January 2012
4 posts
“While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely...”
– Suler, J. (2004). The Online Disinhibition Effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, Vol 7(3): 321-326.
Just the abstract. AKA GIFT.
(via untanglingtheweb)
The Messy Art Of UX Sketching →
September 2011
1 post
6 tags
If wire frames are dead. Where do I go from here?
‘Wire frames are dead, long live rapid protyping’. This is a statement I see over and over again in the UX community on Blogs and on Twitter.
Added to the recent interest in ‘Designers who can code’. I have been doing some thinking.
I take great pride in the presentation and usefulness of the documentation I produce, and painstakingly tune every detail, but whats the...
August 2011
1 post
6 tags
Constraints: Thinking Inside the Box
This Blog post was origionally posted by me on the Head London Blog
We tend to think that creativity thrives best when constraints are removed, when in-fact the opposite is true, creativity thrives when people are challenged by constraints, that inconvenience forces people to be inventive, innovative and creative.
Constraints provide us with the opportunity to get rid of everything that is...
June 2011
3 posts
The Importance of a Great First Run Experience →
Ignoring the blank slate stage is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. The blank slate is your app’s first impression and you never get a second…
Alone Together →
Sherry Turkle talks to Aleks Krotoski at the RSA about her research and her books on identity in the age of the internet.
MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle has spent fifteen-years exploring our lives on the digital terrain. Based on interviews with hundreds of children and adults, she visits the RSA to describe new, unsettling relationships between friends,...
October 2010
2 posts
“When a design finally hits the real world, stereotypes go out the window. Real...”
– The Difference Between Good Design and Great Design
“Can experience be designed?” Yes. No. Wait, yes....
“When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinctly human qualities comes into play. A person’s experience emerges from these qualities: Motivations: why they are engaged with your offering, and what they hope to get out of it Expectations: the preconceptions they bring to how something works Perceptions: the ways in which your offering affects their senses...
September 2010
5 posts
Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles
A chronological list of essential Interaction Design reading.
Take a look
Review Design Comps on iPhone
Review is a simple app to review your visual design comps on the iPhone. You install an app on your mac and an app on your iPhone and pair the two. On the Mac, drop images into Review, and they’re synced with the iPhone for previewing at full screen.
Via Konigi
Can Experience be Designed?
Did someone design what you experience right now? Can experience be designed? Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?”
So is everybody that uses the term “user experience design” a...
10 Omnigraffle Tips You Might Not Know
Great run down of some Omnigraffle tips and tricks, you might not have stumbled across from Todd Moy at Viget Labs.
Check them out here
Informing Smartphone App Design
Shadowing, Field Interviews and Diary Studies; three complimentary research techniques well suited to smart phone app design. Discussed in detail over at UX Magazine by Suzanne Ginsburg.
Read all about it.
August 2010
16 posts
Ocado: Delivering on User Experience
“Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.”
Ocado is the biggest online grocery retailer in the world Felicity Evans over at UX Booth...
Google and Arcade Fire Team Up for HTML5...
(Via cameronmoll)
Google and Arcade Fire Team Up for HTML5 ‘Experience’
This multi-window browser experience is probably unlike anything you’ve seen before, though eerily reminiscent of the Javascript-controlled browser window resizing and spawning we saw a decade ago (most notably with Flash sites). The big headline here is that it’s built with HTML5. I’ve not dived into this...
Free Wireframing Kits and Resources
Comprehensive and slightly epic roundup from Aquil Akhter at Smashing Magazine
“To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape,...
2 tags
How Choice Impairs Your Visitors
“Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to...
1 tag
A Model for UX Career Growth
From the guys at Adaptive path
HTC is live
Our latest work at Head
(Via mrbnut (Andy Bennett))
Me and the team at Head have been busily working away on lots of exciting projects over the last year, and they’re all starting to make their way onto the world wide web. Here’s one of our latest projects for HTC. We’ve just re-designed the products section of their Global site. You can read all about the project here
Using Omnigraffle with Subversion
By default Omnigraffle and Subversion do not play nicely together, and will result in Subversion collisions and hair pulling.
This happens because by default Omnigraffle saves as a File Package, this is a folder that allows the user to modify a group of files as if they were one, and helps to keep Omnigraffle files smaller by only having to keep a single instance of elements such as images....
Good Help is Hard to Find
“Frustrated users can become a company’s biggest fans. People who have no trouble using a system may not give the experience a great deal of thought. But someone who has difficulty and then finds that the system anticipated their need for help (and met it effectively) is much more likely to appreciate the thoughtfulness of the system’s developers—and of the business itself. Effective...
Scamping Tools
My scamping/sketching tools for rapid wireframing; Sharpies of various colours, Uniball fine-line pen, Uniball Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil, Goldline layout pad, Pritt non-permanent glue, scissors, Post Its, Blue Tac (and not in the photo, Tipex & a photocopier)
What Motivates Us
Complete Beginners Guide to Design Research
“Research actually begins the moment we learn about a project, whether we acknowledge it or not. As user experience designers we aren’t content simply designing to specification. Instead, we ask questions. We take notes. We learn everything we can about our client and their audience—and that’s before we even begin! In this article, we explore the (purported) method to this (seeming)...
A Visual Vocabulary for Describing Information...
“Diagrams are an essential tool for communicating information architecture and interaction design in Web development teams. This document discusses the considerations in development of such diagrams, outlines a basic symbology for diagramming information architecture and interaction design concepts, and provides guidelines for the use of these elements.”
Read more on Jesse...
Creating a Table of Contents in OmniGraffle with...
A quick and easy to use script for creating a Table of Contents in your Omnigraffle documents. Wish i had discovered this a long time ago!
Get the Script & instructions here
Generate Omnigraffle Site Map from Sitemap XML
Create a quick and dirty site map in Omnigraffle from an existing sitemap.xml. Not especially pretty output but seems to do the job!
Find out more here
Create the Perfect Prototype
A great article landed in my Google Reader this morning, particularly highlighting the importance low-fi sketches (or Scamps as we call them at Head) for making rapid changes to designs to discuss with clients/stakeholders. Scamping helps to weed out the more obvious and less effective solutions quickly before moving onto thinking more deeply about detailed digitised solutions for a product.
...
Creating Master Objects in Omnigraffle
When wire framing, you often have a group of objects that need to appear across multiple canvases but need to be positioned in different locations, a good example of this is a page footer, the content of which would be the same across many canvases but due to varying page height would appear in different locations on each.
It makes sense to make changes to the footer at a global level. To do this...