User Experience

Andrew Chen writes about product design debt. During a product lifecycle there's a constant flow of new features. The most common solution to deal with it — to add new button or tab. This solution is far from effective but the most popular one. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A video of Kim Goodwin's presentation at #UMarafon webinar. She goes through Cooper UX process step by step and shows a lot of examples of real work. A really really great presentation with a series of good questions from listeners. You can see slides — http://www.slideshare.net/KimGood... or webinar page — http://marathon.uidesign.ru/goodwin.... - Juras Vetrau

The 4th IDEA conference was held September, 15-16th in Toronto by The Information Architecture Institute. We'll try to put together a coverage of the event in comments to this post — presentations, videos, photos, reports, workbooks etc. Official site of the event — http://ideaconference.org/2009.... - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A review from Boxes & Arrows, Day 2 — http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view... - Juras Vetrau

Vicky Teniaki from Johnny Holland has interviewed Todd Zaki Warfel about his new book — "Prototyping: A Practioner's Guide". The article features methods & tools comparision matrix from the book where different wireframing & prototyping approaches are listed. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Where is Blend, though? - Alexey Ivanov

@epleplepl: Blend is too young :) Totally agree with Todd's choice, I always use Visio, Fireworks and Axure (and maybe Balsamiq also) as a list of tools that cover most wireframing/prototyping needs and have a bright future. - Juras Vetrau

An interesting article from Thomas Peterson where he thinks about waterfall UCD process versus agile-based trial & error approach. Although its a controversional and maybe too provocative post — it critiques rather general UCD "image" than reviews different UCD approaches, author rasies some important points. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

@copylove: I agree its a controversional and too provocative article. It critiques rather general UCD "image" than reviews different UCD approaches. But author rasies some important points: 1) getting real feedback from real product usage on a distance is very important. There's a bunch of case studies of UX research & design prior to product development or during implementation &... more... - Juras Vetrau

"The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should). At Mozilla Labs, we’ve been working on some potential integrations of identity directly into the browser. Note, this is an extremely rough draft." - A. Khmelevsky™ from Bookmarklet

Interesting Sign In solution built-in browser by Aza Raskin. - A. Khmelevsky™

While many people tout the flexibility and customization options Android gives people, I can’t help but wonder if the singular model Apple employs makes managing a set of mobile applications easier. Every app is accessed the same way and only open apps are running. Sure this is limiting in some ways (customization options, background processes) but empowering in others (clarity, control) at the same time. If people feel more confident with Apple's simpler customization options, they may actually customize more (add additional apps) as a result. - Ashish Tiwari from Bookmarklet

The 2nd Service Design Conference was held October, 26-27th in Madeira, Portugal by Service Design Network. We'll try to put together a coverage of the event in comments to this post — presentations, videos, photos, reports, workbooks etc. Official site of the event — http://www.service-design-network.org/content.... - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

All presentations and videos — http://www.service-design-network.org/content.... - Juras Vetrau

Here's also videos from the 1st Service Design Thinks conference — http://www.servicedesigning.org/events.... - Juras Vetrau

A short but interesting article about specialized task design from Mikkel Michelsen. As he says, "In the digital work environment of a specialist such as the nurse, designing the patient vital sign monitor requires the interaction designer to use and apply domain-specific knowledge. “Systolic Blood Pressure” is not just a label in a list; you have to know what it means. And then you have to design what it means to the nurse. So how can we design the best possible systems when faced with these special contexts? How do we ensure that interactive systems for specialized users do not become needlessly complex and difficult to use? This article provides an introduction to domain of specialized interaction design, and provides you with some key guidelines for a successful UX result." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Sasha Komarov: "All too often, iPhone developers create products in isolation from their customers. In order to create really appealing applications, developers must stop focusing only on the mechanisms of the apps. Zoom out: understand the person using the application, as well as the complex environmental factors surrounding that person." - Alexey Ivanov from Bookmarklet

Four Key Principles of Mobile User Experience — http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view... (Boxes & Arrows). - Juras Vetrau

"When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales. But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them. To make this happen O’Reilly needed to be on board to allow the book to be freely copied and shared, in an era in which these very freedoms threaten the publishing world." - Urbansheep from Bookmarklet

“In Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how designers can bake sustainability into their design processes in order to produce more sustainable solutions. Design is the Problem explains: How sustainability isn't as difficult to understand and address as many would have you think Several of the leading frameworks and perspectives on sustainability How to insert sustainability into the development process that you're already using The many, practical strategies that make the products, services, and events you design and develop more sustainable—right now.” - Urbansheep from Bookmarklet

A great user experience incorporates three pillars: structure, behavior, and expression. This talk will explore the wide variety of interaction design patterns we have built into the Android system framework to help educate you on the best way to use these pattern-based behaviors for an optimized user experience. - act like newcomer

Nate Fortin from Cooper Consulting puts together a comprehensive article about different design disciplines and their collaboration during product design & development process. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

“In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established. Or, on a nerdier note, think about riffling through decks of Magic: The Gathering cards, zooming in for larger-than-life detail of the card's artwork and then zooming out to see how each was related or linked to others in the set. This probably reminds you - as it did us - a lot of Wikipedia. But imagine Wikipedia as an infinitely scannable, shuffleable, expandable, retractable, linked, and yet still detachable deck of digital cards; and then you have an inkling of how Pivot looks and feels.” RWW — http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... - Urbansheep from Bookmarklet

MS Office Visio 2010 Beta is available for download. It's a stable version of a popular diagramming and wireframing tool. It features a lot of improvements including: 1) ribbon interface; 2) great diagramming tools — diagrams can be drawn, aligned, distributed really fast; 3) auto-expandable page; 4) paste-in-place; 5) extended stencil capabilities — you can include data sources now. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

An interesting 10 minute video that shows a very well made paper prototype in action. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Another paper prototype walk-through — http://www.youtube.com/watch.... - Juras Vetrau

A good critique of A/B testing of design. As its author says, "Any A/B test is a trial, so called because we’re observing evidence gained by trying something out. I can never truly know that there’s a 50% chance of a coin landing as a head or a tail – I can only run trials and observe the evidence. Similarly, we can never truly know that a design leads to higher conversion – we can only run trials and observe the evidence. If that empirical evidence is strong enough, we conclude that the design is an improvement. If not, we don’t." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Found some nice abstract and helpful stencils for iPhone wireframing. The ones by Y! were too realistic. Have you already done any wireframing for iPhone web- or regular apps? - Alexey Ivanov

A comprehensive list of iPhone wireframing tools, stencils and templates — http://iphoneized.com/2009.... - Juras Vetrau

Modified Morville's UX model - with strategic (context) and tactical (execution) axes added. User experience is not (only) about usability, information architecture or visual design as we traditionally see it. User experience only happens when great design is executed in the right way and for the right reason. Because user experience will not happen, until the design is in fact used by a user. - Olga Safonova

#ux - Olga Safonova

A great overview presentation about gestural and touch interfaces from Dan Saffer. He's talking about touchscreen and sensor types, kinesiology and physiology, choice of appropriate gestures and reveals a case study. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A small but interesting case study from MS Office 2010 design team. The story tells about integration of a new complicated feature (collaboration) into familiar process (rich document editing) without breaking old one. One of most interesting parts is a set of principles they've set during this process. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

More about Office team UX research tools and techniques — http://blogs.technet.com/office2.... - Juras Vetrau

A nice overview presentation about mobile user interfaces from Nick Finck. As he says, "This will be a crash course in mobile user experience design, are you ready? We will look at how the mobile context has evolved over the years and where it is headed. We’ll explore the differences between the web and the mobile web, why these differences are important, what the key user experience principals are for the mobile web ...oh yeah, and there will be plenty of examples for you to sink your teeth into. I will give you the information you need to design an optimal user experience for the mobile web as well as what decisions you will need to make along the way." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Cristian Pascu comes up with 8 reasons why interactive prototyping helps. It's defenitely not something you didn't know before, yet a good start to perceive someone to include interactive prototyping in the design process. - Alexey Ivanov from Bookmarklet

Prototyping in the Wild presentation — http://www.slideshare.net/toddwar.... - Juras Vetrau

"This talk takes a quick look at how to build a shared vocabulary and use prototyping to bypass extensive wireframes and development specs." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

A very interesting approach to wireframe sketching — ondrejvalka (http://www.flickr.com/photos...) uses a cardboard frame with general application layout and a notebook where he draws screen content. A nice time-saving trick. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Another showcase and set of tips from Smashing Magazine. This time — "coming soon" pages. - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Great article from Andy Rutledge about gestalt principles of perception in design, comes in 4 parts. As the author says, "Almost everything that makes graphic design work can be found in a set of laws and principles collectively known as the Gestalt principles of perception. There is no more powerful tool at a designer’s disposal than a comprehensive grasp of these principles. By the same token, those who don’t have a good grasp of them are lost when faced with design projects and often go “fishing” on design gallery sites, being relegated to cliché motifs and layouts. But clients deserve better than our vague understanding. If you haven’t already, resolve to learn the Gestalt principles of perception." #2 — http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt..., #3 — http://www.andyrutledge.com/gestalt..., #4 — http://www.andyrutledge.com/common-..., #5 — http://www.andyrutledge.com/closure.... - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Extremely awesome and up-to-date. Thx. - Rinat

As Jakub Linowski says, "The interactive sketching notation is an emerging visual language which affords the representation of interface states and event-based user actions. Through a few simple and standardized rules, what the user sees (drawn in greys and blacks) and does (drawn in red) are unified into a coherent sketching system. This unification of both interface and use, intends to enable designers to tell more powerful stories of interaction." - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet

Here's a print-ready flipbook that includes a bunch of modern RIA patterns. It can be used as an illustrated pattern catalog or cut to create UI postcards. Direct download link — http://www.theresaneil.com/files... (PDF, 2.5 Mb). - Juras Vetrau from Bookmarklet