Have you ever checked out Interaction-Design.org? No? Then you are missing out. They have so much amazing content and learning material it should be a go to destination for any interaction designer looking to learn. I’ve been given a special sneak preview of something they’ve been brewing up to share specially with you.
Last year I had the honor to present at SxSW with Chris Risdon and Nick Disabato. Speaking at SxSW was such a great experience that I’m aiming to do it again next year. My submission for next years conference is a version of the talk “From Cancer to Bankruptcy” I gave at MidwestUX and STC Summit earlier this year. For me this is a fun talk to give as it allows me to relive some fun stories. For the audience it is a great resource to learn about ways to deal with unexpected events that come up during the course of field study.
Performing field studies are a great source of information and design inspiration, and it’s an activity that can be a challenge to pull off. Given that over my career so far, I’ve had the chance to complete over fifty field studies for various projects, I feel it’s my duty share the lessons I’ve learned with other designers and user experience practitioners.
If you’ve had the chance to see this talk, or if it sounds of interest to you, please be so kind as to visit my submission on the SxSWi PanelPicker and vote for it. If you have any comments, please leave them there and I’ll do my best to respond to any questions or critiques that you may have.
Thanks and I hope to see you in Austin.
At MidwestUX, I gave a shorten version of my upcoming STC Summit presentation. For those of you that came to my talk, thank you for your time and attention. For those that were not able to make it, below you will find a recap of the material I provided to the crowd. Really quickly, I’d like to thank the MidwestUX team for putting on a great conference, and for allowing me the chance to be a part of the event.
One of the best ways user experience professionals can build an empathic link with people, is to interview them in their homes, or their personal environments. Doing this comes at a risk though. Not a physical risk per se, but an emotional and mental risk. You learn about extremely sensitive information and you hear such emotional stories that it can eventually take a lot out of you, not only as a designer but also as a person. Continue reading
In Part 1, I argued that the need for a designer to know how to code what they create is based on the designer’s chosen professional path and the overall size of the project they are working on. This has resulted in a variety of great comments, both here on the blog and on the twitterverse. If you haven’t had a chance to read it, please check it out.
Having dealt with that side of the argument, I want to provide some thoughts on why it’s important for designers to know about code, understand what a development lifecycle looks like, and why knowing these two aspects of digital creation is vital to being a well rounded designer. As I mentioned in the previous post, my educational background is in Computer Science. There are very few aspects of the coursework that I use in my everyday work, but what I do use is the concepts and domain knowledge that came along with it. Because of the curriculum I have a fundamental understanding of Object Oriented Programming, System Architecture, and the theory behind programming languages and their structure. Continue reading
At SxSW this year I attended a panel that meant to tell designers that there isn’t any excuses not to know how to code anymore. Putting aside some general complaints I had about the structure of the panel, I had a problem with the overall message the panel delivered. The claim: that to be considered a true designer, you must know how to code what you design, is misguided and in the end harmful to the profession of user experience. Continue reading
My 20 month year old son Tristan made a visit to my office last week. As we were leaving, he fell victim to my office’s front door. For years I have despised this door, as no matter how many times I walk through it, I always fall for it’s crappy affordances.
I recently returned from SxSW where I was given the honor and privilege to co-present with Chris Risdon and Nick Disabato. Together we presented a 2.5 hour workshop on Behavioral Design and Persuasion. The workshop was split into three parts, with Chris covering the general theory behind Behavioral Design and Persuasion, Nick going into details behind specific concepts around Persuasion and showcase many great design patterns, and I was tasked to cover the ethical side of doing Behavioral Design. Overall, our talk was a huge success in my book and I want to thank both Chris and Nick for including me on this amazing journey.
This question gets asked in a variety of online forums and Q&A communities all the time. We also hear it offline coming from stakeholders and clients when projects are getting kicked off, or when designs are being reviewed. Fortunately, this question has a simple answer – YES! Now, the rationale behind the answer is where it gets tricky, and for all you out there that are a fans of User Research it’s where the fun happens. Continue reading
Recently, I’ve had to create several in-depth interactive prototypes, and keeping all the various designs and interactions straight was a bit of a daunting task. Especially when the level of interactive fidelity was high. To ensure that I hooked up every piece of interaction and wrote every logic case needed, I took the development of the prototypes step by step, or layer by interactive layer. This post is a brief description of the process I followed. I’d be interested to know how this relates to your own process and any other comments you might have. Continue reading
Why doesn’t the iPhone allow you to customize the vibration sequence based on the context of the notification? This has been bugging me for awhile, but thanks to Eduardo Ortiz and Diego Pulido I’m bugged enough by it now to write about it. During a standard work day, my phone stays in the silent mode more often than not. Between SMS message, Boxcar Notifications, and emails my phone buzzes a lot. Now I’m like many people and I keep my personal email open all day so I can easily switch it when I need to. Feeling an email “buzz” come from my leg would tell me to check this tab rather than pull out my phone. The more I think about this type of use, the more I want this feature. Continue reading
