paper & pencil

P&P is an INTJ

Enter your blog's URL into Typealyzer and find out it's personality type. Turns out my site is an INTJ. I've taken the Meyers-Briggs times a couple of times and I'm always an ENTJ. I'm definitely more introverted online than I am in person. Spot on Typealyzer!

INTJ is dubbed "The Scientists":

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be pshysically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communcating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use conrete examples. Since they are extremly good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Tips & Tricks from Making Games

Four Carnegie Mellon graduate students offer the tips & tricks they learned from making over 50 games in a single semester.

Mr. Gray: “Mime After Mime” and “A Mime to Kill” were two games I made that attempted gameplay using only positional audio cues with no visuals. Although they were utter failures, the whole team was thrilled to take such a bold risk to prove the failure of audio-only gameplay, and I could point with pride to my hideous creations. As I gathered experience throughout the project, I was able to take more directed risks that lead to successful games.”

Via IxDA Discussion

The Disciplines of User Experience Design

Dan Saffer updated the UX model from his book, Designing for Interaction.

I agree with the conclusion that User Experience Design is not a discipline on it's own but more "management and coordination between the disciplines to ensure holistic products".

In support of this conclusion, Liz Bacon pointed to a similar blog post: User Experience Design Does Not Exist.

The designers that work on amazon.com don't create the experience— they're responsible for building the system, product and service that allowed those different experiences to happen. The designers work to understand how the user interacts with the website to create the most desirable and profitable experiences. We call that interaction design.

Designers need to stop thinking that they're creating experiences. They're allowing them to unfold with sound design decisions.

Interaction Elasticity

Jakob Nielsen defines interaction elasticity:

Usability problems are like a barrier between you and your potential customers: the worse the design, the higher the barrier. Will users jump the hurdle? Some will, some won't. The lower your barrier and the more compelling your offer, the lower your interaction elasticity will be, and the more people will jump.

There are two strategies for increasing your website's business value: (1) do something that people really want and thus make demand less elastic, and (2) reduce interaction costs by increasing usability. I would do both.

What makes a "User Experience expert"?

RJ Owen asks and attempts to answer the question What makes a "User Experience expert"? He lists the top 5 things that distinguishes "real" UX professionals, which sparked a great discussion in the comments. Some highlights...

David Malouf:

What all UX practitioners agree to is the necessity of understanding user needs. This is not always what users ask for, but rather what they really need. It takes a lot of analysis to get tot he latent needs inside of manifest statements, but it is this "fuzzy" area where UX really does its magic and provides the greatest value.

stevenb:

I would disagree that UX is just another term for customer service. I agree that you can't have a great UX if your organization has lousy customer service, but I like to say that UX has a quality of totality to it. You might have great customer service, but if your website stinks that's going to bring down the whole experience. Or if your store is poorly laid out and people can't find things easily - that's going to impact on the UX. Every touchpoint needs to be a part of the overall UX.

Larry Marine:

User-experience is only part of a solution. It works in concert with other disciplines to help create the right solution that meets the users' needs and supports the business' objectives. The iPod change the user-experience of the day, but it also had good ID, packaging, and marketing. Remember, though, the older MP3 players had good marketing, ID, and packaging, too. But they lacked the user-experience that the iPod provides. And guess who owns the market?

This isn't to say that a good user experience can save a bad product, but a bad UX can certainly kill a a good product.

I have some of the most successful designs out there, and they are successful due, not to some self proposed design genius (that I most certainly do not posses), but, to relying on good user research. Einstein once said that if he had 20 days to solve a problem, he would spend the first 19 defining it and the last day solving it. Good user research defines the problem better than anything else. Don't rely on the "existing" problem statement. I've worked on over 250 different projects, and all, and I mean 100%, of them had a dramatically incorrect problem statement.

As I am known to say, without good user research, the best you can hope to do is solve the wrong problem, very well.

The Complexity Paradox

The complexity paradox described by Bruce Tognazzini confirms my belief that the world will continue to need more and more interaction designers.

Given that people will continue to want the same level of complexity in their lives, given that we will continue to reduce the proportion of complexity of any given function that we expose to the user, we may expect that the difficulty and complexity of our own tasks, be they at the application or OS level, will only increase over time. That has certainly been the case so far--we've gone from simple memo writers and sketchpads to document processors and PhotoShop. And we may assume that's only the beginning.

Designing With Vision

From: davecortright

Designing With Vision

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: startup strategy)

Your GIFs aren't welcome here

I'm surprised that both iPhoto (disclaimer: I have an older version) and Picasa will not display GIF images. In Picasa I see "Invalid Image" in big, bold, red letters, like it's my fault they didn't think through how people would use their software... such as for say, saving examples of poor interaction design.

UX = Fail.

MAYA Design: Carnegie Library

The design consultancy MAYA has a great portfolio piece on their redesign of the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, PA.

To counter the perception of dusty, dowdy spaces eclipsed by Google, Amazon, and Barnes&Noble, some libraries have erected architectural showplaces.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh realized that such facelifts alone do not change much about their institutionalized and asset-centric approach to helping people engage with information. Starting with questions about what the library should communicate when people walk in the door—but aiming for deep changes that would make them a preferred destination for information and social interaction— Carnegie Library administrators and librarians, graphics design firm Landesberg Design, and architectural firm Edge Studio asked MAYA to join their team.

MAYA describes their process and provides and an incredible image gallery of their sketches, wireframes, personas, and other design documentation.

Getting Real About Agile Design

Cennydd Bowles promotes Agile in a recent A List Apart article:

For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear—research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs—we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.

The author provides a nice list of recommended reading on Agile. I found the article interesting but not too all that provocative until I went to the discusion and read David Malouf's comments:

Iteration is not a fools foley. It is purposeful and leads to better design. Artistic creativity is an important part of all levels of a design process. It is the core method of exploration of ideas based on the solid and proven belief that the 1st idea is not the best. Evaluative methods suggested in Agile get the current design right, but they do not actually address making sure you are doing the right design (read Sketching User Experience and see Bill Buxton’s and Alan Cooper’s Interaction08 presentations regarding these issues (interaction08.ixda.org). So to me because you don’t really seem to get the importance of real design methods it would be easy to negate their importance towards creating successful products and services in exchange for expediency.