“Experience Dynamics has made this diagram available as a poster-size print, perfect for hanging in your office, cube or team-area. This was a fun diagram to work on. Frank Spillers, of Experience Dynamics saw my earlier Flickr diagrams and wanted to commission something similar with some general usability and user experience concepts. The idea was to emphasize the readability and approachability of the subject matter (keep it fun!) and not overload the map with too many concepts.”
John Maeda: The Master of Simplicity
“John Maeda is a graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at the MIT Media Lab. He’s been dubbed ‘the Master of Simplicity,’ is the author of a blog on simplicity, and also has a new book called The Laws of Simplicity. The book outlines ten laws of simplicity over 100 pages (a page count restraint Maeda imposed on himself). It’s full of interesting anecdotes and big picture ideas about simplicity.”
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Why Doing User Observations First is Wrong
“How many times have you had to fight hard for the ability to do field studies and other observations at the very start of the project? How many times have you patiently explained that taking time now would be rewarded by faster time to market overall? And how many times were you successful? The HCI community has long complained about product processes that do not allow time to start with good observations. The more I examine this issue, the more I think that it is we, the HCI community, who are wrong.”
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Help Adaptive Path understand the Business Value of User Experience
“Some colleagues at Adaptive Path have launched a survey on the business value of user experience, and how organizations treat user experience. It’s brief (about 5 minutes), and if you fill it out, you can get a free copy of our report ‘Leveraging Business Value.’”
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What I learned redesigning del.icio.us
“What’s the difference between a huge mass-market Internet success, and a niche tool favored only by a tiny techie minority? I learned part of the answer in a recent project I finished up a few months ago.”
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User Experience Week 2006
“We’ll be heading back to Washington D.C. with more sessions and more speakers than ever, including special guest presenters Steven Johnson, Michael Bierut, Jeff Veen, Jared Spool, Nate Bolt, Dan Brown along with members of Adaptive Path. We’re developing all new curriculum for this year’s User Experience Week. And we’re presenting sessions in two tracks that will offer practitioner skills development as well as product management strategy and business value methods.”
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Want Free Beer? (Cafe testing)
“Whether you are testing the User Interface for a new technology or just re-branding your service, chances are that you could benefit from some sound market feedback. The good news is that you don’t have to spend weeks on research or thousands of dollars to get it. Cafe testing — quick, low-cost, informal market testing at a cafe — can help you get the feedback you need fast. This article tells you everything you need to know to get started.”
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Subvert from Within: A user-focused employee guide
“…let’s say you’re not a Ward Cunningham or any other famous, visible, already influential industry player. You’re an engineer, or maybe a program manager. In that case, you do what many of us did at Sun… subvert from within. Here’s my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies. Most is from things a maverick (but cleverly disguised as compliant) group of us did at Sun, while we could.”
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Net Rage: A Study of Blogs and Usability
“Catalyst’s proprietary test of the usability of blogs, conducted in late June and early July of 2005, can be downloaded immediately here. Our analysis sheds light on a variety of heretofore neglected, user-experience related design challenges associated with blogs’ potential to become a mainstream medium for Internet users.”
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Lazy, stupid and evil design
“Having a coffee and cake with Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert from Nielsen Norman Group, I asked him what was holding up progress on the web. ‘Three things, really: I call them lazy, stupid and evil design,’ he replies.” (Thanks InfoDesign!)
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