Clients don’t know a thing about their users, and designers think that if they like it, everyone will. Sound familiar? Daniel Lafreniere's 30-minute "extreme user research" plan comes to the rescue for those of us facing this exact situation. With this practical method, you can generate loads of useful data that will have a real impact on design, thus making the website more effective and profitable.
Inventor Ray Kurzweil wants to travel from our era to the future over a border he calls the "singularity." Artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, he says, but will not make human consciousness irrelevant. Kurzweil argues the singularity won't destroy us -- it will immortalize us.
We have now reached a point at which other technologies have begun to seriously compete with written language as viable methods for not only recording our ideas, but also interacting with the world around us. What does this mean for designers of user experience? Our tools for interaction are changing.
One of usability's main laws is that "designers are not users." This insight is about as important as "vice presidents are not users" and "users are not designers" (so don't listen to them; watch them).
The usability discipline exists because systematic methods can overcome the gap between the design team and its target audience. You don't have to rely on your best guesses: you can find out how actual customers behave and what you can do to make them buy more.
There are 3 different degrees of difference between designers and their users, from a small fissure to a gaping gulf. The strategy for bridging the gap depends on how severe it is.
Interested in designing touchscreens, Wii-like gestural interfaces, and interactive environments? Dan Saffer (Adaptive Path) has posted a draft of the first chapter of his new book “Interactive Gestures: Designing Gestural Interfaces” at the IxDA discussion list.
Read his first unedited draft here.
Interesting presentation at SXSW from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, who tried to assess how Apple can ‘get’ design when so many other companies try and fail. After describing Apple’s process of delivering consumers with a succession of presents (“really good ideas wrapped up in other really good ideas” — in other words, great software in fabulous hardware in beautiful packaging), he asked the question many have asked in their time: “How the ?*^! do you do that?” (South by Southwest is at ease with its panelists speaking earthily.)
“There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Thus said Mark Twain. Should we add "Research Findings" to the list? Experience shows that, especially with qualitative research like the type designers often do, two researchers can look at the same set of data and draw dramatically different findings from them. How do we deal with this?
Watch Dan Saffer’s (Adaptive Path) Presentation at the sixth annual IIT Design Research Conference, held September 21-22, 2007 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago.
You're welcome, Paul!
Interaction Designers are the shapers of behavior. Behavior is a large idea, and may, at first blush, seem too large to warrant a single profession. But a profession has emerged nonetheless. This professional category includes the complexity of information architecture, the anthropologic desire to understand humanity, the altruistic nature of usability engineering, and the creation of dialogue. These topics are discussed in the four sections of this text.
Download Thoughts on Interaction Design as a single .pdf file suitable for on-screen reading (2,520k)
Multinational companies in China, which also include homegrown firms with overseas operations, spend US$346 million annually on information technology globally, according to a recent survey which also found out that they focus on IT outsourcing services. The Chinese MNCs spend US$346 million annually and hire 4,359 IT-related employees on average, close to the figures of the world's leading MNCs which spend US$350 million and 5,178 respectively, said the survey by US-based IT service provider Unisys, which was conducted by IDG, in the third quarter.
As in most Western countries, mobile phones are also very popular in China, among all different age groups and walks of life -- sometimes seen in very unusual places. The contrast between China and other Western countries shows up in the -- astronomical -- numbers: up to 1997, there was little over 10 million mobile phone service subscriptions... today, there are more than 400 million.
Even more impressive is use of short messages (SMS): just in the first 10 months of 2005, there were more than 260 billion. Short messages are so popular that such demand pushes the industry into creating a myriad of services based on systems that automatically answer messages sent through SMS from costumers: for example, in big cities like Shanghai, one can check the Yellow Pages through SMS, make restaurant reservations through SMS, and so on.
» Design Leaders ... Last Reply: 8 months ago by designative.
Here are some of the "old school" stuff:
- Design is Kinky;
- Half Project;
- Digital Thread;
- Kaliber10000;
P.S: What I mean by "old school" is anything that've lasted more than 5 years (Kaliber's been out there for 7!)