Motivation Design useit.com: Jakob Nielsen on Usability and Web Design WebVisions New York: Flexible Systems and Techniques for Better User Experiences Posted by core jr | 25 Jan 2012 | Comments (0) How will our future change with technology? Designers and developers gathered last week to answer this question at WebVisions in New York City. Presentations and workshops during this 3-day conference explored the future of design, content creation, user experience and business strategy. Workshops centered on embracing new technology, designing for the user and collaboration. Much of the focus in the area of Interaction Design centered on responsive design and mobile first. As the field of User Experience (UX) grows many UX designers are still trying to define it. Hess is confident that her principles will stay true as technology evolves and experiences change because they are technology agnostic. Luke Williams, Fellow at frog and Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, wrapped up the conference with a talk on Disruptive Thinking. More from WebVisions New York City: » Progressive Enhancement and How Sci-Fi Creates Better Interfaces
UsabilityPost UDL Guidelines 2.0 The goal of education in the 21st century is not simply the mastery of content knowledge or use of new technologies. It is the mastery of the learning process. Education should help turn novice learners into expert learners—individuals who want to learn, who know how to learn strategically, and who, in their own highly individual and flexible ways, are well prepared for a lifetime of learning. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps educators meet this goal by providing a framework for understanding how to create curricula that meets the needs of all learners from the start. The UDL Guidelines, an articulation of the UDL framework, can assist anyone who plans lessons/units of study or develops curricula (goals, methods, materials, and assessments) to reduce barriers, as well as optimize levels of challenge and support, to meet the needs of all learners from the start. They can also help educators identify the barriers found in existing curricula. Learn more about the UDL Guidelines:
Standards Organizations Who’s responsible for setting the standards for the World Wide Web and the information technology universe in general? Here are some of the major players. W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) The W3C is the source for most of the recommendations that concern web developers. You may have noticed that we haven’t used the word“standards” yet. ISO (International Organization for Standardization) This is a true standards body, with the resources to test products for standards compliance. ANSI (American National Standards Institute) Another wide-ranging standards organization, ANSI is well-known as being the keeper of ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The Unicode Consortium This group has developed and maintained the Unicode standard, which, as their website says, “…provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.” The Internet Engineering Task Force
The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence By Jared M. Spool Originally published: Nov 16, 2011 Lost for decades, an old model has re-emerged to help how we look at today's design challenges. The four-stage model is intriguingly simple, describing a person's path from ignorance to mastery: Stage 1: Unconscious Incompetence This is where our person starts. Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence Our person has now realized there is much more to what they are trying to do than they realized, and they don't really know what they thought they knew. Stage 3: Conscious Competence Here our person has overcome what they didn't know and started the path of learning. Stage 4: Unconscious Competence In this final stage, our person has now internalized all the knowledge and can utilize their understanding without active thought or concentration. This concrete description of skill and knowledge mastery has many applications in the world of experience design. Applying the Model To Our Knowledge of Our Users Applying the Model To Our Users' Objectives
Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers By Adam Churchill Originally published: Jun 28, 2011 You can read this in Italian thanks to Marco Dini. A while back, I recorded a podcast with designer, Dan Rubin. His presentation really got our audience thinking and they asked so many great questions during the seminar that we didn't have time to answer them all. Adam Churchill: Design is somewhat subjective. Dan Rubin: There's a common misunderstanding of what design is exactly. But those aren't really the things we're talking about. When we talk about interaction design, that's a more detailed side, beyond just the communication, the actual interaction, the give and take. When we're working at a lower level, below the behavior, we actually need to provide a foundation for that functionality or for the content. When we're talking primarily about good typographical rules and creating a balanced visual hierarchy, those things are not subjective. That's the nice thing about design. Adam: So let's talk color. Want to Learn More?
Information Interplay: Visual Design, Information Architecture, and Content By Jared M. Spool Originally published: Aug 27, 2009 Editor's note: Thanks to Marco Dini, you can now read this article in Italian. The error message stated, "Searched for Return Policy. No Results Found." It took us a while to get to this point. But she couldn't see the back. The product description might have answered her question, but she couldn't find it. Of course, had she scrolled that far, the description wouldn't have answered her question. The shopper reached for a new strategy. If only she could find the return policy. That's when she tried searching. Poking around on the site did uncover a link labeled "Help" which produced a glorified, unordered Frequently-Asked Questions list. The shopper gave up. Three-way Failure What we have here is a three-way failure to communicate what the shopper needed to make her purchase. When she couldn't easily see the design of the product and she didn't locate the product description, she encountered visual design issues. Skills, not Roles
Learning Experience Design » About LXD Learning Experience Design (LXD) is a design discipline that aims to make learning more effective and fun. It uses experience as the foundation for learning. There’s a focus on innovative use of media, both analogue and digital. To learn form experience is nothing new. It all starts with a unique design process called “Designing the Learning Experience”. Research: Determining who, what where and how you want to educate and translating the results into a strategy. Design: Turning the strategy into a creative concept and several types of design. Development: Realizing the design in iterative phases with room for testing and monitoring. Management: Managing the process both towards the design team and the client. Focus on experience: It offers more than a single solution but a complete and logical experience. Combining science and design: Building a bridge between the world of science and the creative industry. There are eight basic rules that are of vital importance to succesfull LXD.
If… | Design with Intent (introducing behavioural heuristics) EDIT (April 2013): An article based on the ideas in this post has now been published in the International Journal of Design – which is open-access, so it’s free to read/share. The article refines some of the ideas in this post, using elements from CarbonCulture as examples, and linking it all to concepts from human factors, cybernetics and other fields. There are lots of models of human behaviour, and as the design of systems becomes increasingly focused on people, modelling behaviour has become more important for designers. I’m not going to get into what models are ‘best’ / right / most predictive for designers’ use here. Behavioural heuristics The term has some currency in game theory, other economic decision-making and even in games design, but all I really mean here is rules (of thumb) that people might follow when interacting with a system – things like: Truth tables for people There are two main objections to this. And many others, probably.