay Greene ~ HIVE 2011) Posted on November 03, 2011 | Permalink Anthropology extracts the true nature of techHave we found the Margaret Mead of user experience in Technology? "Genevieve Bell, director of interaction and experience research at Intel Corporation, says when she approaches technology she is "less interested in thinking about the piece of technology itself and more interested in the kind of work that technology is trying to do and the larger context in which it finds itself." In the following interview, Bell discusses her experience as a 'Thinker in Residence' and how anthropology concepts can be used to make tech more consumer centric." (Jenn Webb a.k.a. @jennwebb ~ O'Reilly Radar) Posted on October 31, 2011 | Permalink Using Scientific Knowledge to Bring Structure to Design ProblemsThe need for a scientific foundation of what we do expressed differently. "Experience design, especially interface design, is perhaps one of the most fertile fields for the idea of scientific design. (...) In this article, we discuss three examples of solid scientific knowledge that are often applied to interface design. In our view, the translation of scientific findings into design practices is not always as straight-forward as we wish it would be. The concept of scientific knowledge refers to convictions about the world that have been reached through controlled processes of inquiry and investigation and that, in principle, are not influenced by arbitrary conventions, personal preferences, or individual interests. Scientific knowledge is derived from systematic observation that gradually leads to an understanding of reality that must be valid for everyone." (Gabriela Trindade Perry and Suely Fragoso ~ UX Magazine) Posted on October 28, 2011 | Permalink Shoes, Cars, and Other Love Stories: Investigating The Experience of Love for ProductsWe not only love people, but products as well. And they don't talk back, sort of. "People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with products they own and use. Inspired by existing approaches to the experience of love from social psychology, research tools are developed for the closer study of person-product love. Using those tools the research in this thesis investigates how person-product interactions are linked to the experience of love and how these influence love over time. The findings reveal how the experience of love arises from person-product relationships, how love relationships develop over time, and which factors can provoke change in the love experience and love relationships over time. These findings present opportunities for design researchers and designers to foster rewarding experiences and long-lasting person-product relationships. Person-product love relationships can bring emotional rewards that benefit people's wellbeing and stimulate sustained efforts to keep loved products for longer." (Beatriz Russo ~ Technical University Delft) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink The Ghost Hunter's Guide to User ResearchSome handy tips and tricks from the ghost hunter. "It was never my childhood dream to become a usability professional. In kindergarten, I didn't observe the other kids playing with their toys and think of ways to improve them. I didn't yearn to perform heuristic evaluations, usability tests, and contextual inquiries. Don Norman wasn't my Mister Rogers and Jakob Nielsen wasn't my Captain Kangaroo." (Jim Ross a.k.a. @anotheruxguy ~ UXmatters) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink Design Research and Research DesignLooking into understanding from an art perspective is always interesting. "Much of design is informed by research of some sort; research, on the other hand, is almost never informed by design. Over the past several months, my students and I have built a curriculum centered around the idea that research and design are two sides of the same coin. We took it for granted that research can inform design; what took us by surprise was the great extent to which design can, in turn, enhance research." (Kevin Walker ~ Design Observer) Posted on October 04, 2011 | Permalink How Long Do Users Stay on Web Pages?I will stay much longer when there's something interesting to read, which is mostly not the case. "Users often leave Web pages in 10-20 seconds, but pages with a clear value proposition can hold people's attention for much longer because visit - durations follow a negative Weibull distribution." Posted on September 12, 2011 | Permalink Do you make these 4 mistakes when carrying out a usability review?Following review recipes (a.k.a. tips, do's and dont's) means you're following algorithms; if you follow anything, let it be heuristics. "When properly carried out, usability reviews are a very efficient way of finding the usability bloopers in an interface. But there are four common mistakes made by novice reviewers: failing to take the user's perspective; using only a single reviewer, rather than collating the results from a team; using a generic set of usability principles rather than technology-specific guidelines; and lacking the experience to judge which problems are important." (David Travis a.k.a. @userfocus) Posted on September 02, 2011 | Permalink Reliability and Dependability in Usability Testing"Usability testing is a form of user research, in so far as it allows you to make conclusions about a large population based on observations of a small sample of that population. Essentially, we try to assess our products' suitability for our marketplace - as well as its usability for the population of interest - by testing it with a group of typical users. Usability testing often involves both quantitative and qualitative data - either of which can be subject to misunderstandings. This column discusses principles of rigorous research as they apply to usability testing, with an emphasis on reliability and dependability." (Mike Hughes ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 24, 2011 | Permalink Measuring information behaviour performance inside a company: A case study"Measuring information behaviour performance to provide practical guidance for knowledge workers is an important issue for the success of a company. Drawing upon the literature from psychology, marketing, management and information systems, this paper develops a practical model of information behaviour that provides fundamental determinants of knowledge workers' performance." (Yujong Hwang ~ Information Research, 16(2) Posted on June 16, 2011 | Permalink Comparing User Research Methods for Information Architecture"In this column, I'll summarize and compare the latest generative and evaluative methods for IA user research. The methods I'll examine include open card sorting, Modified-Delphi card sorting, closed card sorting, reverse card sorting, card-based classification evaluation, tree testing, and testing information architecture with low-fidelity prototypes. I'll cover the advantages and disadvantages to consider when choosing between these methods, when it makes sense to use each method, and describe an ideal combination of these methods." Posted on June 08, 2011 | Permalink The Art of Design Research (and Why It Matters)"(...) sometimes design teams don't have the patience to see the value in dragging out a study in an effort to make it scientifically or statistically significant. We're just not wired that way; we prefer to make and experiment and then analyze later. So what is research good for?" (Jon Freach ~ The Atlantic) Posted on May 31, 2011 | Permalink Capturing Meaningful and Significant User Experience Metrics"How many times have you wondered how you can collect meaningful and significant metrics to validate your research? Many researchers struggle with this same dilemma on a daily basis. For example, how can we know the magnitude of the issues we are detecting in a traditional usability lab study? Surprisingly, there are many ways to capture useful UX metrics if you have the knowledge of what solutions to use and how to use them." Posted on May 24, 2011 | Permalink UX Analytics: Getting a Quick Win (2/2)"First, consider what is the most critical action you want your customers to accomplish on your site - what is your primary conversion? For an ecommerce site, the purchase that a thank - you confirmation represents is commonly the key conversion. From there, work backward to determine the key steps a user takes to get to that conversion point. In checkout, it might be - in reverse order - order confirmation, order review, shipping/billing/payment information, and adding a product to the shopping cart." (Kristi Olson ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 11, 2011 | Permalink The Problem with Design Education"Design - central to successful technologies - is too isolated from science education, argues design guru Don Norman." (MIT Technology Review) courtesy of markvanderbeeken Posted on April 06, 2011 | Permalink How Design Thinking Can Help Prevent Another Mortgage Bubble"Here was a chance to remake a tool that plays a vital role in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. But what happened that day turned out to be much more than streamlining a critical form in the home-buying process. Even much more than the redesign of a vital 'touch point' within the larger 'user experience'. What happened was that the symposium's attendees discovered just how radical a solution Design Thinking could offer; not only to the problem of a broken mortgage process, but to public policy at its highest levels." (Monica Bueno ~ Co.Design) Posted on April 05, 2011 | Permalink Imagine Design CreateInterview with Hugh Dubberly "Design practice does not learn. As a profession, we don't even know how to learn. We're stuck. Trapped in the past. Unable to move forward. Unclear on what forward might mean. Lacking mechanisms to build and share knowledge. Lacking even a model of design knowledge. In fact, the problem is so structurally embedded, so pervasive, so deep, that we don't see it." (Dubberly Design Office) Posted on March 30, 2011 | Permalink Anatomy of a Design Decision"The best designs come from not one, but hundreds of well-made decisions. The worst designs arise out of hundreds of poorly-made decisions. All that stands between you and a great design is the quality of your decisions. Where do they come from? For the last five years, we've been studying how designers make their decisions. When do they use outside information, such as research about their users? When do they go with their gut instinct? When do the designers look to past decisions and the lessons they've learned? What we found will surprise you. In this presentation, Jared will take you on an entertaining deep dive into the gut instinct of the best designers (without looking at all the gooey parts). You'll learn five styles of decision making, from Self Design to Experience-focused Design, and which style produces quality results. Prepare to learn how to be a better designer, as Jared shares the secrets of the best and worst." (Jared Spool ~ UIE) Posted on March 24, 2011 | Permalink Design Thinking Won't Save You"Ladies and gentlemen, let me break this to you gently. Design Thinking, the topic we're here to analyze and discuss and get to grips with so you can go back to Mars and instantly transform your businesses, is not the answer." (Helen Walters) Posted on March 22, 2011 | Permalink UX Analytics, Part I: A Call to Action"As UX researchers, our goal is to identify customer pain points and obstacles in a given workflow or process, then tell a compelling story about their risks and provide general recommendations for alleviating those risks. But after eight years in UX research - even having mastered the arts of compelling storytelling and building stakeholder empathy - I still never quite saw the results I'd hoped for. Worse, my work required me to move quickly onto the next project, never to hear again about the outcomes of projects past." (Kristi Olson ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 21, 2011 | Permalink FYI: TMI: Toward a holistic social theory of information overload"Research into information overload has been extensive and cross–disciplinary, producing a multitude of suggested causes and posed solutions. I argue that many of the conclusions arrived at by existing research, while laudable in their inventiveness and/or practicality, miss the mark by viewing information overload as a problem that can be understood (or even solved) by purely rational means. Such a perspective lacks a critical understanding in human information usage: much in the same way that economic models dependent on rationality for their explanations or projections fail (often spectacularly, as recent history attests), models that rely too heavily upon the same rational behavior, and not heavily enough upon the interplay of actual social dynamics — power, reputation, norms, and others — in their attempts to explain, project, or address information overload prove bankrupt as well. Furthermore, even research that displays greater awareness of the social context in which overload exists often reveals a similar rationality in its conceptualization. That is, often the same 'social' approaches that offer potential advantages (in mitigating information overload) over their 'non–social' counterparts paradoxically raise new problems, requiring a reappraisal of overload that takes social issues into account holistically." (Anthony Lincoln ~ First Monday Volume 16, Number 3) Posted on March 09, 2011 | Permalink Research Methods for Understanding Consumer Decisions in a Social World"Ultimately, the goal is to understand the entirety of the consumer experience, so we can make the most informed decisions about online strategy, content, and positioning. In this column, I'll first summarize the findings from Edelman's article, then discuss how we can apply traditional user research methodology to supporting changes in marketing strategies." (Michael Hawley ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink Approaches to User Research When Designing for Children"Children's exposure to computing devices depends on a great variety of factors—including cultural traditions, economic power, and family values. But there is no doubt that, in general, children's access to technological devices and interactive products has increased dramatically in recent years. We are now seeing even higher adoption of technology among children—thanks to the unpredictably intuitive interaction of youngsters with touchscreen technologies and mobile devices that they can carry everywhere and use at any time." (Catalina Naranjo-Bock ~ UXmatters) Posted on March 07, 2011 | Permalink On the scalability of design thinking and transdisciplinary design education"Interview with Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2011. Topics include design thinking and India, design,innovation and entrepreneurship driving India's inclusive growth, transdisciplinary design education and design thinking and designers." (aabhira aditya) Posted on March 03, 2011 | Permalink Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale: User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications"More and more products and services are being deployed on the web, and this presents new challenges and opportunities for measurement of user experience on a large scale. There is a strong need for user-centered metrics for web applications, which can be used to measure progress towards key goals, and drive product decisions. In this note, we describe the HEART framework for user-centered metrics, as well as a process for mapping product goals to metrics. We include practical examples of how HEART metrics have helped product teams make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centered. The framework and process have generalized to enough of our company's own products that we are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to reuse or adapt them. We also hope to encourage more research into metrics based on large-scale behavioral data." (Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu ~ Google Research) Posted on February 22, 2011 | Permalink Developing Your Interview Skills, Part II: During the Interview"(...) I'll address how to manage an interview to ensure it starts on the right track and stays there. This article also touches on some ways to develop your interviewing skills throughout your career." (Mia Northrop ~ UXmatters) Posted on February 07, 2011 | Permalink The Art of the Design Critique"Critical discussion around design is as important as the design process itself. If you work in a design team, feedback from your colleagues can keep you challenged, and can push you to improve. Despite its value to the outcome of the design process, it's far too often avoided like a trip to the dentist because we subconsciously feel criticism of our work is not just a reflection on our design, but is a spotlight upon our personal shortcomings. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Proper design criticism focus on goals, outcomes, and the needs of the users." (Aarron Walter ~ Think Vitamin) Posted on January 26, 2011 | Permalink Nokia design head speaks about mobile UX trends"Marko Ahtisaari speaks about existing and emerging design patterns for mobile devices. He says that the iOS design pattern is very well executed but very constrained (...); it's the almost perfect rendition of a superlinear, application-centric design model." (Gabriel White ~ Small Surfaces) Posted on January 26, 2011 | Permalink Understanding the Kano Model: A Tool for Sophisticated Designers"This model predicted the reaction of users as the key elements of Flickr's personalized homepage propagated to other web sites. It predicted why users were initially delighted and why the delight faded over time. We find the Kano Model to be an indispensable tool for designers. Let's take the model apart, so we can understand why it's so useful." (Jared Spool ~ User Interface Engineering) Posted on January 19, 2011 | Permalink Internet Skills: Vital Assets in an Information Society"This dissertation is about being able to keep up with the digitalization of contemporary society. It starts with a brief historical overview of changes in communication technologies and the increasing demands they have put on users. Special attention in this chapter is given to the communication technology that in a relatively short periode of time has vastly changed the way information is collected and used: the Internet." (Alexander J.A.M. van Deursen) Posted on November 25, 2010 | Permalink Developing a Strategy and Vision: Part 1"A good strategy doesn't fall out of the air by itself. You'll want to have several strategies on the table later on so that you can choose the best one. So first we need to create some basis for creating strategies." (Martijn van Welie) Posted on October 19, 2010 | Permalink Richard Buchanan Keynote: SCAD 2010"Designers are great facilitators of conversations among people who have wildly different views about the world. That's a definition of a "wicked problem" by the way. A wicked problem is where there are essentially contested values. Not accidentally contested, not arbitrarily contested. But essentially contested, meaning that there are fundamental differences that cannot be resolved. That to resolve them would be to violate the truths that have been discovered by different people. Designers work with wicked problems. They work with them by the use of dialectic (...)" (Jeff Howard ~ Design for Service) Posted on October 13, 2010 | Permalink Researcher-practitioner interaction update (UXRPI)"One thing that has been useful for me is the overall model of the problem space that emerged for me." (Keith Instone) - courtesy of resmini Posted on October 01, 2010 | Permalink Information science as a social science"This paper traces the specifics of information science as a social science. The paper examines the background of the social sciences in the history of academic disciplines. The paper discusses the ways in which positivism and interpretativism, the leading traditions of the social sciences, assert themselves in information science as a social science. It is argued that received ideas about the social sciences impact how information science as a social science is perceived. It is also argued that information science as a social science can and should provide valid scientific explanations. This paper distinguishes social interaction as the defining feature of information science as a social science. To this end, the paper proposes global complexity not as a theory or solution, but as a metaphor for information science as a social science to address the pressing issues of our increasingly interconnected world." (Sylvain K. Cibangu ~ Information Research 15.3) Posted on September 15, 2010 | Permalink Interviewing Users"Despite many weaknesses, interviews are a valuable method for exploratory user research." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox) Posted on July 26, 2010 | Permalink Knowledge Visualization in Design Practice (.pdf)Exploring the power of knowledge visualization in problem solving - "This paper presents knowledge visualization as a design activity in problem solving. In contemporary design practice the increasing complexity of problems and range of information that design practitioners engage with is driving the need for more robust processes and tools in order to design relevant, meaningful solutions for people. We situate visualization within a four phased model where the intent is to understand the dimensions of a problem. Visualization aids in sensemaking and cognitive processing of complex information. It accomplishes this through framing ambiguous states, bringing order to complexity, making sense out of seemingly unrelated things or finding insights that are buried in data. We propose that in a problem solving context its value goes beyond the functional level of simply representing information but rather operates as a powerful instrument for thinking in analysis, synthesis and insight generation. Visual models and frameworks serve as tools to illuminate relationships and meanings within data and define the areas to explore and construct solutions." (Joanne Mendel and Jan Yeager ~ Parsons Journal for Information Mapping Volume 2 Issue 3) Posted on July 21, 2010 | Permalink Debunking the Myths of Remote Usability Studies"Success in a diverse global marketplace increasingly demands that companies engage customers from diverse global backgrounds in both discussions and usability studies. However, funding for user research travel is becoming more limited, and the availability of local users who meet the need for diversity is often insufficient. Therefore, UX professionals have started using remote usability testing methods to gather adequate user feedback." (Corrie Kwan, Jin Li, and May Wong ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 06, 2010 | Permalink Recruiting Better Research Participants"Recruiting the right participants is the foundation of effective user research, because your research results are only as good as the participants involved. Representative, well-spoken, and thoughtful research participants can provide invaluable feedback. Yet finding and recruiting such ideal participants and getting them to show up for their sessions is sometimes difficult." (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters) Posted on July 06, 2010 | Permalink Ethnography in UX"On my current project, I'm designing and implementing a framework for business that provides workflow management and supports information gathering and reporting. While there may be a software component further down the track, for now the technology is taking the form of procedures, reporting templates, and guidance material. This technology is both intellectual and social. Its goal is to support teams within the organization, and it requires people to work together. The biggest challenge with designing and implementing such technology is not creating code or a user interface, but ensuring its compatibility with team dynamics. This is where ethnography comes in." (Nathanael Boehm ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 21, 2010 | Permalink What every UX professional needs to know about statistics and usability tests"Do you like computers, but hate math? Would you love to work on creating cutting-edge technology, but don't think you have the quantitative aptitude to be a programmer or electrical engineer? Then become a user experience professional! If you can count to 5 (the number of users in a usability test), then you already know all the math you'll need! Everything else is art! I bet you're good at art, aren't you?" (Stat 101) courtesy of usanews Posted on June 17, 2010 | Permalink Global User Research: Practical insights to ensure success"(...) the first book to focus on global user research. The book collects insight from UX professionals from twenty countries and, following a typical project timeline, presents practical insights into the preparation, fieldwork, analysis and reporting, and overall project management for global user research projects." (About the authors) Posted on June 09, 2010 | Permalink So, You Want to Do User Research: Characteristics of Great Researchers"One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the other hand, it takes real commitment and a lot of personal development to do user research well. People commonly assume that research is research—and doing any kind of research is better than doing none at all. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case. Not all user research is created equal. Flawed research can be a significant liability to the success of a product, as well as the company developing it, so it really is important to get it right." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 07, 2010 | Permalink Designing with Behavioral Economics"Much of economics theory is based on the premise that people are rational decision-makers. In recent years, behavioral economics—also known as behavioral finance—has emerged as a discipline, bringing together economics and psychology to understand how social, cognitive, and emotional factors influence how people make decisions, both as individuals and at the market level. Many of the findings of behavioral economics have a direct influence on how users interact with a product. In a worst‑case scenario, a product's design may encourage user behaviors that are detrimental to users' best interests." (Peter Hornsby ~ UXmatters) Posted on June 07, 2010 | Permalink Combining Methods: Web Analytics and User Testing"After presenting on combining methods at the EuroIA in 2009, Adam Cox and Martijn Klompenhouwer again showed the benefits of combining two separate sources. They delivered their presentation at the yearly Usability Professional Association conference in Munich (UPA2010). This time they focused on how to use Web Analytics in the preparation and execution of usability testing. Drawing from their experience of combining Web Analytics and User Research over the years, they illustrated several practical examples of how this combined approach works when it comes to user testing. After a short introduction of the individual methods, they demonstrated this approach by showcasing specific usability testing projects with a presentational style that was both visual and conversational." (User Intelligence) Posted on May 28, 2010 | Permalink Doing User Research Faster and Cheaper"Despite our seeing some initial signs of a recovery, for most people the economy still sucks. Companies have less money to spend and are more cautious about how they spend it. Companies that haven't already cut user research from their project plans altogether are asking researchers to achieve the same results for less money, in less time—or just to do less. Is it possible to scale back user research and still provide value? If so, how can we do things faster and cheaper?" (Jim Ross ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink Enhancing User Research with Emerging Technology"As technology evolves and new gadgets and electronics emerge in the marketplace, our options for the use of technology in conducting our user research continue to expand. The processes through which we have long gathered data—such as surveys and interviews—are no longer the only ways in which we can understand people and how they respond to our clients' products and services. As professional user researchers, we have the opportunity to devise new and innovative ways of more accurately understanding user experience through the use of technology." (Bryan McClain and Demetrius Madrigal ~ UXmatters) Posted on May 03, 2010 | Permalink The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX: Match the Mental Model to the Conceptual Model"A mental model represents a person's thought process for how something works (i.e., a person's understanding of the surrounding world). Mental models are based on incomplete facts, past experiences, and even intuitive perceptions. (...) A conceptual model is the actual model that is given to the user through the interface of the product." (Susan Weinschenk - UX Magazine) Posted on April 15, 2010 | Permalink Defining the Designer of 2015"(...) it has been apparent that design studios and corporate departments have been looking for a new kind of designer, one that has traditional skills and yet a much broader perspective on problem solving. Because one of AIGA's central responsibilities is to keep abreast of developments in the industry, we recognized that we needed to better understand the emerging role of designers and to enter into a deeper discussion with educators and design leaders on how to prepare designers for future changes." (AIGA) Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink The riddle of experience vs. memory"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our 'experiencing selves' and our 'remembering selves' perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness." (TED2010) Posted on April 14, 2010 | Permalink Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet"And what does Mary Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking." (Mathew Ingram - GigaCom) Posted on April 13, 2010 | Permalink Design anthropology: What can it add to your design practice?"Designers primarily concern themselves with how to create a 'successful' communication, product, or experience. But with the past 10 years of globalization, digitalization, and ever increasing design complexity, designers have come to realize that to answer the question of design 'success' requires that they answer that question of how the processes and artifacts of design help define what it means to be human. This 'humanness' can range from how humans control the environment through tools (homo faber); how high-heeled shoes affect natural ways of walking; to moral issues of how participation in the design process empowers marginalized communities. In this space, the practice and theory of design anthropology has emerged." (Dori Tunstall) Posted on April 07, 2010 | Permalink IDSA Design Research"We have launched this site in connection with the release of the spring issue of Innovation Magazine, which is dedicated to design research. All of the articles from the magazine are available here. We encourage you to read these articles and share your thoughts and ideas through the site." Posted on April 04, 2010 | Permalink User-Centered Innovation is not Sustainable"Only forward-looking executives, designers, and, of course, policy makers may introduce sustainable innovation into the economic picture. They need to step back from current dominant needs and behaviors and envision new scenarios. They need to propose new unsolicited products and services that are both attractive, sustainable, and profitable." (Roberto Verganti - Harvard Business Review) Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink Sustainable User Research"Traditionally, user research involves directly observing and talking with people in the context of their work or play. Either researchers travel to observe participants in their natural environments or participants travel to a usability lab or focus-group facility. How better to understand how people use a product or technology than to observe them using it firsthand?" (Jim Ross - UXmatters) Posted on March 22, 2010 | Permalink Preso: Data-Driven Design"A five minute rant on the importance of letting data be your guide when making tactical design decisions. An introduction for managers of design teams who are driven from a heuristic, or 'genius' perspective." (Ryan Freitas) Posted on March 10, 2010 | Permalink The State Of Customer Experience 2010"Only 11% have a very disciplined approach to customer experience." (Bruce Temkin - Customer Experience Matters) Posted on February 26, 2010 | Permalink Research Is Communication"In actuality, the reason so many small software businesses fail so quickly is because they don't understand that their knowledge of how to build a product is not sufficient to build success. The true vision of a multidisciplinary team of engineers, designers, product people, marketers, business people, and researchers is foreign to them. If some of the people creating software don't understand our role, it's not surprising consumers don't." (Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain - UXmatters) Posted on January 04, 2010 | Permalink Customer journey mapping"Customer journey mapping is the process of tracking and describing all the experiences that customers have as they encounter a service or set of services, taking into account not only what happens to them, but also their responses to their experiences. Used well, it can reveal opportunities for improvement and innovation in that experience, acting as a strategic tool to ensure every interaction with the customer is as positive as it can be." (Cabinet Office) Posted on November 11, 2009 | Permalink Co-creation through generative design thinking"Co-creation is not just the next new thing in marketing. It is an alternative way of seeing and being in the world. Existing and thriving in the emerging co-creative landscapes will require the creation and application of new tools, methods and methodologies for connecting, innovating, making, telling and sharing. These generative tools must be useful and usable for all types of people. Generative design thinking provides a design language for all of us, designers as well as non-designers, to use in provoking the imagination, stimulating ideation, stirring the emotions, discovering unmet needs and facilitating embodiments of future possibilities. Examples of this generative design language in action, from projects ranging from consumer product and service development to the planning and architecture of new healthcare campuses, will be shared." (Elizabeth B.-N. Sanders - IASDR09) Posted on October 30, 2009 | Permalink Science and Design"But as the world grows more complex, more interconnected, with the underlying infrastructure less and less visible, hidden inside electronic and optical mechanisms, conveyed as all-powerful yet invisible information and knowledge, design more than ever needs a body of reliable, verifiable procedures. Science is the systematic method of building a reliable, verifiable, repeatable, and generalizable body of knowledge. Science is not a body of facts: it is a process. Design is the deliberate shaping of the environment in ways that satisfy individual and societal needs. Scientific methods can inform design. Designers can create a science of design." (Donald A. Norman - IASDR09) Posted on October 30, 2009 | Permalink Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts"The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression. For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective consciousness of Internet users. An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world's unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data." (Alex Wright - NYT) Posted on October 15, 2009 | Permalink What is Design Thinking Anyway?"Toward the end of the nineteenth century, American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey began to explore the limits of formal declarative logic — that is, inductive and deductive reasoning. They were less interested in how one declares a statement true or false than in the process by which we come to know and understand. To them, the acquisition of knowledge was not an abstract, purely conceptual exercise, but one involving interaction with and inquiry into the world around them. Understanding did not entail progress toward an absolute truth but rather an evolving interaction with a context or environment." (Roger Martin - Design Observer) Posted on October 15, 2009 | Permalink IORG: The Information Overload Research Group"We work together to understand, publicize and solve the information overload problem. We do this by (1) defining and building awareness of information overload, (2) facilitating and funding collaboration and advanced research aimed at shaping solutions and establishing best practices, and (3) serving as a resource center where we share information and resources, offer guidance and connections, and help make the business case for fighting information overload." (About The IORG) Posted on September 30, 2009 | Permalink Audience Segmentation Models"Understanding the people who will ultimately engage with a product or service provides the foundation for user experience design. Modeling those people and segmenting our models into meaningful groups lets us explore different clusters of needs, then address our solutions to meeting the needs of people belonging to specific clusters." (Steve Baty - UXmatters) Posted on September 21, 2009 | Permalink Book Chapter: Designed Animism"What does pervasive computing have to do with animism? Essentially, it can become a tool in manifesting what I call designed animism. The goal is fundamentally experiential, but the conequences are profound: designed animism forms the basis of a poetics for a new world." (Brenda Laurel) Posted on August 26, 2009 | Permalink Designing for Interaction: Design Research"If only a small bit of the typical time, money, and resources used to make and market a product or service were put towards design research—observing, talking to, and maybe even making artifacts with customers and users—the products and services we use would be greatly improved. Dan Saffer explains." (Dan Saffer - Peachpit) - courtesy jhollandmag Posted on August 20, 2009 | Permalink Using the Internet: Skill related problems in users' online behavior"This study extends the conventional and superficial notion of measuring digital skills by proposing definitions for operational, formal, information and strategic skills. The main purpose was to identify individual skill related problems that users experience when navigating the Internet. In particular, lower levels of education and aging seem to contribute to the amount of experienced operational and formal skill related problems. With respect to information skills, higher levels of education seem to perform best. Age did not seem to contribute to information skill related problems. Results did reveal that age had a negative effect on selecting irrelevant search results. Individual strategic Internet skill related problems occurred often, with the exception of subjects with higher levels of education. Younger subjects experienced far less operational and formal skill related problems, but there was no difference regarding information and strategic skill related problems." (Alexander J.A.M. van Deursen and Jan A.G.M. van Dijk) - courtesy of shuggie Posted on August 14, 2009 | Permalink Finding Gold in Your User Research Results"This article describes a funnel that starts with the product, progresses to the users, and finally, plumbs the depths of the user research itself. I'll attempt to show how each of these stages can inform the next stage and move us toward finding the gold." (Daniel Szuc - UXmatters) Posted on July 06, 2009 | Permalink Guesses vs. Data as Basis for Design Recommendations"Even the tiniest amount of empirical facts (say, observing 2 users) vastly improves the probability of making correct UI design decisions." (Jakob Nielsen - Alertbox) Posted on June 08, 2009 | Permalink Symposium Contextmapping: The Videos"About five years ago, we started the contextmapping research at ID-StudioLab. In these past five years, four PhD students have explored various elements in the procedure. Several hundred students at TU Delft have learnt its principles, as did many design students and practitioners in workshops in the Netherlands, Europe, and Asia. Several dozens of students have explored, varied, modified, and reflected on the techniques, their possibilities and limitations. In May 2009, the first 'contextmapping' PhD thesis will be defended. On this occasion, we take the opportunity to reflect on the new techniques for involving users in the fuzzy front end of product design. What was learnt, what are the opportunities and barriers in industrial practice, and what do we think should the next developments be?" - (ID-StudioLab - TU Delft) courtesy of paulvalk Posted on May 20, 2009 | Permalink Remote Research: Real Users, Real Time, Real Research (Chapter 1)"Remote user research describes any research method that allows you to observe, interview, or get feedback from users while they're at a distance, in their "native environment" (at their desk, in their home or office) doing their own tasks. Remote studies allow you to recruit quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment, on their own time. Our book will teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top-to-bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop." - (Tony Tulathimutte - Rosenfeld Media) Posted on May 19, 2009 | Permalink User experience and web analytics"(...) we would probably all benefit from a dashboard of reports that included the ones that we've come to expect from our analytics tools, but that also include other quantitative reports (such as from help desk logs) and, perhaps more importantly, qualitative reports from such sources as ongoing usability testing." - (Louis Rosenfeld - Bloug) Posted on May 17, 2009 | Permalink Bringing the everyday life of people into design"This thesis describes a research journey in which I developed various communication tools and a theoretical framework for making user experiences useful for designers in the very beginning of the design process." - (Froukje Sleeswijk Visser - ContextQueen) Posted on May 12, 2009 | Permalink Attention and awareness in stage magic: Turning tricks into research"Just as vision scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Magic shows are a manifestation of accomplished magic performers' deep intuition for and understanding of human attention and awareness. By studying magicians and their techniques, neuroscientists can learn powerful methods to manipulate attention and awareness in the laboratory. Such methods could be exploited to directly study the behavioural and neural basis of consciousness itself, for instance through the use of brain imaging and other neural recording techniques." - (Nature Reviews Neuroscience) Posted on May 07, 2009 | Permalink Design Fiction"Science fiction is a form of popular entertainment. The emotional payoff of the science fiction genre is the sense of wonder it conveys. Science fiction 'design' therefore demands some whiz-bang, whereas industrial design requires safety, utility, serviceability, cost constraints, appearance, and shelf appeal. To these old-school ID virtues nowadays we might add sustainability and a decent interface." - (Bruce Sterling - ACM interactions XVI.3) Posted on May 07, 2009 | Permalink Shall We Dance?"It is with great pride that I welcome you to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Information Architecture. The Journal of Information Architecture is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture. The journal will focus on information architecture research and development in all types of shared information environments, such as for example social networks, web sites, intranets, mobile and Rich Internet Applications, from various perspectives such as technical, cultural, social, and communicational." - (Dorte Madsen - Journal of Information Architecture 1.1) Posted on May 05, 2009 | Permalink Analysis, Plus Synthesis: Turning Data into Insights"Conducting primary user research such as in-depth interviews or field studies can be fairly straightforward, when compared with what you face upon returning to the office with piles of notes, sketches, user journals, and audio and video recordings. You may ask, What should I do with all this data? and How do I turn it into something meaningful?" - (Lindsay Ellerby - UXmatters) Posted on April 28, 2009 | Permalink IA Summit 09 - Keynote"Michael Wesch opened the IA Summit this year with an inspired keynote that provides a fresh and ambitious direction for all designers. He points out that our 'audiences' aren't audiences at all, but rather creators, and our job is not to lecture but to enable. With this new approach comes not only design challenges but the joy of reconnecting people to each other, which he illustrated with a series of extraordinary video clips." - (Jeff Parks - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on April 06, 2009 | Permalink User (experience) research, design research, usability research, market research"(...) a much more significant change was made at Yahoo! more recently: a merger of the user experience research group and the market research group, yielding an organization named, Customer Insights." - (Richard Anderson - Riander) Posted on February 19, 2009 | Permalink User Research Friday"One thing I was really listening for was how people actually use research to do design. In my practice as an interaction designer, I find user research to be extremely important. I'm a strong advocate of ethnographically-inspired fieldwork (...) because it helps me understand how people really work and think." (Lane Halley - Cooper Journal) Posted on November 17, 2008 | Permalink When to Use Which User Experience Research Methods"Modern day user experience research methods can now answer a wide range of questions. Knowing when to use each method can be understood by mapping them in 3 key dimensions and across typical product development phases." (Christian Rohrer - Alertbox) Posted on October 06, 2008 | Permalink Users Participation in Online Conversation"In the past, user participation in editorial publications was limited to writing "letters to the editor." On the web, users take an active role in shaping the message through their comments and debates. Bond Art + Science looked at how traditional media and online publications invite, manage and benefit from user participation, and we identified some best practices and common pitfalls." (Bond Art + Science) Posted on August 27, 2008 | Permalink What Adaptive Path Thinks When It Thinks About Eyetracking"(...) you rarely hear about eyetracking leading to crucial insights. Eyetracking is helpful when you need to know something extremely tactical at a very precise level of detail. But we should think very hard about the payoff. There's a great deal of overhead and it's difficult to make this a flexible, nimble process." (Adaptive Path) Posted on March 27, 2008 | Permalink Extreme User Research"What is the biggest problem I face almost every time a client hires me to do something about a web project going awry? They don't know a thing about their users. They don't have a clue, whatsoever. Unbelievable but true!" (Daniel Lafreniere - Boxes and Arrows) Posted on March 27, 2008 | Permalink Filling Much Needed Holes"Ethnographic research is fun. You get to go out into the world and watch, take pictures, satisfy your curiosity and inherent nosiness. Back at the office it is great fun to scribble notes, to post them on walls and rearrange them to form patterns. Then we can create personas, colorful little artificial people with cute, interesting lives, or maybe overstressed, over-busy lives. We delight at personas, at prototyping, at watching people go through their paces. New products galore. Innovation is the new hot topic. But does all of this activity lead to actual success in the marketplace? I fear not." (Donald A. Norman) Posted on December 05, 2007 | Permalink Design Research in 2006"In the US, it is the practitioners who have been leading with regard to design research in practice. So in the U.S., there is exploration and innovation in design research going on, but it is not as well disseminated. It is discussed in general terms so as not to give too much away to 'the competition'. It is not often published, though the interaction design community is doing a good job of sharing. Europe is way ahead of the US in design research of a participatory nature. Why? Because they (particularly northern Europe) have embraced a participatory attitude for a long time. The participatory way of thinking is antithetical to the US-centric mode of manufacturers pushing products at 'consumers' through marketing and advertising." (Liz Sanders - MakeTools) Posted on September 19, 2007 | Permalink Pick and MixConsumers moving between online and offline channels in the context of leisure travel preparations (PhD Thesis 2007) - "Consumers are increasingly using web-based systems for the search and purchase of products and services. They are, however, also still using traditional, offline channels such as telephone, high street and mail order, on a regular basis. The research presented in this thesis investigated consumer use of e-services in the context of a multi-channel environment, with a special focus on voluntary channel choice and voluntary movement between channels. Both multi-channel usage and voluntary movement between channels are currently under-researched topics." (Geke van Dijk - STBY) Posted on July 10, 2007 | Permalink Design Documentaries: Inspiring Design Research Through Documentary Film"This paper shows how we can take inspiration and use techniques from documentary film in pursuing user research." (Bas Raijmakers et al. - STBY Design Documentaties) Posted on July 10, 2007 | Permalink |


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Second of a few images from my day at the TDF final in Paris. This is Ben Swift of Team Sky. A young British Rider from Yorkshire who had a great first Tour and shows oodles of potential for the future.
I have added additional blur in PS just to take the background down and soften out the spectators. Otherwise a straight shot. I was fortunate to get a front row position on the barriers on the corner of the Tuilleries however it gets very tight and panning was a challenge in itself! Quite a number of shots had blurred hands of those either side of me as they waved and cheered. This was one where I managed to catch the action without obstruction.
As always I love to hear your comments - like or not and any constructive points. Thanks for looking.
Brand: | Canon |
Camera: | Canon EOS 5D |
Lens: | Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM |
Recording media: | JPEG (digital) |
Date Taken: | 24 Jul 2011 - 4:27 PM |
Focal Length: | 105mm |
Aperture: | f/8.0 |
Shutter Speed: | 1/125sec |
Exposure Comp: | 0.0 |
Exposure Mode: | Shutter speed priority AE |
Metering Mode: | Multi-segment |
Flash: | Off, Did not fire |
Title: | Swifty being Swift |
Username: | Coast |
Uploaded: | 1 Aug 2011 - 9:03 AM |
Tags: | Ben Swift, Cycling, Paris, Sports / action, Sprint, Tdf, Team Sky, Tour de france |
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Votes: | 20 |
I like the shot and can understand how hard it is to pan in a crowd, but I think the ps work has spoilt it. If it was my picture I think I may down a more dramatic blur, a zoom blur or even graduated the blur to the rear but make the rear very blurry.
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subset: commoncrawl


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Iffy Geek Anthem 'Tonight I'm Frakkin' You'
Hey Juggernaut -- smell my finger. That's Jabba's @$$hole!
Because geeky-ass songs are all the rage these days, here's 'Tonight I'm Frakkin' You', a parody of Enrique Englesias' 'Tonight (I'm F***ing You)', which I've never heard and have no intentions of starting now. Also: a diet. EATING RIGHT IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE AND I GAVE UP LONG AGO. The video features cameos from The Big Bang Theory's Kunal Nayaar and Battlestar Galactica'sRitchard Hatch and BG: Caprica's Alesandra Toresanni. Plus others. It's chock-full of geeky references and the video isn't really that bad but some of the sounds gave me a headache and made my dog start barking at the computer and she doesn't bark for anything but treats and robberies. Which -- OMG THERE'S A MASKED PERSON IN MY HOUSE. Batman!
Hit the jump and get your geek swerve on BUT NO FRAKKIN'.
Tonight, I'm Frakking You [break]
Tonight I'm Frakking You [theendoftheinterwebs]
Thanks to Patrick, clark, AZAZ and Erica, who all penned geek anthems on the back of bar napkins before spilling drinks and smearing their work. BUT THOSE COULD HAVE BEEN HITS! Kidding, I'm sure they all blew.
Note: Trailer is after the jump. This is a screenshot from a porno parody of 'The Big Bang Theory'. I dunno, maybe it's for you. Me? I don't watch adult movies, I live them. Did somebody call a plumber? No? Electrician? Did you order a pizza? I'M HERE TO BONE DAMMIT. ... / Continue →
This is the music video for a song called 'Tron Girl' by Barely Political. It looks like something you'd see on Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! except it actually makes sense and you didn't have to stay up past your bedtime on a Sunday night to watch it. Plus it's avail... / Continue →
This is a gallery of the cosplaying girls from this past weekend's San Diego Comic-Con. As you may or may not know, I was denied access to the convention this year for "being too drunk to stand" and telling security "my superpenis is my costume". Guilty as charged aside, Norm... / Continue →


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The Brooks Institute film blog will share news, events and video clips to inspire your creative vision.
May 14, 2013 • Film, General • 0 Comments
It's simple: you need to know what makes a screenplay good. Even if you wish to pursue directing or producing, screenwriting is a foundational filmmaking skill. Whether you are beginning to write a screenplay or want a Screenwriting I refresher, review these five tips before you start drafting: Continue...
April 15, 2013 • Anthony R. W. Lopez • General, Film • 0 Comments
Brooks film alumnus Anthony R. W. Lopez shares seven simple ways to help promote your work and your business on social platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Continue...
February 26, 2013 • General, Film, Alumni and Career Services • 0 Comments
Keith Lancaster shares what drew him to cinematography, the experienced he gained at Brooks and the exciting opportunities he's finding on set. Continue...
February 11, 2013 • General, Film • 0 Comments
Brooks alumnus Kevin Huang won best-directed film in the 10-10-10 Student Filmmaking Competition at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Continue...
January 31, 2013 • General, Film • 0 Comments
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