Featured
UIE Brain Sparks
Design strategy. It’s rare you hear anyone bragging about the food served at a school or government institution’s cafeteria. The food there usually fits the bill of edible, but it’s certainly nothing to write home about.
These government-funded venues have to serve a lot of food to anyone who walks in the door. They can’t think about catering to the needs of individuals.
By Jared Spool, 31 October 2012
UIE Brain Sparks
Design strategy. In today’s UIEtips, I look back on an article from January 2011 – Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers. In this article, I explain how the Kano Model predicts the reaction of users from initial delight and why the delight fades over time. Here’s an excerpt from the article. When blogging [.
By Jared Spool, 17 October 2012
Smashing Magazine Fe...
Design strategy.
Unless you’re developing completely new products at a startup, you likely work in an organization that has accumulated years of legacy design and development in its products.
By Stefan Klocek, 27 September 2012
Elezea
Design strategy. The air of ‘meh’ surrounding Apple’s iPhone event this coming Wednesday is almost palpable. A wave of pre-disappointment is sweeping much of the tech blog world, with proclamations like this one from Andrew Couts:
As bored as I am by the new iPhone’s purported growth spurt, I’m not particularly interested in any of the other realistic features Apple might add to some “dream phone” either. NFC? Yawn. Quad-core processor? Psh.
By Rian, 10 September 2012
UsabilityPost
Design strategy. Smashing Magazine published a good article by Paul Scrivens titled “MUD: Minimum Usable Design” in which the author talks about satisfying groups of audiences, starting with the largest — i. e. what is the minimum that the site must do for the majority of users — and then following on to the smaller and smaller ones, that is, implementing more specialized features.
By Dmitry Fadeyev, 29 May 2012
Smashing Magazine Fe...
Design strategy.
There is a paradox that fits my life. Doesn’t matter what aspect of my life I am talking about because it always seems to apply. Even more so when I think about this paradox and the design of this website and other websites. I really hate this paradox.
By Paul Scrivens, 29 May 2012
UXmatters
Design strategy. By Paul Bryan
Published: May 21, 2012
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no spoon.
21 May 2012
Smashing Magazine Fe...
Design strategy.
In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns. All types of organizations are guilty: large government agencies, Fortune 500s, not-for-profits and (especially) institutions of higher education.
By Louis Rosenfeld, 16 May 2012
Featured
Co.Design
Design strategy. "What we are trying to do is make an operating system and a computer more like a web service. " That’s the vision Caesar Sengupta, product strategy lead for Google Chrome OS, laid out for me last year, as the company was gearing up to launch its own cloud-based operating system to compete with Microsoft and Apple. It was a big bet at the time, and one the search giant is still banking on: that consumers want the desktop to feel more like the web.
By Austin Carr, 16 May 2012
Johnny Holland
Design strategy. It’s no secret that working in teams and having an outlook for success are attributes of a successful athlete. Today I want to talk about our first lesson from the field: success is all about strategy.
Well I believe that there are many lessons that we can learn from sports in order to enhance our UX skillset as well.
By Elisabeth Hubert, 23 April 2012
Featured
Elezea
Design strategy. Jake Knapp writes that you can build better products by designing the marketing first:
Okay, let’s pretend I grab you and stuff you in a DeLorean. We time travel a few weeks into the future. Your latest project has just been released.
Imagine you can see the launch page.
By Rian, 18 March 2012
Co.Design
Design strategy. The cleverest trick that Apple has ever pulled isn’t convincing us to pay $500 for a phone or MP3 player, but rather convincing the world that if you want good design, then you have to follow Apple’s template of clean lines and stripped-down details. You can see how that happened: The company has become so synonymous with both good design and minimalism that most people assume those two things are one and the same.
By Cliff Kuang, 6 February 2012
UXmatters
Design strategy. By Jim Nieters
Published: January 23, 2012
“An interaction model is a design model that binds an application together in a way that supports the conceptual models of its target users. ”
In March of 2011, I joined HP to lead the User Experience and Front-End Development organization for Consumer Travel. My goal? To design products that transform the future of travel.
23 January 2012
UIE Brain Sparks
Design strategy. Sometimes, it’s easy to brand what we do as the “science of the obvious. ” Here we are, doing all this research, and come up with something that is painfully obvious.
The latest of the obviously obvious findings we’ve come up with? That teams who don’t have a shared understanding of their design rarely succeed at producing a great product. See? It’s obvious.
By Jared Spool, 18 January 2012
UsabilityPost
Design strategy. There’s an interesting post over at TechCrunch discussing the current hot topic of the iPad design — or more specifically: how Apple has created a design for a tablet that is so simple and obvious that their competition has no other way forward but to implement their own products the same way, suffering Apple lawsuits in the process.
By Dmitry Fadeyev, 9 December 2011
Elezea
Design strategy. When Google+ first came out there was plenty of praise for its UI design[1], particularly the “un-Google like” design of the Circles feature. Oliver Reichenstein wrote:
Every interaction seems to have been thought through and designed until its last little bits (and those matter as much as the big bits). It even has room for some warmth (like the circle rolling away when you delete it) which is rare for Google’s cold UID approach.
By Rian, 8 December 2011
ZURB
Design strategy.
An old friend emailed us a great article from Daniel Jacobs, Focus on People, Not Products, whose main points struck a cord with us, especially since our latest newletter was titled It's About the People, Not the Product. We immediately saw several examples that backup Jacobs' main points:
You’re not selling what people want to buy.
5 December 2011
ZURB
Design strategy. Our very own Chief Instigator was recently asked to give one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. Here is what he had to say:
Don’t focus on the thing (the product), focus on the people.
A number of you emailed me after we posted the interview with this piece of advice. Let’s break the concept down so that everyone understands what we mean when we say this.
29 November 2011
Johnny Holland
Design strategy. I’ve been watching two trends recently in the realm of digital product development. First is the incorporation of gaming concepts into products that seemingly have nothing to do with gaming. Second, the importance of designing products that are not only easy to use but a pleasure to use.
To be sure, these trends aren’t new.
By Greg Laugero, 3 November 2011
www.fastcodesign.com
Design strategy. User-friendliness is the inevitable result of a smart design approach, not the starting point. Here are three criteria to help you develop a useful design brief that will ultimately yield a great product.
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25 October 2011
UXmatters
Design strategy. By Paul Bryan
Published: October 17, 2011
“UX strategy is about building a rationale that guides user experience design efforts for the foreseeable future. ”
Many people in the UX community are puzzled by the term UX Strategy.
17 October 2011
UXmatters
Design strategy. By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain
Published: August 8, 2011
“Getting the attention of late adopters can present an enormous challenge. ”
We’ve met with several startups recently that are targeting market segments in which there is a lot of room for growth. Some of these are representative of segments that are showing rapid adoption of more advanced technologies like smartphones and tablets.
8 August 2011
ZURB
Design strategy. Nike CEO, Mark Parker says that shortly after becoming CEO and working on Nike+ with Apple he talked to Steve Jobs on the phone. “Do you have any advice?” Parker asked Jobs. Here is what Jobs had to say:
Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after.
25 July 2011
UIE Brain Sparks
Design strategy. The excitement in the room was electric. Everyone was waiting for the big moment. Finally, it was here.
For six months, the team had been working on their new design principles.
By Jared Spool, 1 March 2011
Userfocus Usability ...
Design strategy. Many design teams launch into development without a shared vision of the user experience. Without this shared vision, the team lacks direction, challenge and focus. This article describes how to use the 'Design the Box' activity to develop a user experience vision, and then describes three ways of publicising the vision: telling a short story; drawing a cartoon showing the experience; and creating a video to illustrate the future.
By david.travis@userfoc..., 5 January 2011