52 Weeks of UX The user experience is made up of all the interactions a person has with your brand, company, or organization. This may include interactions with your software, your web site, your call center, an advertisement, with a sticker on someone else’s computer, with a mobile application, with your Twitter account, with you over email, maybe even face-to-face. The sum total of these interactions over time is the user experience. The interaction designer plans for these moments. Part of their responsibility is to make all interactions positive, and includes aspects of the software, the copy-writing, the graphics, layout, flows, physical experiences. It’s a shame when one part of the experience is top notch and another is dreadful. User experience spans multiple practices. Web designers, traditionally secure in the role of page creators, now have a wider purview.
The Diagram Queen The Diagram Queen Works by Korean artist Minjeong An (born 1981) Update / Anatomy of a post: Researching another Korean artist, I stumbled upon a thumbnail of Minjeong An's work in a Korean gallery's archived 2008-ish exhibit. After a good hour of googling and google-translating Hangul (phew), I finally hit on the artist's site. I added links to some full-size images in the captions, at least until Minjeong's site is back up. Minjeong An, "Self Portrait" (2007) click here for very large version Minjeong An, 2008 click here for very large version detail of the above Minjeong An, The Power of a Kiss, 2008 Minjeong An, Detail Plan of Somnolence, 2008 Minjeong An, Bilingualism, 2007 click here for very large version Minjeong An, six panel work (details below) click here for very large version Minjeong An, detail of 2007 six-panel work 1 Minjeong An, detail of 2007 six-panel work 2 Minjeong An, detail of 2007 six-panel work 3 Minjeong An, detail of 2007 six-panel work 4 Also see: Diagrams on 50 Watts
User laziness = user smartness, and why this is really important. A blog by Harry Brignull, User Experience Designer & Consultant — A blog by Harry Brignull, User Experience Designer & Consultant Note: This post might be a little dated. It was published in November 2008. User research is a funny thing. When you see users rushing through your user interface without stopping to think, or skipping through huge swathes of your lovingly prepared copy, it’s tempting to think of them as lazy sods. It’s true. It’s not negative. To quote Philip Johnson Laird (one of my favourite cognitive scientists): A calculator blindly follows the rules for multiplication or addition. The concept of productive laziness forms a valuable underpinning for our understanding of theories like information foraging, information scent, scan reading, and generally of user behaviour online. To put it simply: we are in the business of enabling users to be productively lazy in new and useful ways.
Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of The URL The URL is a very powerful concept; it represents a universal way to access any resource anywhere in the world. Here’s one of them, as it appears in Firefox 5′s address bar: The first few letters before the colon are called the protocol, which tells the computer how to interpret the rest of the URL. The http protocol is the most common and specifies a resource on the World Wide Web, while the tel protocol specifies a telephone number, and https specifies a resource on the Web transferred over a secure channel that can’t be eavesdropped. Those are just a few; there’s lots of other ones. Many user interface designers for browsers believe that most users don’t understand what a protocol is, which is probably accurate. There’s a number of things that trouble me about this approach. Aside from those concerns, however, there’s something else I’m worried about. Understanding technology is relative.
Putting people first Big Data powers the modern world. What do we gain from Big Data? What do we lose? Al Jazeera America examines the role of technology and the implications of sharing personal information in the network’s first graphic novella, Terms of Service: Understanding Our Role in the World of Big Data. The new comic novella, available on Al Jazeera America’s website at is a thought provoking, entertaining field guide to help smart people understand how their personal, and often very private, data is collected and used. Co-produced by well-known cartoonist Josh Neufeld and Al Jazeera America reporter Michael Keller, Terms of Service is an entertaining feature that follows characters “Josh and Michael” as they journey through the challenges of digital privacy and other issues consumers should be aware of in the “brave new world” of technology and Big Data. Josh Neufeld is a nonfiction cartoonist living in Brooklyn.
UX Storytellers Can Experience be Designed? by Oliver Reichenstein Do experience designers shape how users feel, or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? People’s perceptions of user interfaces are too different to be precogitated by a single person. Look at the Agenda Con men: As in every other field there are con men that fool naive clients using experience design as a slogan. Bullshitters: Bullshitting is not lying, it’s fooling people into assuming whatever suits your purpose. Wishy-washy managers: Insecure managers like anything that can be tested, because it allows them to avoid responsibility. The Rhetoric Amateurish Exaggeration: User Experience Design as hyperbole: User experience design somehow suggests that a designer has direct control over how each and every user experiences their product. Technical language: User Experience Design as a synecdoche: The user experience of a product doesn’t start with the first hands-on contact, and it doesn’t end there either.
Service Design Network Designing for Service: Creating an Experience Advantage Design We are surrounded by things that have been designed—from the utensils we eat with, to the vehicles that transport us, to the machines we interact with. We use and experience designed artifacts everyday. Figure 19.1 – A caricature of the popular conception of design vs. all other concepts. Ultimately, everything that has not come from nature has been designed—it just may not have been consciously designed. Service There are many definitions of service in the literature. For purposes of this discussion, we put forth the definition described by Jean Gadrey and based on Peter Hill’s 1977 work (Gadrey, 2002): ‘‘a service may be defined as a change in the conditions of a person or a good belonging to some economic unit, which is brought about as the result of the activity of some other economic unit with the prior agreement of the former person or economic unit.’’ Figure 19.2 – The service triangle as illustrated and defined by Jean Gadrey. (2002) Experiences Matter G.
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