Posts Tagged ‘design’

A Tale of Two Conferences

by Hugh Beyer

I’ve attended two conferences in the last three weeks—Jared Spool’s UX Immersions conference, and CHI 2012, the primary computer-human interaction conference. UX Immersions was the smaller conference, focusing this year on the Agile/UX interface and on design for mobile devices. It was a great group of very focused people and, as it was run by Jared’s [...]

What Makes Things Cool?

by Karen Holtzblatt

This intensive, hands-on workshop teaches how to design for the Cool Experience intentionally.

Webinar: Innovation in Cool

by Karen Holtzblatt

What makes products cool? Sign up now for our webinar on Cool Innovation and find out!

Announcing Interactions Article: What Makes Things Cool?

by Karen Holtzblatt

I’m pleased to announce my article on “What Makes Things Cool?” has just been published in the November issue of Interactions. See the front cover of your copy of Interactions or buy a copy of the PDF here. Any time that a new platform emerges, it calls for new design principles and techniques to truly [...]

The Limits of Iterative Development

by Hugh Beyer

One of the ongoing questions in Agile development is whether and how much up-front design needs to be done. This is my perspective.

Simple Methods for Reliable User Involvement

by Hugh Beyer

Hugh will be presenting at the Agile conference again this year, talking about basic techniques for getting users involved in your Agile sprints. From the conference program: One of the difficult problems faced by an Agile team is that of getting reliable user input. Since Agile projects depend on minimal up-front planning and specification, user [...]

Boston MiniUPA Conference Redux – May, 2011

by Traci Lepore

Boston MiniUPA isn’t mini anymore, but it’s still good.

I’m in the user’s shoes, now what?

by Traci Lepore

How finding an empathetically user-centered perspective on design builds innovation Many of us talk about being user-centered, and most of us want to be user-centered designers. But what does that really mean? And how do you take the understanding you gain from user research and do something meaningful with it for an innovative outcome? In [...]

Nouns and Verbs

by Larry Marturano

When you think of a technology or a product as a noun, you concentrate on what it is, its object-ness. But a verb is something different. When you think of a technology or product as a verb, you think about what it can do for people. And that’s an important difference for the success of the product.

Digital Publishing: A view from the trenches

by Shelley Wood

It’s a huge challenge for a print publishing company to transform into a technology company. Here are some of the pitfalls.

Designing for “Cool”

by Karen Holtzblatt

Making compelling products and applications

Looking Below the Surface

by David Rondeau

Analyzing and understanding interaction design

Driving Innovation

by Kelley Wagg

The new GM gets intimate with customers. A case study.

How Do You Overcome Requirements Blind Spots?

by Dave Flotree

This company’s confidence in their original business plan and product concept was so great that it had blinded them to customer realities. The train had already left the station before they really knew customer needs.

Innovation Comes from Watching Users

by Kelley Wagg

GM’s experience studying drivers shows that a close analysis of user behavior can indeed lead to innovation.

Finding Design Opportunity in Connections

by David Rondeau

Designers are sometimes myopic. (Before you get defensive, you should know I’ve been designing for 20 years and I still include myself in that statement.) As designers, we tend to focus on our product but not the larger ecosystem in which it exists—even though almost everything we design is connected to other products or services. [...]

The Responsibility of Design

by Karen Holtzblatt

Do you ever get “the clutch”? You know what I mean—that feeling in your chest that THIS feature MUST be shipped or the product will FAIL. When a team member can’t let go of their idea no matter what the data from the customer, the reality of shipping, or the difficulty of the code, we [...]

Seduced by a Keyboard

by Hugh Beyer

Here’s the story: I’m at a meeting hosted by another company. A bunch of us walk into their team room, talking, and I wander over to the table in the center of the room and touch the keyboard laying there. Then I start swearing. I swore because Apple did it again. The keyboard was one [...]

Next of Kin

by Larry Marturano

The Microsoft Kin was launched in mid-April—a social networking optimized phone aimed squarely and explicitly at teens and pre-teens. But by June it was dead. Did user research ironically help kill the Kin?

Changing Minds is Hard Work

by Hugh Beyer

I’ve been telling people for years that thinking is hard work. At the end of a day building an affinity when everyone’s brain is completely fried even though all they’ve done for the day is stick Post-its on the wall—“See, thinking is hard work!” I say with a chipper smile, and everybody hates me. This [...]

Is Analytics the Answer?

by Larry Marturano

It’s been fascinating over the last several years to watch the big hairy technology battle of our age play out—Google versus Apple. This is a clash of ideologies in how they approach design.

Why Developers Don’t Think Systemically

by Hugh Beyer

BJ Clark over at Marked as Pertinent has an interesting post on who should do acceptance testing. He starts there, but he spends most of the post on the really interesting question, which is the role of the Interaction Designer (ID). His claim, which I agree with, is that the ID is responsible for the [...]

How Blink Justifies Doing Field Interviews

by Shelley Wood

Malcolm Gladwell’s stories support doing observational user research in the field, show why it matters, and reveal how to convince management to let you do it. If you are fighting to justify going out to observe your customers in the field instead of doing traditional interviews—here’s some ammunition from a credible source not connected to the technology community.

Agile development at CHI

by Hugh Beyer

I attended CHI 2010 week before last and it was interesting and insightful as usual. There were lots of great ideas, interaction paradigms and insightful research being presented. But one topic was not much addressed by official conference sessions, but was common in the hallway conversations: how to deal with agile software development. I go [...]

Journey to the Center of the Human Psyche

by Karen Holtzblatt

Reading after a show or movie is not just “being in the know” or “being part of a community”. It’s not just about having something to talk to others about. It’s also about our reluctance to let go of something that is part of our lives no longer—it is about re-experiencing as a human driver.

Interaction Design and the Boston Subway

by David Rondeau

Today interaction design includes much more than what we see on our computer screens. It has a much wider impact on people’s everyday lives—even when they don’t own a computer. Because of this, we need to start thinking about interaction design as more than just buttons or functions arranged on a screen. Let me use [...]

Differentiate with Simplicity

by Kelley Wagg

As a marketing professional at a large company for many years, I—along with my peers—always struggled to find ways to differentiate our products. What whizzy new feature can we include that no one else has? But occasionally a product comes along and reminds me that a key differentiator can be simplicity itself.

Tycho Brahe, Your Third-Grade English Teacher and Innovation

by Larry Marturano

Science and design certainly seem at face value to be light years apart, practiced by people with very different training, values, and personalities. But the problems faced by designers and scientists are similar, and the parallels between the scientific method as practiced by scientists and good user-centered design techniques are remarkably similar.