TAT, a Swedish software technology and mobile interface design company, recently ran a two-week open innovation experiment, during which they collaborate with the web community to sketch out an idea for two weeks and then build a video of the concept that gets most contribution and attention – measured in votes, ideas, and comments. They [...]

Posted on 3 September 2010 | 7:24 am

The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life, writes Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd in the Technology Review. “Each time Facebook’s privacy settings change or a technology makes personal information available to new audiences, people scream foul. Each time, their cries seem to fall on deaf ears. [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 10:38 am

Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. The Economist reports in an article that quotes Danah Boyd and Ethan Zuckerman. “A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 10:31 am

Adrian Chan of Gravity 7 and Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon.com and lecturer at Stanford and UC Berkeley, together wrote an article on how best to respond to the world of social data, how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it belonged to the very company DNA. “If social data powers [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 3:27 am

Stowe Boyd went to BlogTalk in Galway, Ireland and came back inspired: sociality, he says, has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. “The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 3:08 am

A few days ago sociologist Ms Lucía Merino presented her PhD thesis entitled, Digital natives: a study of the technological socialisation of young people, at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). “Considering that young people nowadays are natives of the so-called digital culture, Ms Merino explored their relationship with the new technologies and how [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 2:44 am

Should we focus on changing the behaviour of people OR changing the behaviour of devices? That is the key question in article by Ajit Jaokar on his blog Open Gardens. “The many privacy related issues raised by the Web will be amplified in the world of mobility and even more so, in a world dominated [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 2:27 am

People pushing sustainability don’t tend to be the same types who love our digital-crazed iWorld. And that’s a problem because it means they don’t push one of the great advantages of dense, energy-efficient cities: urban life integrates far better with mobile devices than does its car-logged suburban cousin. Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic’s lead technology writer, [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 2:13 am

Libraries will have to build a new foundation if they are to recover from these economic hard times—a foundation of valuable services, of user experience, not just free content, writes Aaron Schmidt in Library Journal. “We need to stop focusing on giving away free content and do something different—something no other institution, civic or commercial, [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 1:55 am

Researchers say that touch screens are the start of a trend to make computers more open to human gestures, argues the New York Times. “Device makers in a post-iPhone world are focused on fingertips, with touch at the core of the newest wave of computer design, known as natural user interface. Unlike past interfaces centered [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 1:45 am

The current issue of Interactions Magazine is generally on the nuances of what makes us human, writes co-editor-in-chief Jon Kolko, and more in particular “about authenticity, complexity, and design-and the political, social, and human qualities of our work”. Here are the articles that are currently available for free: interactions: authenticity, complexity, and design by Jon [...]

Posted on 2 September 2010 | 1:35 am

The latest issue of the International Journal of Design, eer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, is devoted to the aesthetics of interaction design: This special issue attempts to provide an overview of current research in the Aesthetics of Interaction. We believe there is no such thing as absolute [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 11:00 am

If a provocative new study is to be believed, the world lives in a situation where American undergraduates monopolize our knowledge of human nature, writes Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times. “In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 10:45 am

Two new articles in UX Magazine: Don’t become a digital dinosaur by Samantha Starmer UX professionals can’t constrict a user’s experience to specified devices, touchpoints, or time periods. As devices integrate with each other and with the real world, we have to design for this integration and blurring. UX pros must work on the holistic [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 10:30 am

Mostly the young are interested in letting others know their physical location. Others are reticent for safety reasons, or against providing too much information. The New York Times reports: “Internet companies have appropriated the real estate business’s mantra — it’s all about location, location, location. But while a home on the beach will always be [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 9:27 am

The New York Times reports on how online start-ups are allowing people to rent out their belongings locally, for a small fee. “The Roomba was mine for only 24 hours. I had rented it through a service called SnapGoods, which allows people to lend out their surplus gadgetry and various gear for a daily fee. [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 9:10 am

Le Monde newspaper published (Google translation) today a summary of an ethnographic research project on smartphone use by young adult, presented yesterday at a Virgin Mobile press conference in Paris. The research was conducted by Olivier Aïm of the Celsa Graduate School, Laurence Allard of the Lille 3 University and Joëlle Menrath of Discours & [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 7:48 am

The City of Dublin and the Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT) will act as co-hosts for Interaction 12, the annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) which will take place for the first time in Europe in 2012. The other submissions came from Berlin, Delft, Helsinki and Paris, from which Berlin, Dublin [...]

Posted on 1 September 2010 | 3:53 am

Martin Kettle thinks the UK has lost sight of next door Europe, trapped as Brits are in their Anglo-centric internet. “It is hard to recall a time when the national, not just the London, mind was less informed about or engaged with Europe than it is today. Europe may still be this country’s major export [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 8:32 am

The 2010 Finnish National Innovation Strategy contains an important section on demand and user-driven innovation, with user-driven innovation being described as: “User-driven innovation makes use of information on customers, user communities and customer companies. It engages users as active participants in innovation activity. The key aspect of user-driven innovation is information on user needs, whether [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 8:21 am

This week Google’s Eric Schmidt suggested we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life? Jemima Kiss reports in The Guardian: “From the surveillance entertainment of Big Brother to CCTV and celebrity magazines, [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 8:02 am

Younghee Jung, manager and design researcher at the Nokia Research Centre in Bangalore, India, has been profiled again on the Nokia Conversations blog through a long interview: One of [Younghee's] most recent projects was Nokia Open Studios. It’s a project that was conducted in three communities across the globe, in a bid to discover what [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 3:47 am

The people at frogdesign have posted two long articles (the first one is really an essay) that we consider a recommended read: Openness or how do you design for the loss of control? Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 3:36 am

Imon Deshmukh of Cooper thinks that interfaces can be more closely integrated with the environment in which they operate. In an article on the Cooper blog, he shares some of what he heas learned from the universe of video games and how it might be applicable to other kinds of designed experiences. “A key area [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 2:53 am

In our urge to create great products online, we should focus on making experiences happen that plant memories in people’s heads, argues Dmitry Dragilev, lead marketer at ZURB, in a guest contribution on Techcrunch. “Everyone gets caught up thinking it’s user experience they need to worry about, but it’s what they remember about their experience [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 2:34 am

On August 12, at noon, ZDNet Australia organised a live broadcast on the future of email. The discussion delved into the issues and challenges facing email in its current state, and looked at how social media is changing the way we exchange information. The panel of local and global communications experts included Genevieve Bell, Intel [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 2:17 am

Frank Spillers thinks the User Experience community has not fully tapped the potential of gender-specific design aka Woman-centered Design. According to Spillers, gender as an audience sensitive criteria (differentiation) is barely present in North American technology product design (where it is much easier to do) let alone Web experiences. In Asia there is more design [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 2:00 am

There has been growing concern that computers have failed to live up to the promise of improving learning for school kids. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and PBS have all done stories recently calling into question the benefits of computers in schools. But, says David Theo Goldberg in a sophisticated article on DMLcentral, [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 1:47 am

In America and Britain governments hope that a partnership with “social entrepreneurs” can solve some of society’s most intractable problem. The Economist reports in a long article. “Social innovation” is the increasingly common shorthand for this approach to public-private partnerships. It differs from the fashion in the past couple of decades for contracting out the [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 1:31 am

In Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy, Steve Daniels of Brown University illuminates the dynamics of Africa’s informal economy to enhance our understanding of emerging systems of innovation. “Wandering through winding alleys dotted with makeshift worksheds, one can’t help but feel clouded by the clanging of hammers on metal, grinding of bandsaws on wood, [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 1:16 am

In this review of the book Over the holidays, I read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and found it quite wanting. In an excellent review of the book, researcher and author Evgeny Morozov explains what is wrong with it and I support his analysis entirely. “Shirky’s digital [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 1:02 am

In this review of the book 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website, published by The Hindu, the author emphasises very strongly the importance of usefulness. “Create your website for your users, advise Steve Johnston and Liam McGee in “50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website“. Every design decision should be referred back [...]

Posted on 21 August 2010 | 12:46 am

Companies spend so much money on free services because of online advertising that trades in personal information. If Web users supply less information, the Web will supply less information to them, says Jim Harper in the Wall Street Journal. “If Web users supply less information to the Web, the Web will supply less information to [...]

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:50 pm

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the New York Times on what will make us happy. “The practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they [...]

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:44 pm

In an article for UX Mag designer Francisco Inchauste examines some of the many faces of complexity and explores the balance we need to find for successful solutions. Simplicity for its own sake should not be the goal. Balancing the amount of complexity that we engage with is something that UX people deal with on [...]

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:37 pm

Emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students show that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups. The first annual report of this longitudinal study, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, and [...]

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:29 pm

They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. Der Spiegel reports. “Young people primarily use the Internet to interact with friends. They go on social [...]

Posted on 20 August 2010 | 11:17 pm

Steve Baty, principal at Meld Studios and vice president of IxDA, argues in a long article on Core77 that interaction designers now have the opportunity to move their purview beyond the shallow plane of interaction into the design of systems, organisational capability and culture; to tackle very complex problems and affect profound and lasting change. [...]

Posted on 5 August 2010 | 2:52 am

From April 12 through April 14, 2010, 22 designers, historians, curators, educators and journalists met at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, in Italy, to discuss the museum’s role in the 21st century in relation to design for social change. Participants (including Paolo Antonelli, Andrew Blauvelt, Allan Chochinov and John Thackara) from a spectrum [...]

Posted on 5 August 2010 | 2:33 am

A couple of years ago I wrote about Mobile Revolutions, a blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell Salazar. The blog also supported TakingITMobile, an international study on youth mobile communications that she completed as a part of her Master of Environmental Studies at Canada’s York University. And her key findings [...]

Posted on 2 August 2010 | 11:55 pm

In the modern digital age where seemingly everything and everyone is online, a new industry is emerging to “manage” the internet footprint that people and businesses leave online. “Reputation managers” can clean up and shape a person’s online history: burying the damaging stuff and promoting the good. The Guardian reports. “Experts say that the huge [...]

Posted on 1 August 2010 | 2:21 am

In 2009, Dr. Genevieve Bell, an Australian-born anthropologist and ethnographer, who is an Intel Fellow and heads Intel’s newly created Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) division, was selected as South Australia’s Thinker in Residence. In her assignment, she focused on the ways in which South Australians use new technologies in their everyday lives. Through extensive, [...]

Posted on 29 July 2010 | 11:31 pm

Nalini Kotamraju, assistant professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, gave an excellent talk yesterday at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the lack of user centricity in e-government services. Individuals and institutions are slower to adopt e-government services due to a lack of user centricity in design and development. [...]

Posted on 28 July 2010 | 11:48 am

On the way to celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2014, the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (formerly the Winter Palace of the Russian czars) hired legendary architect Rem Koolhaas to modernize the art museum experience for visitors in a way that both respects the storied history of the Hermitage and also positions the museum as [...]

Posted on 28 July 2010 | 6:17 am

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian blogger, journalist and science-fiction author, argues in The Guardian that curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade. Although bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty, the real delight, he says, lies in making your own choices. “The only real reason to adopt coercive curation [...]

Posted on 27 July 2010 | 11:20 pm

Who do you read and associate with online? Ethan Zuckerman argues in this Guardian video that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues.

Posted on 27 July 2010 | 11:11 pm

The conventional public services delivery model does not address underlying problems that lead many to rely on public services and thus carries the seeds of its own demise, argue David Boyle, Anna Coote, Chris Sherwood and Julia Slay in a new report by UK think-and-do-tank nef (the new economics foundation) and NESTA, the UK’s National [...]

Posted on 23 July 2010 | 7:57 am

Indrani Medhi, associate researcher in the Technology For Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, was recently rated one of the “50 smartest people in technology” in 2010 by Fortune Magazine. In an interview with Arlene Chang of the India Real Time blog of the Wall Street Journal, Medhi talks about her passion for socio-economic [...]

Posted on 21 July 2010 | 10:52 pm

Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, reports in The New York Times Magazine. “We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, [...]

Posted on 21 July 2010 | 6:45 am

Facebook is about to celebrate its 500-millionth user, but the social media application has had wide consequences, even for those who have never signed on, writes the BBC. Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of a company which only has a couple of thousand employees to serve half a billion [...]

Posted on 21 July 2010 | 6:23 am

Jakub Linowski created a sketch annotation system for interaction design and provides a free downloadable PDF describing how to use it.

"The interactive sketching notation is an emerging visual language which affords the representation of interface states and event-based user actions. Through a few simple and standardized rules, what the user sees (drawn in greys and blacks) and does (drawn in red) are unified into a coherent sketching system. This unification of both interface and use, intends to enable designers to tell more powerful stories of interaction. "

Posted on 30 August 2010 | 6:04 am

The User Interface Stack Exchange is a free, community driven Q and A site for user interface researchers and experts. It was created through the open democratic process defined at Stack Exchange Area 51, part of the Stack Exchange Network and Stack Overflow. Help out by registering and contributing your expertise.

Posted on 25 August 2010 | 7:00 am

Wireframes Mag pointed to an XML to OmniGraffle Sitmap Generator created by Jason Kunesh at Fuzzy Math to generate a sitemap from an XML file. The script assumes that your XML file consists of url elements, and that parent child relationships are defined by the paths in the url. For instance, http://konigi.com/about-site/unicorns would be a child of http://konigi.com/about-site. Once you generate a list of your urls and pass it to the script, OmniGraffle generates the sitemap hierarchy for you.

Posted on 18 August 2010 | 9:04 am

This is a fantastic interview of Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose where Bezos talks about why Kindle shouldn't be the iPad and why Amazon's new mission is "Earth's most customer-centric company."

Posted on 17 August 2010 | 3:13 pm

Draftboard is a wireframe and visual design review web app for capturing design reviews of your work.

Posted on 17 August 2010 | 2:39 pm

This is a pretty fun comparison of a Windows 7 Hanvon tablet and the iPad. Mute the music and Steve Jobs voice over unless your into that kind of cacophony.

Found via 52 Tiger.

Posted on 10 August 2010 | 6:29 pm

If you're curious about Keynote prototyping, Travis Isaacs' describes how he works with the presentation software to produce click-through prototypes. As Travis notes, it's even useful to people who like to go between a low-fidelity wireframe created in another application to interactive demonstrations.

You can purchase Travis' Keynote Wireframe Toolkit here on Konigi.

Posted on 4 August 2010 | 5:59 am

There's no doubt about where the call to action is here. I especially like the useful copy on this page. "If for any reason you are unwilling or unable to click the giant button, please email us..."

Via @patio11

Posted on 3 August 2010 | 11:10 am

Harry Brignull did a thorough review of WhatUsersDo.com, a UK-based remote, unmoderated, qualitative usability testing service. To use the service, you pay £25-£30 per participant and you get back screen recordings with audio of them thinking aloud during the tasks. The test participants are chosen from a pool of users paid to take usability tests, similar to usertesting.com.

As Brignull notes, this is possibly valuable to companies with little experience doing usability testing on their own before, but is less likely to be of value to companies with the experience and budget for doing moderated usability research on their own, or with a usability research consultancy.

Posted on 3 August 2010 | 8:29 am

Keynote lovers, take notice. There's a community of designers who love wireframing in Apple's presentation software, and Travis Isaacs has created a set of clean, Mac OS style user interface components to suit your needs in Keynote.

The toolkit provides all of the foundational design elements you need to quickly create wireframes in Keynote. Version 2 includes: Form elements and buttons; Navigation elements, such as menus, tabs, bread crumbs, accordions, carousels, and fly-outs; Stylish tables; iOS elements, including buttons, menus, toolbars, alerts, keyboards; 960 grid system templates; Text style guide; Image and video place holders; ad units; Alerts and messages; Annotations for capturing interactivity; and Progress bars.

We're proud to announce that you can now purchase Travis' Keynote Wireframe Toolkit in the Konigi store.

Posted on 29 July 2010 | 8:06 am

Quplo may be the most promising HTML prototyping tools I've seen for UX designers who know a little HTML and would like to do HTML prototyping, but either don't have the chops to build the interaction by hand, or are lazy like me.

The web-based tool allows you to build multiple prototypes using a combination of standard HTML/CSS. If you can do JS, the standard JS libraries are available to include in your pages (or sheets in Quplo lingo).

Quplo provides some really simple syntax and markup language, called "flow," for creating variables, loops, conditionals, layouts (like master templates), parts (reusable pieces of code like UI components, menus, etc.), and including browser, get and post vars.

You can even specify a "redesign" prototype and provide a URL, and it'll ingest the HTML for that page as a starting point for your prototype. Cobble together a bunch of pages and you have an interactive HTML prototype to demonstrate your pages and state changes. If you need to, you can download a compressed .zip of the XML files in your project.

This is easily the best thing I've seen for HTML prototyping for non-programmers that I've seen. It's like what my Protokit wanted to grow up to be. :) Sick stuff for the UX k1Ddi35. You can bet I'm going to campaign for a way to get Mockups into this tool.

Posted on 22 July 2010 | 10:49 am

Touch Notation is a simple annotation system created by Matt Gemmell for documenting multi-touch gestures. It's an incredibly simple system when compared to the more literal annotation symbols that use hands, because the symbology can be quickly rendered in sketches as well as being used in wireframing libraries.

The Touch Notation page provides PSD, AI, and OmniGraffle templates. I've additionally created a Balsamiq Mockups version of the system on Mockups To Go.

Posted on 15 July 2010 | 10:04 am

DataTables is a plug-in for the jQuery Javascript library. It is flexible tool, based upon the foundations of progressive enhancement, which will add advanced interaction controls to any HTML table. Key features:

• Variable length pagination
• On-the-fly filtering
• Multi-column sorting with data type detection
• Smart handling of column widths
• Display data from almost any data source
• DOM, Javascript array, Ajax file and server-side processing (PHP, C#, Perl, Ruby, AIR, Gears etc)
• Fully internationalisable
• jQuery UI ThemeRoller support
• Wide variety of plug-ins inc. TableTools, FixedHeader and KeyTable

More info...

Via @filamentgroup

Posted on 14 July 2010 | 7:46 am

AddUse is a commercial user research service that allow you to run and analyze web surveys and allows usability test facilitators to manually capture and analyze the results of test sessions.

Posted on 5 July 2010 | 12:27 am

Elastic Lists is an open source project from Moritz Stefaner that allows you to create a faceted browsing interface for navigating large, multi-dimensional info spaces with just a few clicks, never letting you run into situations with zero results. Elastic Lists is an Apache licensed, AS3 project for use in Flash CS4 or Flex.

Posted on 5 July 2010 | 12:16 am

Bounce is a new screen capture service from Zurb that lets you invite other collaborators to annotate screenshots.

Here's a test page of Konigi for you to defile, er, test.

Posted on 5 July 2010 | 12:05 am

UX Storytellers is a blog that captures the stories that we share when we're talking UX with our peers at conferences and events. Jan Jursa's team are collecting these stories to publish as a free PDF, an online magazine and eventually a book.

Posted on 4 July 2010 | 11:39 pm

Catriona Cornett created a great list of sketching resources for user experience designers. Includes links to articles, tools, templates, presentations, videos, and examples.

Check it out and add more to the comments. Missing for me are the links to sketch apps for the iPad.

Posted on 28 June 2010 | 9:02 am

I swear I've answered this question a dozen times, so I'm capturing to refer people in the future. The tree control in my OmnGraffle Wireframe Stencil is a godawful hack that uses tabs and arrow characters. Copying and pasting the arrows, however, screws up the formatting. OmniGraffle just doesn't make this kind of manipulation of text all that easy and I haven't found an ideal solution, but if you want to learn how I do it, read on.

To use the tree control presently, you utilize the tab stops and insert arrrows from a character viewer. Type CMD-R to show rulers and tab stops in paragraphs of text. Then Option-Tab to move between tab stops. 1 tab for first level arrow. Insert arrows from the character viewer.

The video below shows how to :

1) Enable the character viewer in OS X System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources.
2) Use tab stops to Option-tab your text to create hierarchy.
3) Use OS X's character viewer to insert arrows.

View it in full screen to see it.

I'm using Option-* to make the bullets. Like I said it's terribly awkward, but that's how I make do.

Since using paragraph formatting in a text element is unnecessarily difficult, what might be an easier way to manage is to use a table and copy/paste the arrow icons if you find the above technique a pain.

Posted on 24 June 2010 | 11:06 am

Marian Bantjes gives a fantastic TED talk, where she discusses her work as a graphic artist living outside the mainstream of design thinking, thinking about ethereal qualities like bringing joy, invoking wonder, and inciting curiosity. This bit excited me:

The more I deal with the work as something of my own, as something that is personal, the more successful it is as something that is compelling, interesting, and sustaining.

Bantjes' focus on placing importance on the personal interest she puts into her work strikes a chord with me as someone interested in product design, because that personal interest can even help create personality and character in interface design work and writing copy.

This kind of self-centered approach to design is not something we talk about taking as user advocates, and it's certainly not something that I would expect any of my peers to advise in their work. But as you may have seen me write several times here in the past, when it comes to product design, there is something to be said for honoring one's instincts and interests when it comes to being steadfast on feature selection and putting forth a voice or personality in your product.

Posted on 22 June 2010 | 1:44 pm

The moment I saw screenshots of Roundarch’s work on the real-time stats dashboard for the New York Jets’ new stadium I was smitten and not just because I’m a huge fan of the Jets (as well as Rex Ryan’s leadership model). I love how they’ve taken really complex information that spans different categories (food, parking, [...]

Posted on 3 September 2010 | 7:06 am

Other game companies at the time assigned alphabet letters or colors to the buttons. We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols, and I came up with the triangle-circle-X-square combination immediately afterward. I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had [...]

Posted on 26 August 2010 | 10:33 am

There are a lot of reasons Flipboard is special and they absolutely deserve all the attention (and melted servers) they’re getting. I suspect that many folks don’t even realize the potential they have to really have a profound effect on how people consume content going forward, particularly as we continue to find ourselves with more [...]

Posted on 26 August 2010 | 8:00 am

YouTube – Steve Jobs Oldie but GoodieGreat, simple, talk on branding from Jobs here. Brands@Foursquare | 24 Big Brand Campaigns | Social Commerce TodayNice roundup. I love me some Catch A Choo. 157 App Stats You Should Know About – Daniel Lammon’s PosterousBookmark this one, dawg! Dark Patterns: Black Hat, Anti-Usability Design PatternsA great collection [...]

Posted on 17 August 2010 | 4:00 pm

A VC: Being PresentExcellent Father's Day post on the importance of being present from Fred Wilson. Add Some XBOX To Your UX :: SXSW 2010 Talk :: Josh KnowlesGreat, thorough, presentation on the intricacies of game mechanics and how to weave them into your experience. (i.e. don't "just add badges!") Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command [...]

Posted on 1 August 2010 | 8:00 pm

Awesome awesome visualization of Inception. The more I think about and talk about the movie with others, the more I need to see it again. (via Inception Infographic by ~dehahs)

Posted on 29 July 2010 | 8:59 am

In 2007, Spanish bank BBVA engaged IDEO to rethink the way their ATMs worked. In 2009 the fruits of that labor began to see the light of day and the companies have done a really great job highlighting their insights and subsequent designs. The average ATM experience is nothing special so the opportunity to innovate [...]

Posted on 26 July 2010 | 9:00 am

A Day’s Outing – Find a great Day Trip, Weekend Getaway, Local Event, Things To DoLiking the way they're approaching the "find things to do" problem. I need to play around a bit and see what the data quality is like. There is something different about Foursquare friends, methinks | TrisHusseyDotComNice post on why "friends" [...]

Posted on 18 July 2010 | 8:00 pm

Out of the box – book from adrian333 on Vimeo. One could argue that “No Manual” needed is the pinnacle of product design but if you’re going to make a “manual” you could do far worse than this. So much nicer to help people experience your product in order to learn rather than just telling [...]

Posted on 30 June 2010 | 10:46 am

Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android | Monday NoteSmart fiction piece on one way Nokia could turn things around. I thought this was a good idea 2 years ago. Qrcheck.in | Check-in your foursquare By QRCODENeat. Infographic: How Teenagers Use Mobile Phones | Digital Buzz BlogGreat data here. Bonus for being nicely visualized. New Panera location says pay [...]

Posted on 24 June 2010 | 7:01 am