Re: [IxDA Discuss] Adaptive Path's Aurora ... Discuss
Some quick thoughts.. There's some strong ideas in here. The concept of presentation views is good and the collaboration works well. Where it is weak is in the actual interface. There is simply too much competing on the screen to make this a strong interface from user experience point of view. Demos often do take the 'show it on screen' approach as they can showcase more features as opposed to an interface that uses time more. In general it takes many ideas that exist (the 3D space to explore files has been done many times) and puts them together in a very condensed way. Users may get very confused using the interface shown, not to mention 'Gorilla arm' from using that 3D mouse. So some good background thinking but the execution is fairly weak in terms of strong clear user interface. Respect to them for putting this together but some better interface design could have presented the ideas better. Cheers Stewart Dean 2008/8/5 David Malouf [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have to say there are so many elements I like about this concept and it is only part 1 of the video. Kudos to Jesse James Garrett and the rest of the AP design team on Aurora. Check out the demo video of their browser concept video. http://adaptivepath.com/aurora/ -- David Malouf http://synapticburn.com/ http://ixda.org/ http://motorola.com/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Job: Microsoft User Experience Evangelist (US based)
Chris Wrote.. UXE's must be able to speak compellingly and enthusiastically to many audiences within the design ecosystem, including designers and production artists, producers and client/services managers, as well as creative directors and general management. As a user experience professional your job description failed to talk to me. Looks like you want a visual designer who does a bit of interaction and is charasmatic rather than a user experience person. If you want to evangelise about user experience doesn't it help that you actually preach user experience in all that you do? As it stands the post reads like the bad old days when you had 'tech' and you had 'design'. There's nothing about being user centric, usability, accessability in here - it's all about being compelling and engaging, which is about a third of what user experience is about. I'm not anti-microsoft it's just when I'm after a solution, the current tool set from Microsoft is behind the curve for where user experience is and based upon the old bad model bells and whilstles being more important than information and functionality. So if you're an evangelist yourself then you've just done the exact opposite of what you where looking to do. All this just leaves me thinking Microsoft don't get user experience. -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] The new UI wars: Why there's no Flash on iPhone 2.0
I always thought the Flash thing was about the UI but not about new UIs being built for applications but the fact many existing flash usages simply won't work on a small touch screen device. In short flash on the iPhone would often break the web browsing user experience in the way it's used. For that reason it's a good idea not to put it on the iPhone. All the technical issues are solvable after all. Stew Dean 2008/6/18 Kontra [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Many reasons have been floated for why Flash isn't a good match for the iPhone: it's slow, it hogs CPU cycles, it drains the battery, it crashes too often, it's not optimized for Mac OS X and so on. As obvious as these reasons may be, even if all those *technical* issues could be solved tomorrow, there would still remain a huge divide between Adobe and Apple on the iPhone: who controls the UI? ... In this highly charged and competitive marketplace to establish the next UI paradigm for mobile devices, Apple is not about to give Adobe or any other company free reins to dilute its brand proposition by introducing cross-platform, common-denominator UIs and interaction patterns to be mingled with Apple's carefully orchestrated multi-touch approach. So what does that leave Adobe with? http://counternotions.com/2008/06/17/flash-iphone/ -- Kontra http://counternotions.com Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Alan Cooper's Goal-Oriented Design process - step-by-step
Looks like a fairly standard approach. I split design in to Concept and Detail and use an overlapped iterative approach to phases - no water fall or throwing things over the wall. I also use a task based process rather than a goal based, this is an evolution from goal based and attempts to define the users by what they do, not what car they drive (as can happen with badly created personas). In all cases tasks, users etc I try to keep as real as possible. Stewart Dean 2008/5/1 chadvavra [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I haven't, but I did recently come up with a distilled philosophy. To create a human connection in technological products with usable form and content by understanding business and user desires, needs, and motivations. My company uses a version called, Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy but I I worry sometimes as Design is so early and so not what is traditionally design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=28587 Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Don't listen to your customers.
On 28/03/2008, Kristof Versluys [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What people tell they do What people actually do = completely different Listen to your customer. Get him involved. But even better, see him use a product/website/... Give him simple tasks. Ask him to describe what he's doing. I say take it up a level. You're right what they do is the key here NOT what they want. My focus has been on finding out what they do not even mentioning the product or website. This sets the 'universe' that the product/site exists in. To me this is the basis of any final solution, even redesigns. The users are going to use it to do something - how does that fit with their world. It's very contextual and I find it scares many folks as they expect us to start by testing the website and I totally ignore 90% of the time when talking to users. So the 'faster horse' thing is spot on. I try never to ask the user 'what do you want on the website' but instead 'what would make what you do easier'. There's then a series of steps to get from that to actual interaction design which can be squeezed into suprisingly short amout of time and radically improve the quality of the end project (and make it much simpler). Pay attention to the underlying issues; if he/she wants a faster horse, you don't have to build or find a faster horse. Extraction: you now know they want to go faster Get the questioning level right, I've found, and you can get them to tell you that they just want to go faster. In short let the users set the scope and what functionality is important to them and what information they need and when - we can do the rest :) -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Design Deliverables and Developers
On 04/03/2008, Celeste 'seele' Paul [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Does anyone know of studies or other research that explicitly looks at how developers are using design deliverables in practice? Particularly integrating things such as wireframes in to functional specifications. Or even if developers get the wireframes and mockups we give them. I've found that developers prefer annotated slides or a big numbered list of issues to having to read anything big, but those types of things don't look as nice as a fully written final report for the project manager. Thoughts? ~ Celeste Very qucikly... Often there is a cultural clash between the 'traditional' developer process and the new processes that have grown involving wireframes, flow diagrams etc. The key is the correct definition of the functional specification in such a way as it's usable and understandable to developers. In essence they are the audience you need to make happy - I have often created overviews for broader audiences and prototypes are increasingly used. The wireframes make up most of the functional specification. Tools like Axure output a word document that is essentialy a retelling of the wireframes which some developers are used to working with. So sometimes detailed wireframes with all the error states are enough and are understandable, sometimes wirefreames with a word file and or excel spreadsheet are needed. Other times a good set of diagrams and wireframes are all that's needed. They become the functional spec. The end aim is to present the information needed to ensure that what is envisenged is built and that there are not gaps that the developers fill in because it wasnt covered. It's always best to try and work with the developers rather then doing the design and throw it over the wall, it just means that the wireframes are more realistic and some of the arbitary decisions we all make can often be made in favour for more 'doable' options. It increases the likelyhood of final delivery. -- Stewart Dean Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Agile methodologies for discovering user needs
Hi Oliver, I think it's rare not to have limited time to do user research. First, and this may be obvious, use what resources you have to you. If you are designing for an end customer then people who deal with end customers on a regular basis will have a lot of the information you need already distilled. If you're looking to do some ethnographic studies then providing you have some idea of the user base and someway to set up meetings (two big things) then I would focus on one to one interviews lasting about an hour each with as many as you can get really. Whilst user testing stops being much use after about six folks the correct approach to one to one interviews keeps on yeilding results much much longer. On one project I was still finding useful information on interview number 30 (squeezed into a week and a half interviewing). In terms of technique I find the key is not to 'rush to solution' - that is don't go in there and ask 'so what do you want to see?'. For example if you're developing a banking site then I would structure each interview roughly like this. Start off by finding out about the person, their rough background, age, what they do, a quick portrait of who they are (this can be used later to replace composite personas). Then you then explore the things they do with their bank - I stress it's important to get the tasks that the users carry out and not focus on what you're going to build. If they talk about online banking as part of what they do that's great but think user tasks not tasks related to the online bank. Now what should happen is the user will have told you about who they are and what they do. In a natural way you start to introduce questions about such as what sources of information they use to make decisions, what are the things that drive them crazy etc. - again within the overall area of banking. Finaly and I usualy do this in the last 15-10 minutes if the user hasnt already lead upto it you talk about online banking - if they use it (I'll talk more about that later), how they use it and towards the end get their suggestions. Now I've seen a lot of other folks do these kinds of interviews and to start talking about features and functionality towards the final part of an interview to some will appear crazy. I can assure you it's the opposite. By the time you've got to details you will have a good portrait of the user, have a picture of how the product fits into their world, the tasks they carry out and how they already use the product (if they do) and most of the time because they are thinking about something that is part of their life will have already have started talking about ways to make it better for them without prompting. If you go in there and ask them to carry out a task on a site and tell you what you think (even with a five minute 'who are you' session') in my view it feels more like a test of the user and less an exchange of thoughts - this is the reason that given limited time I would always go for the one to one interviews and would probably never see the need for user testing! Also I have seen user research where part of the recruitment criteria is 'must have used the system'. Why? You're doing user research not systems testing! It's the task you're interested in not what path they use through an arbitrary solution. From these sessions you can then create real human profiles (I really do recommend people avoid composites as they tend towards stereotypes and are often just a bunch of assumptions rather than about real users). You can also create user stories if people what those, I personaly prefer more detailed task disagrams that can then be used to create user journies relating to the final solution. There's much more to my approach than I can fit in a short email but it's based upon the problems I've seen with more traditional approaches which are often take a lot of time, money and often colour results or produce user research documents where it's impossible to determine what is 'real' and what is just an assumption someone has made up - the reason why I suggest not using personas if you don't have real people. In my view if you've made up a name and put a picture from google onto a persona it's already coloured and can be misleading. Cheers Stewart Dean On 16/02/2008, oliver green [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi All, We are in the discovery phase of the project, where we have absolutely no idea what the user needs are. There is limited time and resources this we cant conduct ethnographic studies. What would be the best set of agile methodologies that can be used to start the process? Thanks, Oliver Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Interaction08 - missing piece of the conversation
On 10/02/2008, Marc Rettig [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [On Interaction08] THE MISSING TOPIC It's this: we are a community supposedly driven by understanding of the people who are affected by our work (that's PC for our users), but we aren't talking about them very much. Hi Marc, I'm not there but judging by this group I see what for me is a constant challenge, that is the healthy separation for user needs and implementation concerns. In my mind getting the right amount of separation at the right time in a project makes a big difference. If you ignore implementation near the start of the project and think about user needs and what they want to do then you bring the users back into the equation and are building something that has purpose, focus and is user centered. You then start bringing in implementation, for example is it going to be a website and start designing against that. Start with implementation and you can build a wonderfully crafted application with superb engineering that does 100 things but few folks really can't be bothered to learn and give up when it doesn't do the 1 thing they really wanted. If you start by saying 'we're going to build a community based ajax based website' then in my mind you've descided you're going to use a hammer then are lookiing for things to hit with it and screws just become 'crinkle cut nails'. Whilst I have technical skills I know it's best to ignore then at the start of a project. Even if I know we have a set architecture to build against with some pre-build solutions letting that set what users are going to search for is backwards. By the sounds of it might be a problem that some folks are too implementation focused. I call this an engineer mindset, the want to solve the technical issues of how to create the final product whilst what I call a user experience mindset is more about determining what the users are looking to achive, what tasks they carry out regardless of existing solutions and then see what part of the tasks they carry out can be helped by some kind of tool or infomation source. It's about abstracting out the problem and not rushing to solution as many of us are forced to do. You point about most folks in US homes is well made, I think it's true the world over. Most of us are very atypical in terms of audience who use these sites. Sites like Digg are very geek biased and appeals to a minority (although the tech focus is dropping). Let's ensure we have a healthy disrespect for all technology! -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Good Rant on lack of Good GUI Design Software
On 30/01/2008, Narciso Jaramillo [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Coming in on this thread a bit late...lots of good stuff here! David Malouf wrote: The Thermo stuff is definitely interesting, but thinks like a graphic designer, not like an interactive designer. Expression in their tutorials anyway is thinking similarly. Basic assumption that is false that both are making is that I'm going to make a finalized high fidelity graphic UI as a flat screen to start and THEN add interactive elements. This goes against the very way IxD's have been working. Just a quick note on this... Our current public Thermo demo does emphasize the graphic-design-to-production workflow, but we're also interested in the early-stage interaction design workflow. We do plan to have basic drawing tools and built-in components to let you do wireframing, and you can build custom components and try out interactions and transitions in wireframe as well. That's good to hear Narciso. The ease of creating custom components is going to be vital here as the potential problem is that the tool you use only really thinks of interaction in certain ways - like a windows UI or a web form. Whilst most of what I work on is web I often find myself creating custom forms of interaction so the customization is vital. What is also required is to substittued lo-fi with hi-fi later on in the process. If the prebuild widgets are too hi-fi it makes the lo-fi element of the interface sketches look strange. It sounds like the overall message of this thread is that the interaction design workflow is much more about early-stage experimentation, screen architecture, and prototyping, and that while visuals are somewhat important (for sketching and presentation purposes), exact visual bits aren't. Is that a fair characterization? Spot on. It's also about diagrams and flow that relate to these sketches. Notations, clickable site maps and user flow are all used by the agencies i have worked in the UK and I all major web agencies now use these in the creation of their websites. The same appears to be true in the US, so I wouldn't underestimate the audience of a more diagram based tool as I would say very few large websites are build these days without going through a fairly standard flow, site map, wireframe process. I'd definitely be curious to hear what other kinds of interaction design needs aren't being addressed by visual-production-oriented design tools today. See above for a start. To simplify things I would love to be able to draw a flow or site map and then be able to link these to my wireframes. I'd like to be able to set cases (a limited set of variables like Axure) and I'd like to have an annotation layer that allows paper/pdf presentation and screen based presentation. The wireframes created tend to fall into two main categories - functional pages (forms, interactive tools and heavily interactive elements) and content (text, pictures and pages where interaction is about changing the view of the content). The content pages often take the form of 'templates', one wireframe covering at times the majority of the site, but both the functional and content templates share elements so the ability for parts to inherited (and understand their context) is another thing I'd like to see in any interaction design tool. At the moment I'm looking at Flash and Axure to try and create a new kind of wireframes that include interaction and allows prototyping for client/user validation so if Thermos can deliver as much drawing ability (multiple pages/screens is a must have) as Visio but allows more on top then it starts to become a viable contender for a Information Architect / User Experience / Interaction Design tool. It's just in the teams I work in the graphic designers are part of a team and folks like myself are the ones that create architecture and main interaction for a project. If you'd like more detail or examples feel free to contact me. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Differnce between user interface and interactiondesign?
On 27/01/2008, Troy Gardner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To be contrarian, I routinely work with UI designers who take wireframes (from an IA/IxD) and convert them to high fidelity comps (primarily in photoshop but sometimes in illustrator). That's not UI design - that's visual or graphic design. User interface design is the designing of the interface which is what you do when you do wireframes (in part collaboration with your designers I presume). Most people equate design to visual design so I can see why you use that label - elsewhere it's not the same - the UI designer creates the wireframes. But then I've never had any labeled UI designer working on any project I've worked on. Interactive designers I've worked with and are, as someone pointed out, often design and build guys who do flash stuff, mostly at the microsite end of things in the UK new media market. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Good Rant on lack of Good GUI Design Software
On 24/01/2008, Andrei Herasimchuk [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 24, 2008, at 3:32 AM, Stew Dean wrote: So get a good CMS, add on a new kind of sitemap / process flow tool, allow sketching, allow me to create libraries of items with inheritance (so I can set up a relationship between items, change all my drop downs from my black and white version to, say, Vista style boxes), allow content to be entered and managed tagged and organised. This sounds suspiciously like what we do with our custom rolled prototyping tools. Also, you left out the aesthetic aspect that such a product would need. I don't think enough people appreciate just how hard it is to create a tool hat does all that you want it to for the interactive side and can still draw sophisticated graphics like Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks. Once you toss in the need for the tool to handle HTML layout rules or custom layout rules... I googled out the post that launched this post (at least it appears to be it). http://www.jasonsantamaria.com/archive/2008/01/23/mucking_up_the_fireworks.php In the work I do the aesthetic aspect comes a few steps down in the interation design process (as is increasing the norm for interactive projects), even in the most visual rich applications I've worked on wireframes and even interactive prototypes are created either before or along side visual design. I agree the tool needs to be able to throw around bit maps and vectors (good vector drawing is vital I feel for any diagraming tool) but I would say the tool that allows easy production of graphics almost feels like a seperate but linked tool to the one I had in mind. It's almost like the same problem but seen from a visual design flow rather then a user experience flow (visual design being a complimentary role to mine) and the post does hit several nails on the head from that point of view - you want the visual design to plug into the logic. So if I define a widget using a few lines and even add in the logic then this can be replaced by a hi-fi version. These elements could have styles applied to them and again have inheritance (possibly via CSS). It's always worth noting that new two folks work the same way so any tool would be able to deal with different types of skills. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Good Rant on lack of Good GUI Design Software
On 24/01/2008, David Malouf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Thermo stuff is definitely interesting, but thinks like a graphic designer, not like an interactive designer. Expression in their tutorials anyway is thinking similarly. Basic assumption that is false that both are making is that I'm going to make a finalized high fidelity graphic UI as a flat screen to start and THEN add interactive elements. This goes against the very way IxD's have been working. Well said David, My view is that it goes even beyond wireframes and UI. I need a tool that understands all the elements I put into get to the final interfaces elements. I don't want to add the logic at the interface level but a level above. This means a tool that understands site maps and process flows. At the moment I see lots of folks doing diagram tools, I see a few prototype tools like Axure that are good for wireframes and out put specification documents (do people still use them?) and I see Designer to Dev tools like Expression and the forthcoming Thermo. Both of these, as a user experience specialist, are of no good to me but may be of use to the front end devs - they're implimentation tools not user experience tools. The tools I need is part CMS (this is more important that you'd think), part diagram tool (visual representation is very important - I want control over how things look), part development tool (it needs to tie into a developement process not create a throw away prototype) and part project management tool (version control, issue logging, change tracking). So get a good CMS, add on a new kind of sitemap / process flow tool, allow sketching, allow me to create libraries of items with inheritance (so I can set up a relationship between items, change all my drop downs from my black and white version to, say, Vista style boxes), allow content to be entered and managed tagged and organised. Yes it does sound like I want a swiss army knife but I feel in my work all these elements are so closely related and are part of the same story. I've come to accept that Adobe or Microsoft would never design such a tool as for both of these companies user experience is about Visual Design and Developers, use user exeprience folks don't appear to exist in their world. I feel there is a huge gap in the market but I have yet to see anything get even remotely close to what I'm imagining. I live in hope that someone has been secretely working on something like this - if you are let me know :) Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Why do crappy interfaces sell?
On 22/01/2008, Todd Zaki Warfel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 6. Buyer isn't the user. How many people here in large-mid sized companies? Go ahead, raise your hands. Okay, how many of you get to pick the platform and applications you use? Oh, right. I think the term is 'Golf course purchases' :) I've seen many six figure CMS and personalisation systems that do less than a three figure or free CMS. Common myth clients tend to believe 'our site is very big and very complicated'. Then you fit their complete site with all the pages onto a couple bits of A3 (or even one sheet). Stew Dean -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Tata Nano vs. OLPC/XO
On 12/01/2008, Murli Nagasundaram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael, while that story sadly turned out to be an urban myth (if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't) there are numerous instances of resourcefulness one encounters as one wanders about in poor societies where people survive, if not thrive, in the most challenging circumstances -- and here's the incredible part: with their humanity intact; and indeed remaining more human and humane than many if not most people one encounters in cities. I have been shamed many times by the generosity I have encountered among people that many consider poor. - The micro-banking revolution began in Bangladesh - villagers in the Indian subcontinent often build their own satellite dishes out of scrap metal they find on the roadside - An entire class of students gets through school sharing a single textbook per subject; they end up with far sharper memories - The humble streetlamp is the venue for many a night class This is very true. Having less things doesnt mean you don't learn less or have a poorer quality of life. What I find saddening about the whole Tata thing is that this could have been a great chance to introduce an electric vehicle, or even a hydrogen one, one that was cheap to look after and run based upon the use of solar energy. That would have been a world changing concept. In Puru I noticed that all the outlaying villages and those floating on lake Titicaca use solar power above any other source (partly down to a scheme to allow them to pay for the cells in installments). Solar power remains the most promising technology for developing nations and it's good to see it being adopted. Now we just need cheap light batteries or a way to store hydrogen created via the use of solar energy and then developing nations can avoid the whole dependency on petrol thing and skip the mistakes of developed nations. So, anyway. To directly relate this to software / site design it's about working out what is the mininmum you need for the job and being ruthless with the pruning of needless functionality (yes I know it's a bit of a stretch). I've been using Vista for about a week now and can happily live without it graphical sparkle. I hoping gradients on everything is a phase everyone is going through - we don't need things like that do we? My first computer had 48k memory (yes k, not m or g) yet I had loads of fun playing games with it, wrote programmes and even wrote an essay using it. Okay maybe a thin link to the much more worthy topic of the ability for people to be resourcefull giving limited resources and be potenitaly as happy as those with endless resources. Stew Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Cramming what we do into a few hours
On 05/01/2008, Dan Saffer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 4, 2008, at 2:11 PM, Tom Illmensee wrote: There's a fun demonstration technique called [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Jan 4, 2008, at 12:04 PM, Billy Cox wrote: If it were me, I would use a simulation exercise to illustrate the value of usability. Now, I don't want to go off on a rant here, but this is the second time in a very short thread that the term usability has been substituted for interaction design (or simply design). We should know better and we certainly shouldn't be teaching people that they are the same! Usability is a by-product of good design. It's a baseline. It's a characteristic. It's hygiene. It is not the same as interaction design. Well said Dan. I've been trying to 'descope' the term usability for years now, just as once everything had interaction or interactive tacked on it as well (er, like interaction design). But anyway I've always described usability as something that is ambient, it's just present. It's not someones job or an activity you do before after or during a project. The aim of the whole team is to create a user experience that is usable, useful, engaging and whatever else it needs to be. Sometimes usability is second fiddle to something being engaging depending or being functinoal. After all in terms of usability a guitar or a car are not intuitive so would not really be described as that usable BUT they are very ergonomic once you have learnt how to use them so are good for the task they set out to do (be it play smoke on the water or haul a potted plant and set of shelves back from IKEA). I digress but Dan, well said. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] When/Where/How did you decide to be a designer?
On 18/12/2007, Fred Beecher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 12/18/07, pauric [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think many of us took the long winding path actually. I was wondering if we could hear some stories about those pivotal moments in our careers where we changed from being 'X' in to Interaction Designers What was different about the K2000 was that the pitch fine tune parameter was in cents, an actual unit of pitch and something that many musicians and most sound designers would understand. It hit me that someone took the time to adapt the machine to the musician rather than being lazy and doing it the other way round. Some folks may know this but the Kerzweil synths where the product of Ray Kerzweil who is responsible for books such as 'The Singularity is Near' that covers what could happen if a technical singularity strikes us (which, depending on you you speak to is between 30years and never). Off topic but his work does add a different dimension to why I do user experience (I don't call myself a designer or use the term design in my title just to result issues with being linked to visual design). My starting point was creating games on a ZX spectrum at a very young age - the days games used to be printed in magazines and you'd type them in. No really that's what we used to do. Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Does eye-tracking carry any real meaning?
On 21/11/2007, Robert Hoekman, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 23 rules actionable lessons from eye-tracking studies: http://tinyurl.com/yrhydu I'm curious whether or not others on the list take this stuff seriously. Simple answer is no, it's misleading. Text doesn't ATTRACT more attention, it REQUIRES more attention. So whilst an image can be glanced and understood quickly whilst you have to read text. As with Jakob Nielsen's terrible 'Talking Heads are boring' article what is happening is bad conclusion is being wrung from a fairly meaningless set of data. In the talk head video people where listening first, for example. It's only real use is to test hypothesis, probably best in an academic setting - not as a discovery tool. But then I even see lab based usability testing as second fiddle to infield ethnographic testing - labs are great for impressing clients but it's all smoke and mirrors - well half silvered mirrors. Eye tracking has no use on a real project, something I've learnt by talking to those who have had experience of it first hand. I've even been told that 'heat maps' are very little use as the time element is missing, yet that's what clients like. In short - it's snake oil. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] what are your fundamental tenets of design?
Best ever advice given to me about design is 'Avoid the arbitary'. Like many user experience people I use the term 'It depends' a lot. Stew Dean On 12/11/2007, Lisa deBettencourt [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am curious about what you design by. What are your fundamental tenets of design; those little bulleted phrases on the Design Vision slide of your Powerpoint, the signatures on your email footer, the philosophies you work by as you design? What's your domain and how do you use your tenets to guide you on a daily basis? ~Lisa (IxDA Boston) *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
Re: [IxDA Discuss] Paper is not a prototyping tool
On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:40:59, David Malouf [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In the end what Andrei is saying (at least my interpretation) is that detailed models have to be a part of our design process if we are to indeed consider ourselves designers. Designers make things ... not semblances of things or virtualizations of things. To me one of the biggest failings of IxD and IA is that we have traditionally let other people create the things that we conceptualize. We immediately loose our value to the process and fight to explain ourselves. Take two steps back for a second. Consider an architect, you know, the real ones that design buildings. They make nothing as part of a project, just as I make nothing as part of a project. So not you don't have to make anything to be a 'designer' - you just need to specify and guide. Depending on the role and make up of a team I will do differing things in different ways - for example my current project is a software project and I'm using real interface looking elements in my page designs as opposed to web stuff where it's all very lo-fi. If you're saying that having visual design skills or technical skills are a benefit then yes, I agree. I have a smattering of both and they help, I am totaly capable of putting together a website including CMS, graphic design and a fair amount of scripting. BUT others can do it better - so I work as part of a team. I also hold that good experience design requires a degree of seperation between design and implimentation. Why? Because the engineering mindset is not the same as the design mind set and tends to lead to feature rich and finely engineered solutions that, well, suck. You can end up with a Nokia N95 instead of an iPhone, to use a product design example. Nokia - what happened? Because you can do everything does not mean you should and often it's better you don't. -- Stewart Dean *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .. http://www.ixda.org/help
