Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design My first mobile phone, a Nokia 5110 (purchased in 1998!), offered very few features: I could call, text or play Snake. What’s more, these interactions were completely controlled by the manufacturer. With the advent of smartphones, touch screens, and “app stores,” however, the opportunities for designers are now innumerable. Welcome to Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design. Part 1 concluded with an exploration of information architecture in the mobile context. The design of interactions Most modern, mobile devices employ touch screens; which provide their own set of opportunities and constraints. Ergonomics Designing for mobile ergonomics requires that we pay attention to device dimensions as well as the pragmatic concerns of touch screens. Hit areas, or “areas of the screen the user touches to activate something” require adequate space for the user to accurately (and confidently) press. Yet there are no hard and fast rules with regards to hit areas. Gestures Transitions
nng User Experience 2004 in Amsterdam - mprove.de Abstract Good designers already know how to make products attractive (visceral design) and how to appeal to self- and brand-image (reflective design). Good behavioral designers know how to make products usable and understandable–indeed, that's the focus of most of this conference. It's time now to turn our attention to pleasure and fun. Expectation-driven design marks a new dimension for our discipline and provides a new framework for design. Some notes and highlights Emotional Design Don Norman defines the framework in his book Emotional Design. The visceral level is fast: it makes rapid judgments of what is good or bad, safe or dangerous, and sends appropriate signals to the muscles (the motor system) and alerts the rest of the brain. The levels of human disposition map to different dimensions of product design. Anecdote Don got an email from a Japanese friend (sent from an airport): my senpai says he’d really like some coffee. Expectation Design anticipated – surprised confident – worried
questbeat/QBFlatButton Customer Experience v User Experience In the process of writing the book (, yes, it’s coming, I promise!) I found myself surprisingly flummoxed when it came to writing about Experience Strategy and the role it plays (or should play) in business strategy. I’ve talked about Experience Strategy with clients over the years, written Experience Strategies for projects I’ve worked on, and worked under the illusion that I was clear about what this actually entailed… however, in coming to write about and thereby define what it meant, it all of a sudden felt very fuzzy. What is Experience Strategy? Having done a review of some of the significant contributions to this topic from the UX community, I found myself dissatisfied… for Johnny Holland some time ago. Then I discovered Customer Experience (CX). Turns out there is this whole other profession, born, it seems, mostly from the marketing discipline, who have an active interest in orchestrating company wide good experience for their customers. This worries me.
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Do the hard work to make it simple | GDS design notes This is apparently a slide from a Google engineer highlighting their focus on the user. I don’t know who the quote is from but it was tweeted by Paul Frampton the other day. It reminded me of our fourth design principle, do the hard work to make it simple. The second sentence, “If they don’t know how to form the query, it’s our problem.” was one of the reasons we redesigned the homepage a year and a half ago. Users who couldn’t get the result they wanted from search, often because they couldn’t form the query in the same way we had structured the results, would need to use category style navigation to get what they needed. And it’s another reminder that user experience is the responsibility of the whole team. This slide is from a talk Leisa and I gave at Service Design In Government last week.
Photoshop backgrounds, textures and icons | PSDGraphics Treatise on User Experience Design: Part 1 | UX at Hello Erik User experience design is the liaison between the three areas of technology, business, and design. A good UX designer will have a depth and breadth of experience in all three, not just the visual “graphic design” end or the functional “product development” end. That experience and knowledge is then filtered through the lens of not only the business, but through the user of the product as well. To truly accomplish the goals of “user experience,” you must reside in the interstitial space between all three. From my perspective, I see a true user experience designer as someone who has experienced the pressures and constraints of all three areas, and knows how to navigate the waters of each. At any given moment, the UX designer could be advocating for one of the areas to the other two: You really have to be a triple threat: businessperson, engineer, artist, with experience and empathy for all three domains, and must be able to express and communicate those user needs to all. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Alaska Airlines drives app engagement with Passbook integration, push messaging The Alaska Airlines mobile application for iOS users has been updated to enable users to add their boarding pass to Passbook, helping the airline improve customer experiences and increasing engagement. The airline has offered electronic boarding passes through its native apps for some time but this is the first time they will be supported by Apple Passbook. The updated app also now includes push messaging to alert users to gate and seat changes, time changes and other travel updates that can be served in real-time. “Passbook has really been growing in popularity and Alaska’s customers were asking for this functionality,” said Joe Beninato, general manager of digital wallet for Urban Airship, Portland. “Their new Passbook boarding passes go beyond the electronic boarding passes Alaska already had in its app to automatically pop-up on home screens as customers arrive at the airport, and also automatically update if something like a flight time or gate change occurs,” he said.
What is a UX designer / IA? There's a certain amount of terminology used on this site that assumes a reasonable level of previous exposure to the world of UX design and Information Architecture (IA). One of the key considerations in my role as a user experience designer is to make sure that the site or application I'm designing makes sense to the target user groups, and phraseology and terminology form a large part of this. With this in mind, the remainder of this page is my take on some of the common terminology associated with the realm of UX design in the hope that it may help those getting acquainted with this field. If you are interested in finding out more about this area of website and application design and production, please feel free contact me and I'll do my best to help. User experience designer Information architect User centred design User testing Usability expert review User experience specification Personas, user journeys, and task based design User Experience Designer (UX Designer) Top^ User testing
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