ANTETYPE: The new prototyping and design application for user interface designers - by ERGOSIGN. Keynotopia: User Interface Design Libraries for Keynote, PowerPoint and OpenOffice. A Model for UX Career Growth. Over on the UX Leadership Journal, Will Evans recently shared a really nice model for career growth in the UX field.
[UPDATE: Will's model builds on one originally developed by David Sherwin and Justin Maguire of frog design.] It looks sort of like this. (I added a few details.) (Slightly larger version here. [Note that model has been updated to include attribution to David Sherwin and Justin Maguire.) Webstock '11: John Gruber - The Gap Theory of UI Design. Six controversial topics in usability. Three Keys That Make Good Interaction Design Great. A very difficult task sits before me. In November, I will be joining an amazing Interaction Awards jury in New York for a weekend of evaluation, critique, and debate, deciding which submitted works represent the best of interaction design, the design for how people relate to, interact with, and use products, systems, and services. This will be the first Interaction Awards, run by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
Wizards Versus Forms. By Mike Hughes Published: September 19, 2011 “When I find myself designing an application that is complex, either in terms of its length or its logical dependencies, my natural instinct is to take a wizard approach.
But … breaking up a task into smaller steps does not always provide a better user experience.” Many applications must gather information from users. UX Design Versus UI Development. By Mike Hughes Published: March 21, 2010 “At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves—and sometimes rightfully so—to be UI Designers.”
One of the more interesting tensions I have observed—since getting into user experience design about five years ago—is the almost sibling-rivalry tension between UX Designers and User Interface (UI) Developers. At the heart of the tension between them is the fact that most UI Developers consider themselves—and sometimes rightfully so—to be UI Designers. The coding part is like Picasso’s having to understand how to mix paint.
When I worked on the Body of Knowledge Task Force for the Society for Technical Communication, the interesting question we wrestled with was: What value does a technical communicator add above what an engineer who writes well offers? How to Start a Career in UX Design. Where are the great UI teachers and consultants? Free eBook: Six Circles – An Experience Design Framework. 4 Elements That Make A Good User Experience Into Something Great. In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Awards were good.
The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. Fun Stuff 2011. Here's my annual roundup of all the Fun Stuff items I linked to in the email newsletter in the past year.
(Also see past annual roundups: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.) 2011 Fun Stuff Winner: Fantastic song made by autotuning Google Translate. UI vs UX: what’s the difference? UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns.
UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle. At least that’s what they used to say in the olden days. Rather, that is what I wished they’d say. Despite how simple that may have sounded, there are many complications and misconceptions when it comes to the differences between UI and UX design, and they cause the design community to go into quite a stir whenever they are brought up.
An interesting note to that is that I’ve found the people who work at jobs with titles such as Interaction Designer to get paid more simply because they know and act on the differences between those two fields (typically harnessing a little of both). Agile is Wrong for UX. When something is wrong, it deviates from truth or fact.
And I can say, with more confidence than ever, that traditional Agile software development methodologies (i.e. Scrum) are wrong for UX. In order to prove my case, I want to take you back to the inception of Agile (as I have read and experienced it) and its related software development methodologies. Along the way, we’ll point out the reasons these methodologies are incompatible with the field of User Experience Design. The birth of Agile Agile principles and related methodologies were created for several reasons. A 40-Minute Crash Course In Design Thinking. Inge Druckrey has been teaching design for more than 40 years.
But what she has really been doing is teaching people to see. "You really learn to look," she says in the opening lines of Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See, remarking on the benefits of an education in art and design. Infographic: An Entire Tome Worth Of Innovation Advice, In One Chart. Urban dictionary defines "hustler" as "someone who uses their brain to make it in this world.”
Notorious BIG, on the other hand, preferred levity: “Advancin’, From duplex to mansion.” San Francisco designer Joey Roth offered his own definition in 2010, with a diagrammatic poster that became wildly popular online. By Roth’s estimation, a hustler is someone who does equal amounts of working and talking, as opposed to a martyr, who only works, and a charlatan, who only talks. Printed at San Francisco’s Dependable Letterpress, the beautiful little poster became something of a mantra around many an office--including ours--before it sold out.
Today, Roth released a new poster that functions as an appendix to the hustler classic. Because we don’t know much about automatic gun ammunition, we contacted Roth for an explanation. “Inspiration is represented by the primer,” he says. Gunpowder represents the risks implicit in the design process. Where is Roth getting this stuff? Should We Focus on User Experience? In the next seven minutes or so, this article hopes to convince you that our current notion of UX design mistakenly focuses on experience, and that we should go one step further and focus on the memory of an experience instead.
Studies of behavioral economics have changed my entire perspective on UX design, causing me to question basic tenets. This has led to ponderings like: “Is it possible that trying to create ‘great experiences’ is pointless?” Nobel Prize-winning research seems to hint that it is.