Saturday, October 25, 2008

eye candy is business requirement


Eye Candy IS A Critical Business Requirement

From: stephenpa, 11 months ago





Visual design is more than styling. It is function. And not only because it communicates, but also because it makes us feel. And between feeling and communication, people find things easier to use.


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Destroy the web 2.0 look


FOWD November 2007

From: elliotjaystocks, 11 months ago


FOWD November 2007
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: futureofwebdesign fowd)



'Destroy The Web 2.0 Look': a presentation by Elliot Jay Stocks at Future of Web Design, November 2007


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Social interaction design -- Digg


Designing for Interaction

From: dburka, 1 month ago





Creating a social site sounds great until you get around to actually designing that ambiguous ‘social’ part that’s central to its success. Enabling and encouraging your community to participate is a complex challenge that only gets more sophisticated as the populace on your site grows. In many critical areas, you’ll come up against the curious juxtapositions of designing social interactions. Encouraging positive activities while discouraging negative behaviors, satisfying power users while catering to lurkers, ensuring privacy while fostering openness, and creating pathways while remaining open to unexpected developments, are just some of the hurdles you’re likely to face as you design your site.

Using case studies from Digg, Pownce, and other social communities, we’ll examine how to balance these and other concerns from a user interface design perspective. In particular, mistakes will be analyzed and success stories will be dissected to help explain how successful social interactions can be created and pitfalls can be avoided.


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Thursday, February 21, 2008

user research


DIY User Research (LondonBarCamp3)


From: leisa, 2 months ago





a rough and ready guide to doing your own user research (without once saying 'it depends')


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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

nokia - must see maybe qualcomm should do this too


Nokia brand & design priorities


From: whatidiscover, 9 months ago





Nokia brand & design priorities
Keith Pardy & Alastair Curtis
Nokia Capital Markets Day 2006
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/10/107224/Keith_Pardy_Alastair_Curtis_CMD2006.pdf


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Friday, November 2, 2007

Why did I leave Kanbay User Experience Practice...

Edited from sandy's

So, why I left Earlier company’s UX group?
(Disclaimer: these are my personal views)

There are many things which UX MANAGEMENT needs to look upon and rethink. And SOME OF THESE REASONS made me quit.

  1. UX analysts, interaction designers are not WEB DEVELOPERS, GRAPHIC DESIGNERS, HTML CODERS, UI BUG FIXERS OR JS EXPERTS.
  2. Client is certainly not a King and UX ANALYSTS ARE NOT THEIR SLAVES. Which I thing onsite coordinators and offshore managers should understand. DONOT FEAR YOUR CLIENT. Rather be open and frank. DON’T LIE YOUR CLIENT.
  3. HIRE RIGHT CANDIDATES and for right jobs. Don’t get IITians and Nidians, HFI certified to make HTML mocks ups. You don’t have projects for this people with this background. (Creating html mocks is not interaction design or interface design.)
  4. OPEN UP the methodology diagrams which is “TRADE MARKED” (so called backbone of the UX) and see which the activities are followed so far and in which projects. Is this methodology followed????????
  5. “TRANSPARENCY” in Management, projects, work, rating members.
  6. “SHARE” the presentations with UX team members. Let them know which clients, what projects, who did it. (two years of my employment I didn’t see any of these, hope others will see it sooner or later)
  7. cultivate good “WORK ETHICS”
  8. Identify who is good at work; DON’T JUST GET CARRIED AWAY WITH IMPRESSIVE RESUME. Test each team member’s strength, encourage the team members at the same time rate their Critical success factor based on their work/performance.
  9. Stop measuring your group success with just numbers/revenue. Revenue is not what your team wants, give them challenge.
  10. Lastly, challenge people, give them wicked design problems not wicked UI bugs and WORK on the above suggestions. :-)

Few things which are unique about earlier UX group, which makes team members to enjoy their work

  1. Diverse team, yet very experienced team, ( atleast few whom I have worked with)
  2. Good vision to take the group (sadly I saw it only PPT)
  3. Only group who has foreseen the market for RIA and invested heavily on RIA (this is one of the best thing done so far, I guess management have done fairly good in hiring right people for this group atleast.)
  4. Great onsite opportunities.

BTW things which I miss the most are “Tapri” and all the jhingoors from pune team. :D

Taken from Sandy, http://thinkofthings.com/blog/?p=48

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Who is more important the strategist or the builder/developer ?


My musings :

Having studied design in a highly technical environment like IIT.
(Aka what qualcomm job post calls the hostile, engineering types
)

I was always faced with the question :

for a successful product , who is more important the artist or the engineer ?
This debate later changed to : who, or more aptly put, what function is more important/ critical to the success of a product ?

Is it business/strategy , is it design or is it engineering, is it visual or art ?

I tried to explain and I believe that none of these is more or less important. Each of them have to come together in a perfect sublime way.
In fact they are all the same but they look different in the traditional sense of things.

As I think more about them, and merge them with things I learnt from my professional life .
I find myself making some quotes that are my effort to show what I believe in :
I truly believe in all of these . Do let me know what you think

________________

"good design is good business" - TJ watson

“real artists ship” Steve Jobs


I believe in all 3 of these

"design that doesn't sell is art"

“all design is art”

“at the end of the day, creating good software is still an art”

- vinay

“looks good, works well " – Bill scott, YUI library and AJAX evangelist at Yahoo

“looks good, works well & sells like hot cakes” - vinay

“all art & design is factorised maths” – vinay

“ for better experiences and products, art , science & commerce have to sleep together” - vinay

Design is certainly art. Its a higher form of art .design is art with a specific purpose, utility, or intention in mind… ( from a random post )

If you did read till here , you might want to know what sources/ inspires my comments.

Find them here

Have a look at these two very well written posts ( do read all the comments ) :

http://bokardo.com/archives/five-principles-to-design-by/

http://jehiah.cz/archive/design-is-not-art

http://blog.simplyhired.com/talent-seekers/archives/2006/11/29/recruiting-in-the-creative-age-7.php

Friday, October 5, 2007

social IxD


What Is Social Interaction Design?


From: gravity7, 1 week ago





Introduction to social interaction design, a design approach to social media and social software


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facebook analysis


Facebook Analysis and Study


From: misteroo, 18 hours ago





by FaberNovel


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Saturday, September 29, 2007

shift happens


Shift Happens


From: jbrenman, 6 months ago





This is a stylization of a slideshow originally created by Karl Fisch, examining globalization and America’s future in the 21st century. It is designed to stand alone, without having to be presented in person. Enjoy!


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social media


Power Of Social Media


From: montymetzger, 3 months ago





This is a presentation made by Monty Metzger presented in May 2007 at the Media Meeting Mannheim, Germany.

Layout and Content inspired by "Shift Happens" (http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/shift-happens-33834)


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Saturday, September 22, 2007

gr8 one ..must read


User Generated Communities Usability


From: pecus, 5 months ago





This was my presentation for the 3rd Usability Forum in Portugal, the idea was to mix usability with online community design, and try to determine the usability guidelines for the user generated communities online.


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nice one


How Not To Get Noticed


From: edanzico, 1 month ago





We all have ideas about the design and usability of WordPress, but what happens when actual testing gets applied to the problem. A presentation from WordCamp 2007 shows Happy Cog's work on the information architecture and usability for WordPress.


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slideshare usability


SlideShare Usability Review 1 : Sign Up


From: Chris.McEvoy, 10 months ago





A usability review of the sign up process in SlideShare. A few simple mistakes spoil an otherwise excellent user experience.


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selling usability


Selling usability


From: DaveEllender, 3 months ago





Stuart Church (pure usability), Dave Ellender (cxpartners) - selected slides from a discussion at Bristol Usability Group


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agile


Agile and Usability - Have you got Usagility?


From: Chris.McEvoy, 7 months ago





What happens if you try and apply some of the lessons from the agile world into the usability world.

Have you got Usagility?


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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

developing / engineering the user interface


Developing a Great User Interface


From: seankane, 7 months ago





Presentation from the UIE Web Application Summit


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social IA


Social Information Architecture Workshop


From: gsmith, 6 months ago





My presentation for the Social IA Workshop at the IA Summit (March 22, 2007)


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pleasurable interfaces ( moving beyond tasks and usability)


Creating Pleasurable Interfaces: Getting From Tasks to Experiences


From: stephenpa, 6 months ago





My presentation at Refresh 06


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adaptive interfaces


The Conversation Gets Interesting: Creating the Adaptive Interface


From: stephenpa, 5 months ago





With the proliferation of rich Internet applications and interactions more closely aligned with how people think, we face some interesting challenges:

* Do we design for one common audience and common tasks, or tailor applications around specific audiences and their unique activities?
* How do we resolve the tension between creating simple applications that ‘do less’ and the demand for new features that some people really do need?
* As we move beyond usability to create desirable interfaces, how do we handle a subjective domain like emotions?

These types of challenges could all be addressed by creating a truly ‘adaptive' interface. More than removing unused menu options or collaborative filtering, this would include functionality that is revealed over time as well as interface elements that change based on usage. Imagine the web-based email client that begins offering three forms fields for attachments instead of the default one, because it 'noticed' that you frequently upload more than one file. Or the navigation menu that disappears because it is not relevant to the task at hand. Sound scary? Look at the world of game design, where inconsistency has never been an issue and where users learn new functions over time, as needed. In the same ways that ads are becoming more targeted around context and behavior, we can also create interfaces that respond, suggest, or change based on actual usage data.

While much of this is still speculative, we'll explore some concrete examples of how such ideas have already been used, and other instances where they could be used. We'll also take a brief look at what technologies might support these interactions, as well as some of the rules engines that might make this possible. And, to ground this in the past, we'll at some existing navigational theories and research that might support this argument for an interface that is truly conversational and context aware.


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