Archive for August 2008

26 Aug 2008 1519H

Something surprising

The other day I watched my four-year-old niece show exactly how conversant she is with the web. She is conversant to the degree that she can input in her own name and password into a site, and knows what the major web conventions are, and can play games with relative ease. Kinda makes you wonder [...]

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26 Aug 2008 0917H

Design for Democracy

Thanks to Ryan for pointing out this opinion piece on the Design for Democracy project. You can also see the interactive piece that shows how it would work. As user experience professionals, and as UPA members, we feel of course that the information design and interaction design are inseparable parts of the entire voting user [...]

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26 Aug 2008 0738H

Hate to say I told ya so

but not really. I suspected back in January at Macworld that the network would not be ready to handle the demand placed on it, and today Apple Insider confirms it:
Instead, it’s believed that changes will need to be made on the part of 3G providers to optimize their networks “in terms of number of towers, [...]

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17 Aug 2008 1710H

Alan Cooper tries to set the record straight

You’ll remember an infamous debate between Kent Beck and Alan Cooper re: XP vs. interaction design waaaay back when. Alan tried to set the record straight at Agile 2008 in Toronto last week.

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17 Aug 2008 0850H

Effective design problem solving

By way of Noise Between Stations, there’s a line in this work, my emphasis added, by Nigel Cross’s Expertise in Design:
Expert designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, especially in terms of the time and attention they spend on defining the problem. However, this seems to be appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that [...]

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17 Aug 2008 0647H

Biting the hand that feeds you

Seems a recent post at grokdotcom has inflamed the information architecture community: hardly worth mentioning really but for the strident responses drawn to that flame. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that interaction design or information architecture is faulty or point out how they are incomplete, and most mature disciplines at some point in [...]

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14 Aug 2008 1010H

Frivolity, but, hey: Uniqlock

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10 Aug 2008 0826H

Gap goes back to basics

From BusinessWeek:
“For several years, Gap, under former Disney (DIS) executive Paul Pressler, relied heavily on focus groups and spent little time in the stores. Early on, Gap North American President Marka Hansen encouraged Robinson to have breakfast with store managers at Gap’s flagship on 34th Street in New York City. As he scribbled furiously in [...]

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08 Aug 2008 0858H

Poka-yoke example

From Adobe Media Player. Prevent the user from triggering an error by designing error out of the application: Disable the Accept box until the user accepts the agreement, and don’t let them go forward until they accept the Terms. Or allow the user to quit. Simple.

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07 Aug 2008 1216H

Research driving UX projects

We’re in the production stream of a project now, and I’m looking back on an affinity diagram I put together after we’d had a group of about four or five users tell us their loves and hates (such strong words, I know) about a particular online service we offer. Hadn’t looked at it in a [...]

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