paper & pencil

Alphabetical is an Arbitrary Order

Proof:

Despite being a color junkie, I had a difficult time matching color names to their location in the palette. Ugh!

Good Reads Weeks of Sept. 14 & Sept. 21

Improving the transition from paper to Photoshop
Tips on sketching concepts and moving from analog to digital tools.

Can Information Be Saved?
Possible implications of not preserving digital information and the challenges of preserving it in a way that would be readable in the future.

How I Draft an Information Architecture
Start by making it up, measure against users and content, tweak, repeat until it feels right.

Bing Visual Search Interesting, but Needs More Purpose
Review of Bing's visual search compared to Google Fast Flip

Sustainable mobility #1: think more, move less
Instead of findings alternative fuel sources, John Tackara says we "need to re-think the way we use time and space."

The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine
The rise of Good Enough Tech such as the Flip camcorder and why it happened.

Missing the Point in the Design of Electronic Medical Records
EMR's can be effective but they currently suffer from poor visual layout and organization of the information.

Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product
Products are services and it's al about the experience. Systems thinking helps companies think through the entire experience, in various stages.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web & Part 2
Excerpt from Ginny Redish's new book on writing and presenting content on the web.

Lisa Strausfield: Redesigning Government
Work history of Lisa Strausfield who is going to be using her IA skills to bring more awareness to government facts.

The Duct-Tape Programmer
KISS principle in relation to software development programmers. "Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."

Empathy and Emotionally Intelligent Signage
Using language to generate empathy and influence behavior.

The Lifecycle of a Wireframe

Nick Finck posted slides from his Puget Sound SIGCHI lecture on The Lifecycle of a Wireframe. Some slides are repeated and it's not clear why without hearing the presentation but it contains a great summary of key concepts and questions an IA should always be aware of.

The Life Cycle of a Wireframe

View more Microsoft Word documents from Nick Finck.

My overall strategy for IA is 3 step process; understanding the problem (note: not merely identifying the problem but really understanding it), find a solution (there may be more than one solution, but there is often only one right solution), and present the solution (a large part of your job as a IA is presenting your work so the client can understand the results).

Apple, IKEA and Their Integrated Architecture

Davide Potente and Erika Salvini discuss their findings in studying the bridges between information architecture and wayfinding strategies. They examine the bridges between the web sites and retail environments of Apple and IKEA.

Regardless of where the experience begins and ends, it is highly desirable that the consumer be permitted to interact in a seamless manner and that no information flow fractures be apparent. Continuity can be provided by a structured, bridge-like experience. It follows that the users can keep the same mental model through each step of experience, which will provide a homogeneous model of interaction [1]. Bridge experiences synthesize this process by identifying continuous passages of information

• from one web or software environment to another
• from the web to a software environment 
• from a software environment to a hardware environment 
• from the web to a physical environment.

Best Careers 2009: UX, IxD and IA. Hooray!!

US. News & World Report named Usability Experience Specialist as one of the best careers for 2009. At the start of the article the author lists all the other job title variations this profession uses. I consider myself an Interaction Designer, but my official title is Information Architect. Dan Saffer created a good model of the wide range of UX disciplines.

Whatever you call them, their job is to help ensure that products, especially technical ones, are easy and pleasurable to use.

I am concerned though that the articles does focus much more on evaluation and research and completely skips over design.

You write a report summarizing what you've learned. Then, engineers develop a prototype of the product that comes closest to meeting both the company's and the surgeons' desires.

In between these two sentences is a HUGE step - the design phase where the research is analyzed and converted into solutions that the engineering team can then build. This is where the iPod comes from instead of just another MP3 player.

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

Whitney Hess describes the 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design on Mashable. Each misconception is expanded with thoughts from numerous UX luminaries.

User experience design is NOT...

1. ...user interface design
2. ...a step in the process
3. ...about technology
4. ...just about usability
5. ...just about the user
6. ...expensive
7. ...easy
8. ...the role of one person or department
9. ...a single discipline
10. ...a choice

In support of #2, Dan Brown says:

Most [clients] expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service.

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.

Mental Models Webinar

I attended Indi Young's webinar on Mental Models this afternoon and here are my notes:

• Goes beyond demographics, develop empathy
• Prerequisite: user research (interviews, field studies, etc.)
• Relatively stable, should last ten years or more
• Review quarterly and make adjustments as needed
• Audience segments should be based on behavior, not demographics
• The activities above the line remain relatively the same over time but how the activities are supported by the application change. Example - grocery shopping
• Can be used as a brainstorming tool
• Helps with prioritizing development, provides evidence
• Strengthen personas, more meaningful, forces you to be less superficial
• Look for affinity's - group like behaviors, IA (navigation) emerges
• Identify workflow improvements
• Identify gaps and places where too much time is being spent (inefficiencies)
• Help demonstrate how design can help with strategy, be viewed as a strategic center, not a cost center
• Possibly help identify cultural differences
• Help get closer to finding the "irresistible functionality"
• Help expand audience segments
• Identify shifts in customer behavior

For more notes, check out the twitter stream.

The 5 Competencies of UX Design

Steve Psomas describes the 5 Competencies of UX Design in UX Matters.

1. IA
2. IxD
3. Usability Engineering
4. Visual Design
5. Prototype Engineering

For each he outlines the questions to ask yourself and the options for doing the groundwork and delivering the output. The author advises using these competencies to help determine you strengths and weaknesses and as an individual and as a team.

If you, like me, are deep into making design decisions day after day, you might at times become disoriented and need to realign your thinking about the appropriateness and purpose of the task at hand. It’s important that we come up for air once in a while, not only in the midst of creating our deliverables, but also when managing our time and our team’s expectations.

Our industry is at a crossroads, scrambling to adjust to the demand for richness in Web applications. Design principles, processes, tools, and resources are changing, too. So, now we need to clarify the value of UX design and the competencies it offers to the greater product development process.

Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

Joshua Porter, of UIE, writes in his personal blog Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture.

In many ways, the success of Google’s Pagerank algorithm was the harbinger of all this. The simple idea that people’s actions model meaning better than a directory (even a flexible directory) is a critical step forward in thinking about the Web. The innovation we’re seeing with folksonomies, recommendation systems, social networking sites…all have their roots in the idea that modeling what people actually do on the Web is the best way to provide answers for them. And, perhaps more importantly, it is an admission that we simply can’t predict the future…we can’t design a perfect information architecture, and to attempt to implies that the world we’re modeling doesn’t change.