I'll be speaking at the Open Camp in Dallas, TX on Saturday, August 28th at 5pm. I'll be talking about how to take your content mobile. Hope to see you there!
User Experience Groups within a large organization are all a little different. We have multiple UX groups here were I work, and I’ve either read about or talked to people from a wide assortment of large companies. This has the disadvantage of diluting the idea of a UX Group to the outside world. What do you do? How do you work? What tasks does your group perform? To help everyone understand In-house UX Groups better, I’ve broken down the 7 areas of focus – where I see every group having varying degrees of commonality.
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I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?
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Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.
Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc… and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year my co-presenter was Dustin Askins of Travelocity, and we gave the presentation internally to our UX groups, and just this week at the Dallas UPA Chapter.
As a Designer, I sometimes need to evaluate different technologies and platforms from a Designer’s perspective. Why is it important to get a Designer’s view? As Designers we can quickly be boxed in with inflexible UI layers, unusable sets of standard patterns, and the inability to create a great experience. By reviewing and testing, we can determine the pros and cons of a given technology solution. In honor of Eclipsecon 2008 ;-) I’ve put together a presentation on a popular application platform – the Eclipse RCP.
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If you’re an Interaction Designer, I’m sure you’ve noticed a new design pattern in the past year – one that doesn’t really seem to have a proper name yet. In fact, you’re probably already incorporating this pattern into your designs. It seems like almost every major redesign is leveraging this pattern to help hide complexity: Amazon, Linkedin, TripAdvisor – and sites like Target, Google, and Yahoo have been using it for awhile. It’s a design pattern I’m calling “Revealing Interfaces”.
Awhile back (also known as 2 months ago) Stephen posted about his bookstack. What he was reading, referencing and scanning. He tagged me to share my bookstack, and I was embarrassed with my lack of current books. But, with Christmas here, I actually have a couple of non-digital things in my bookstack.
