“While online, some people self-disclose or act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person. This article explores six factors that interact with each other in creating this online disinhibition effect: dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority. Personality variables also will influence the extent of this disinhibition. Rather than thinking of disinhibition as the revealing of an underlying “true self,” we can conceptualize it as a shift to a constellation within self-structure, involving clusters of affect and cognition that differ from the in-person constellation.” —
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 -
(Source: experienceblogger)
(Source: arielwaldman)
Oh…hell..yes…
(Source: getgrowing, via jonic)
‘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 point?
For some time I have been frustrated by two main things; The first being the difficulty in explaining interactions and behaviors in words and static pictures. The second is having taken a lot of time and effort painstakingly writing wire frame annotations to explain interactions, only to have them misinterpreted or not read at all.
When I talk I use my hands to explain and act things out, as such when I am discussing my wire frames in person I can do this acting out to get the idea across, once I’m out of the picture, things are out of my hands, my painstaking work is diluted.
As such I want to find a way to change the way I design interactions.
Firstly, I want to ween myself off Omnigraffle. When I made the move from visual designer to UX Designer a couple of years ago, I made the shift from Photoshop to Omnigraffle. It was a natural shift to make it was intuitive to me. Omnigraffle and its counterparts are limiting, they are static, the closest thing to a prototype you can make is a PDF click through (I am excluding Axure and similar from this). This is just not good enough.
I am also a big advocate of the importance of sketching, but sketches are first and foremost a tool to help the sketcher think. They are also a way of explaining something visually. That explanation is always more poignant if someone can either see you drawing, or see you pointing and gesticulating. Therefore useless in my Absence.
So, where do I go from here?
If I follow the popular consensus I should start updating my HTML and CSS knowledge. This seems a little much, although certainly something to think about. Tools such as Axure, for rapid prototyping are making a lot of sense to me, as methods to improve the communication of my designs and interactions.
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 irrelevant and focus on the matter in hand. We can break things down into their component parts and by doing so concentrate on the things that really matter, with this we can stop worrying about what it is we are designing and get on with designing the solution to a specific problem.
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
Igor Stravinsky
In 1977 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, co-authored; A Pattern Language. In this book they chronicled 253 archetypal patterns, from big high level patterns relating to the layout of regions and cities. Right down to the details of fixtures such as door knobs, and other embellishments. These patterns can be used together in an infinite number of combinations.
The idea was that ordinary people not just professional designers, could design their own houses, streets and communities together with their neighbours and families, within a set of guiding principles, adapted to the preferences of those people. These principles do not mean that every design will be the same only that there are a set of core constraints that make a design successful.
From very early on in their education, art students are taught to copy and study famous artists, not to mimic them but instead to look at the artists style from many angles, to find the essence of what it is that makes the artists work, and in turn learn what they, themselves, can do within those constraints.
During Life drawing classes at art college, we were usually asked by our tutors to do a series of exercises each placing different constraints on our approach: from drawing with a time limit of a few seconds, to restrictions on the drawing tools we could use. These constraints always led to much more rewarding results than just being left to our own devices.
(Image: Stone Room by Andy Goldsworthy at Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Creative Commons Flickr)
The sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, creates astonishing works of art using only the items he finds while out walking, such as twigs, leaves, rocks, snow and ice. He was once quoted as saying, “I think it’s incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole”.
Famous Artists create great works not necessarily by working unbridled, but, by placing constraints on the style, medium or method they use, exploring in depth what can be done within the constraints they set themselves.
In an interview in the late 1960s, Charles Eames famously stated, “Design depends largely on constraints…Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem: the ability of the designer to recognise as many of the constraints as possible (and) his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints—the constraints of price, size, strength, balance, surface, time, etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.”
Despite the obvious constraints of designing for mobile devices, we have embraced the challenge of designing engaging experiences for them. The limitations of what can be done on a mobile device helps us to concentrate on exactly what is important when using an application, and prioritise what it is that should be included.
Luke Wroblewski argues that the constraints in designing for mobile should be the starting point for all web product offerings rather than the traditional route of designing for desktop experiences first. Acknowledging the constraints of the mobile screen size, and performance helps us to focus on what users care about, and what their core actions will be.
At Head we approach projects in an agile way, we work in short, typically 2 week iterations, focusing on solving specific ‘user stories’. At the beginning of each iteration we choose stories that we will design collaboratively between the UX and Visual design teams. We then work alongside the development team as they build. This constraint of time speeds up development and helps us to quickly see how good a new concept is, as each iteration provides us with a working and stable prototype. This gives us the opportunity test and to fail so, where necessary, we can come up with a better solution.
Designers need to live within real world limits, they need to recognise all the constraints that effect the problem they are trying to solve. Each problem has its own unique set of constraints and the success or failure of the project depends on meeting those constraints.
So, instead of freaking out over constraints, let’s get over it and learn to love and embrace them.
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…
If browsers were children (pic)
(via boagworld)
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, lovers, parents and children, and new instabilities in how we understand privacy and community, intimacy and solitude.
“When a design finally hits the real world, stereotypes go out the window. Real people don’t fit into the neat little boxes that we try to put them in. They’re complex, unpredictable and each one different than the next” — The Difference Between Good Design and Great Design
(Source: boagworld)
“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 (see, hear, touch, smell, taste) Abilities: how they are able to cognitively and physically interact with your offering Flow: how they engage with your offering over time Culture: the framework of codes (manners, language, rituals), behavioral norms, and systems of belief within which the person operates. When someone says they’ve had a good or a bad experience, what they’re talking about is how a product, service, or environment did or didn’t satisfactorily address these qualities.”
“Can experience be designed?” Yes. No. Wait, yes. But.
Via boagworld
A chronological list of essential Interaction Design reading.
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
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 charlatan? see what Oliver Reichenstein at iA has to say. Read more
Great run down of some Omnigraffle tips and tricks, you might not have stumbled across from Todd Moy at Viget Labs.