Relationships With Technology

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Brad

As technology becomes more interactive and personable, people will begin to establish deeper and more meaningful relationships with it. This is a key aspect that Microsoft wanted to get across during their announcement of Project Natal given during E3 last week. The demo of ‘Milo’ given by Lionhead Studio’s showcases this new world in relationships with the interactions between a player and the computerized child Milo. No longer are you required to push joysticks and mash buttons to interact with a character. You directly address them, and based on the relationship you have established with the character, your interaction is ‘unique’.
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Links for 5/25 – 5/29

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Brad

Wireframe Websites That Wow – I have completely fallen for wireframes. This post highlights some of the best sites out there to help yourself keep on top of them.

Selling What We Do – UX is hard to sell, hands down. This post gives some good pointers that makes it a tad bit easier though.
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Only 2 Months Remain…

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Brad

Assuming that the doctors little computer was accurate, we should be seeing our little boy come into the world in 2 months time. Things are definitely starting to sink in and get ‘real’. I think my wife has officially entered the nesting period, she has begun planning out how the nursery is going to be laid out and doing lots of measuring. Which means I get to hold the tapemeasure and nod to whatever suggestions she makes. Continue reading →

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Links for 5/11 – 5/22

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Brad

Twitter’s Most Moronic Change: Removing @ Reply Settings – Twitter community outrage on recent change to their @ Reply system.

About Challenges and Authentic Experiences: An Interview with Bill DeRouchey – Great interview looking at the history of Interaction Design, and where the profession is going. At the end of the interview is a nice piece of advice for young UX Designers. Continue reading →

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Links for 5/4 – 5/8

Posted on May 9, 2009 by Brad

Web Do’s and Don’ts - Great resource for patterns and anti-patterns.

You Are Not A Designer If – It would be very interesting to see a follow up to this called ‘You Are A Designer If’.

Boxes and Arrows Interactions 09 Recap -  Whitney Hess summarizes all the craziness that occurred at this years Interactions 09 conference. Continue reading →

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Should Interaction Design Control Behavior?

Posted on May 6, 2009 by Brad

There seems to be two schools of thought in the IxDA community regarding how a design should influence a user behavior. On one side there are designers who simply try to support existing behavior patterns, on the other hand designers attempt to directly influence a users behavior pattern. Some argue that it is unethical to directly try to influence, or change, a users behavior without them knowing it. In my opinion, if you are not causing the user undue harm by modifying their behavior, it is fair game. Continue reading →

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Links for 4/27 – 5/1

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Brad

You Can’t NOT Afford Good User Experience -  Great resource for anyone looking for ammo to sell UX internally. Stated so simply it is amazing that some people still don’t get it.
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Do you network or compute?

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Brad

Do you consider your interactions on sites like Facebook and Twitter to be computing? Are you working with someone in tandem in order to accomplish a task ? Or are you just chatting about last weekends BBQ and how burnt the hot dogs were? These interactions have very different contexts, which fundamentally mean different things to people.
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Links for 4/20 – 4/24

Posted on April 25, 2009 by Brad

Interview With Designer and Blogger Steven Snell – Another great interview that deals with how blogging and pumping out content is able to help you professionally.

Real Fonts on the Web: Interview with The Font Bureau’s David Berlow -Interesting discussion about the role of fonts on the web and the licensing that surrounds them. Continue reading →

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Flickr – Mindmap Feeding Ground

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Brad

Recently, I was asked to help our visual designer to brainstorm ideas on what some of our icons should represent. The challenge with these icons were they represented fairly abstract concepts, like services and aggregate. Not only were the concepts abstract, but the size of these icons had to be 16×16. In order to get a good inventory of possible solution, creating a mind map for each of these concepts was the best solution. Continue reading →

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