Andy tells us the best practices to employ when building your site for your target audience. Also discover what it takes for your designs to stand out.
Tagged with “ux”
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Andy Budd: Mastering web user experience
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The Psychology of Creativity — Claire Rowland (Fjord London)
A lot of hot air and expensive business consultancy time is sold in pursuit of facilitating creativity but the creative process is still thought of as a mysterious black box, often the preserve of certain people and not others. But what’s the actual science behind it? Are some of us more creative than others, and if so, why? What can all of us do to help ourselves have more and better ideas? This talk offers a brief introduction to the psychology of creativity.
Tagged with design by fire 2010 conference creativity ux
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Christian Crumlish: Designing Social Interfaces: 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns
As we use social tools on the web, design patterns are emerging. Social design must be organic, not static, emotional, not data-driven. A social experience builds on relationships, not transactions.
In 2008, Yahoo!’s Christian Crumlish introduced the idea of social design patterns to BayCHI. He returns in 2010 to share what he learned over two years. With his Yahoo! colleague Erin Malone, Christian created a wiki to gather social design patterns and published a snapshot of the wiki in book form.
Among the many principles of social design, Christian presents five:
- Pave the Cowpaths: Watch what people do, then support and adapt to that behavior.
- Talk Like a Person: Use a conversational voice. Be self-deprecating when an error occurs. Ask questions.
- Be Open: Embrace open standards. Support two-way exchange of data with other applications.
- Learn from Games: Give your application fun elements, like collecting and customization.
- Respect the Ethical Dimension: Understand the expectations people have in social situations and abide by them.
Christian then describes five practices:
- Give people a way to be identified and to characterize themselves.
- Create social objects that give people context for interaction.
- Give people something to do, and understand the continuum of participation, from lurkers to creators to leaders.
- Enable a bridge to real life.
- Let the community elevate people and the content they value.
Finally, he discusses five anti-patterns, commonly-used design choices that appear to solve a problem but that can backfire and pollute of the commons. Examples:
- The Cargo Cult: Copying successful designs without understanding why they are successful.
- Breaking Email: Sending an email alert, but rejecting or silently discarding the reply.
- The Password Anti-Pattern: Asking people for their password to another service encourages poor on-line hygiene.
- The Ex-Boyfriend Bug: Connecting people who share a social circle but who have reasons to avoid each other.
- The Potemkin Village: Building groups with no members. Instead, let people gather naturally.
Christian stresses that social design is an ecosystem in which designers must balance many trade-offs. Not every design pattern applies to every application, but good designers can use patterns to strike a balance that works.
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Bill Buxton and Jared Spool (Spark | CBC Radio)
Earlier this week, I wrote about digital Swiss Army knives. Today, Nora talked to researchers Bill Buxton and Jared Spool about the relative merits of single-purpose and multi-function devices. A shorter version of this discussion will air on Spark 98, but you can hear the full, uncut interview below, or download the MP3. [runs 38:34]
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2010/01/full-interview-bill-buxton-and-jared-spool/
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SpoolCast: UX in an Agile Environment with Jeff Patton
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Why usability is no longer enough
Eric Schaffer declares that "Usability is no longer enough" in this compelling introduction to designing for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET design)
Tagged with ux user experience
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There Is No “There” There
This article was written for Scroll magazine number two, on the theme of “place”, where it appeared in edited form as “Disrupting the Conceptual Metaphors of the Web”:
http://scrollmagazine.com/number-2/conceptual-metaphors
We’ve developed an array of metaphors for talking about the intangible spaces of the web. Maybe it’s time to unshackle ourselves from some of them.
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Jeremy Keith on Ajax design considerations
Jeremy Keith from Clearleft discusses his session at 2008’s UI13 conference called Ajax Design Considerations that Tim attended. What do UX professionals need to know about Ajax to best make use of it in websites and web applications? And why is Jeremy’s title at Clearleft currently "Lineman for the County"?
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Suze Ingram – Would you like service design with that?
Service design is a new discipline which focuses on understanding what customers want, then designing services which meet their needs. Sound familiar? Web designers have focused on user-centred design for years to create websites and applications that are user friendly.
Service design is well established in Europe and North America and there’s already a handful of Australian businesses offering service design. What is it? Does experience in designing for screen interaction translate to designing services too? Will service design be the next big thing? Suze offers insight by drawing on her years of experience as a UX designer and researcher. She shows how service design might fit into your business in the future, who you might pitch it to, and what sort of skills you might need to deliver service design.
http://www.webdirections.org/resources/suze-ingram-would-you-like-service-design-with-that/
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Christian Crumlish – Designing social interfaces
Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. Christian will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.
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