UX Week 2007

Changing working environments, complex business requirements, projects, and technologies are placing new demands on user experience designers. The site architectures, content inventories, wireframes, personas, and creative briefs that once formed the keystone of our user experience toolkit, only represent a portion of our responsibilities now. This panel will continue the skills discussion introduced by Liz Sanders in her participatory design workshop. We will examine the skills, methods,...

For those who manage creative organizations, the professional kitchen can provide inspiration for how to balance important principles like consistency, creative freedom and effective problem solving, all under stressful conditions. Ryan Freitas discusses these and other parallels between the worlds of the cook and the designer. Read more about Ryan’s recent article on this subject. About Ryan Freitas Ryan is a senior interaction designer for Adaptive Path, where he has worked with...

People love their mobile phones and they love the Internet. Based on user affinity for each, accessing Internet content on a mobile device should be a beloved and integral part of people’s lives. However, despite development and investment by carriers, handset manufacturers, and content providers, mobile web usage has not enjoyed the success that was predicted and hoped for. While many speculate the release of the iPhone will create a tipping point for internet access via a mobile device,...

Designing for a desired user experience requires an actionable understanding of the emotions associated with that desired experience. This requires user experience research. While user experience research typically focuses on analyzing “clicks” and usability, the emotional aspects of how it feels to use a website or how people wish an experience felt have great potential to inspire design teams and align entire companies. An understanding of the dreamlike experience and the interactive...

There has been significant interest lately from the business community in the value of design research and design thinking. This is particularly true when it comes to the very early front-end of the design process. Generative Tools help create a shared design language that designers, researchers and other stakeholders can use to visually communicate with each other. The design language is Generative in the sense that with it, people can express an infinite number of ideas (e.g., dreams,...

Learn the true power of the sticky note — yes, stickies! — to quickly and effectively organize data, visualize themes, and identify patterns.. We’ll start with an overview of how Adaptive Path uses sticky notes (aka: Post-Its) in user experience projects. Then, we’ll jump into a set of hands-on activities to test your stickies aptitude and gain experience in multiple methods. You’ll learn methods for rapidly visualizing and organizing data into clusters using sticky notes and how these...

With the rise of YouTube, Craigslist and MySpace, there is a clear trend toward social design, or designing for the social lives of users. What isn’t so clear is how to design for different social situations that may not have appeared on the web before. To help you attack this problem, we’ll look not only at current good and poor examples of social design, but also mine social psychology to get a larger view of how to design for the social lives of users. After all, humans are social...

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this consensus. By greasing the tracks in the early stages of a project, designers can gain the much-needed support of business stakeholders, avoid...

Millions of people from around the world come to eBay every day, and the eBay user experience design group applies a range of design and research methodologies to understand and address the perceptions and needs of its widely varied customer base. Jeff Herman and Ann Bishop will co-lead this session, sharing some of their methods for collaborating with eBay’s customers and exploring the ways in which they use customer insights to inform specific design solutions. In this session, you...

Interactive behaviors are plastic, flexible things, always subtly shifting in response to the actions of the user. As such, they can be hard to pin down on the printed page. Demos can help express the vision of the design, but the nitty-gritty details must be committed to paper if the design is to survive the development rollercoaster. The challenge is to create a document that remains useful as requirements are added and timelines shift, a document so all-inclusive, it remains relevant even...

Too often in the field of interaction design, designers only look at other digital products for inspiration. But this narrow stance soon leaves designers devoid of any fresh ideas. If we were to look at the physical world around us, there are sources of inspiration that interaction designers have barely tapped. We should examine mechanical objects and observe their workings. We should look to nature, with its variety of forms and its intricate ecologies. And we should incorporate lessons...

In recent years, museums around the world have been redefining interactive experiences. Museum interactives are environmental and experiential – offering visitors opportunities to experience history, technology, culture and science in custom-designed, dedicated spaces that include artifacts, lighting, audiovisual elements, electro-mechanical technologies, graphics and scenic treatments. The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC has earned industry-wide acclaim for its interactive...

Search on the web is ubiquitous. Everyone knows and uses Google. Most websites include a way to search the content within their pages and web users are often classified as either searchers or browsers. For many companies, search is considered a solved problem—you get an engine, point it at your content, add an entry box to your global navigation and you are done. This couldn’t be further from the truth. As experience designers, we have an obligation to understand how search works so we...

Many museums present exhibitions about architecture and design. In doing so, they typically treat buildings and other designed objects much as they do paintings, drawings, or sculptures — as individual creative works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or craftsmanship.

Every now and again, a project just jumps the rails — all the best intentions and planning just don’t stack up to the unanticipated challenges. After the dust settles, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on.

Apart from information discovery and aggregation, not much has been written about how semantic technology can be leveraged to improve user experience as a whole. This is unfortunate for a technology where the “semantic” is often overshadowed by the “web.”

Flow diagrams are a key component of an interaction design specification. Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary uses a set of simple shapes to diagram user flow and illustrate basic relationships between webpages.

CNN.com recently unveiled the latest evolution in online news: an intuitive, integrated Web site that gives users the global, national, and local news they find most relevant to them. The goal of this undertaking was to enhance and simplify online news for consumers to allow them to interact with news in more ways than ever before.

This session will focus on the ways in which human-centered researchers team with colleagues across disciplines to transform a mass of data -- field observations, contextual interviews, secondary research and anecdotal stories -- into actionable design principles.

Every document created by web designers contains many layers of information. Too few layers, and the ideas within lose context and meaning. Too many, and the important ideas become obscured. Choosing the right ideas to include can make or break a document, or even the entire project.