Interactiondesign Videos

An audio selection from Leah Buley s A UX Team of One 7.5MB 14min 15sec If you didn t attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley s session entitled How to be a User Experience Team of One . Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top user experience teams that any UXer can use in a small team or an unsupportive environment. Below are some notes I took during Leah s session and slides from this portion of the talk. The slides here are shrunk to fit our blog, but the materials on the disc are full-sized PDFs suitable for printing. Leah began with telling the story of her transition to a new job at Adaptive Path. Up until then, she had been a UX team of one at a financial firm. Her time was mostly spent walled up in a cubicle, headphones on, sketching and otherwise prepping wireframes on the computer, based on up-front meetings determining business requirements. After a few weeks she would emerge from her design cocoon with designs ready to be shown in a dog-and-pony show-style. Her first day at Adaptive Path was radically different. She was handed paper and a Sharpie and, along with a couple of other designers, was asked to tackle a problem by generating several solutions, collaboratively, on the spot. She was initially flush with panic. They didn t teach this at library school! After a short while she warmed up to the process. To get to the quality ideas, you first must generate a lot of ideas, and be OK with many of them being subpar and others simply being tossed aside. Now instead of jumping to the finish, as she had at her previous job, she was exploring more ideas more efficiently with techniques you can use with or without collaborating designers. Leah used the idea of redesigning the eVite.com digital invitation and RSVP service to demonstrate some of the techniques she learned after joining Adaptive Path. (For the purposes of this blog post, we ll be covering just the first part of the brainstorming process) She avoided the computer. Computers can lock you into only one idea and you often get sucked down by minutia you shouldn t be addressing at this stage. She started with a 6-up a single sheet of paper with six, smallish, blank browser viewports and a pen. This allowed for 6 different ideas of how to solve one problem, say the eVite landing page. One or two ideas came easily. How do you push through to the next ideas? [Download a PDF file of Leah's 6-up template] Leah uses a couple of so-called lightweight conceptual frameworks to help push more ideas out of her head. A Spectrum is one such framework. A spectrum is a range from two opposing points. For example, what would the landing page at eVite.com look like if it was intended solely for a first-timer? What would it look like if it was solely for a long-time user of the service? What would pages on the spectrum in between those to points look like? What characteristic would they exhibit? None of the sketches you make on the spectrum may be the right solution. But that s OK, because we re not drawing solutions. We re drawing ideas. This framework gets you to try ideas you might have avoided before. Now you have a pile of ideas to pick from. Perhaps the best design features aspects from several of these thumbnail sketches. You can hear the rest of Leah s talk plus the other seven speakers and Jared Spool s keynote presentation on the UI14 proceedings disc. The disc is loaded with over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks and the presentation slides from the 8 full-day workshops. Order the proceedings disc by November 20, 2009 to guarantee your set and get the lowest price.

apresenta o no "Le Coq Tuguese"

Duration: 27.5m | 15MB Recorded: October, 2009 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] [ Direct Link to MP3 File ] How many IBM or General Electric television ads do we need to see before we are groaning at the mention of the word innovation ? It s too late for me, personally. But that doesn t mean real innovation is dead. Steve Jobs has been quoted saying Apple will innovate their way through tight times. This past week Apple announced record revenues for the past quarter on impressive sales of premium products that aren t supposed to sell well during down times. How are they flourishing while their competition is not? How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That s what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott is one of our favorite speakers on the topic of innovation and project management. He tells us you have to be opportunistic and start small. High-priority challenges may be a temping place to start, but he suggested looking first at low-hanging fruit. You can build momentum for positive change by racking up a number of small wins that together move the project in the right direction. Having these small successes under your belt gives you more influence when attempting larger changes later on. True innovation starts with you allowing yourself to be creative and recording your ideas religiously in a safe place like a notebook or sketchpad. Don t self-censor, either. Initial precision and getting it right are the antithesis of creativity. It s essential to let the ideas flow, and your ideas will improve as you continue to record them. Your journal is an incubator of ideas. Not every idea will be a success, and some will be terrible! But Scott says that s OK. When an opportunity for change arises, you ll have a treasure trove of ideas to pick though. Once you have an idea, you need to involve other people to make it happen. The key differentiator in successful, innovative environments is group trust. People need to feel they are safe to share ideas with their team. If you work in an environment where you re fearful of this, find one person on your team who is the most enthusiastic and try sharing with them. Once you have other people on board with your idea, you ll have an easier time sharing it with others. A common difficulty is honest and constructive critique among teams and individuals. This is an area where the most successful teams have excelled. Good critiques take practice and trust within your team. This usually requires time and commitment. Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. And we have asked him to present his findings in a full-day workshop at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November in Boston. Scott presented on this very topic last year and received rave reviews as one of our most entertaining and informative speakers. You won t want to miss it. What experiences have you had trying to introduce new ideas? Politics and we ve tried that before getting in the way? Let us hear about it in the comments.

Duration: 33m | 17MB Recorded: August, 2009 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] [ Direct Link to MP3 File ] Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We re happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston. I asked Donna, what happens when, one day, you re asked into the boss s office and they drop the web site and information architecture into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place? What s its purpose? She says if you don t get this out of the way first, you ll run up against it when you re further along the trail and it won t be easy to deal with. One strategy Donna likes is to work backwards. Start with what should not be on the site. Sometimes pruning your unnecessary or no longer timely content is an effective way of honing the site. You should ask, What s the value of this content? Is this still relevant? Before you can answer this for certain, you need to research your users needs thoroughly. Along with establishing the site s purpose, knowing your users is the most important step to begin with. These two items will work hand in hand. I asked Donna, once you have these established, should we just dive right into the homepage and start making changes? Generally, the answer is no. A few initial homepage tweaks aren t always bad, especially if you can get some quick wins there. Hopefully your research has revealed the site sections in most need of assistance. Starting there will often be productive. You should most likely start with the content pages, where more people enter your site and where they spend most of their time. Be sure that your content pages work for their specific content, as all your content will not likely be all cookie-cutter. Generally, Donna shies away from using Lorem Ipsum text for content page designs. Also, if you know your customers don t generally begin on the homepage, don t create your navigation by starting with the homepage. Your goal should be to get something informed in front of people quickly. At some point you ll need to take what you know and create a first draft. You ll have to make some of it up. Don t expect it to be 100% right. Check it against your research, show it to people within the organization, and tweak. Show it to users and see if it functions well. The good and bad should become apparent once you put it through these paces. These points are of course just a few of the highlights from our conversation. Please join us for the complete discussion in the podcast. If you found this useful, you ll likely also be interested in Donna s full-day workshop at UI14, Information Architecture Essentials, Best Practices for Organizing Your Site s Content, which was UI13 s highest-rated workshop, newly revised and updated. You won t want to miss it. Have you had the task of redesigning your site s IA just dropped in your lap out of the blue? Where would or did you start? Let us know in the comments!

Duration: 39m | 21MB Recorded: August, 2009 Brian Christiansen, UIE Podcast Producer [ Subscribe to our podcast via ←This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] [ Direct Link to MP3 File ] Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we ve asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Did you know some people are actually building prototypes in Microsoft Excel? It s true. People are using what they have at their disposal and what they are comfortable with, Todd tells me. In the podcast, we discussed a number of the more popular tools that are being used today, from Adobe Fireworks, to Axure RP, to good old PowerPoint. Todd doesn t think your choice of tool is important if you are able to communicate your ideas effectively to your audience. He thinks it is worth knowing the capabilities of a few other tools in the event you need to do something in the future that your current tool can t handle. I got Todd to reveal the process his own shop, Messagefirst, is using to prototype. It may surprise you that they start with rough, black and white sketches which they share with their clients both early and often. Whereas some design shops may work hard on a prototype for three months before first showing it to their client, Todd thinks that s a bad idea. There s nothing worse than diving deep into a design direction only to have it unilaterally shot down in the first review. Instead, you need to get your client to give you lots of feedback very early in the process, starting with basic and rough sketches. It will save both sides a lot of time, effort and frustration. Once the design direction is solidified, Todd and his team move their prototypes into color and interactivity. The Messagefirst crew is now often jumping straight to HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the higher fidelity mockups. Todd tells us that someone with basic HTML skills can (and have) learned to create high fidelity prototypes in just a couple weeks of effort. The secret is the availability modular tools, for example, CSS frameworks like the 960 Grid System and JavaScript libraries like jQuery. This move to code earlier in the process is becoming more and more popular around the web. Todd and I talked more about his two years worth of findings and he gave us a preview of his UI14 full-day workshop. Tune in to the show for more on prototyping. We d love to know what process and tools you re using in your own designs. Have you incorporated feedback early into your process? Let us know in the comments!

Tap is the New CLick Thursday March 6, 2009 www.chia.org Even though touchscreen and gestural technology has been around for decades, Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone and Microsoft Surface have heralded a new era of interaction design where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking.But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design for web and desktop applications, many are still wondering how to adequately design for interactive gestures. This talk covers the basics: ergonomics, a brief history of gestural technology, prototyping and documenting, and how to communicate the presence of a gestural interface to users. Dan Saffer, a founder and principal designer at Kicker Studio, has designed interactive products since 1995 that are currently used by millions every day. Dan has led projects for large organizations like Nokia and Time Warner to start-ups such as Ning and Foxmarks. An international speaker and author, his acclaimed book Designing for Interaction (New Riders) has been called "a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs" and has been translated into several languages. His new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces (O'Reilly) was published in December 2008.Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. Dan's writings on design have appeared in BusinessWeek, Vitamin, and Boxes and Arrows. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Tap is the New Click Thursday March 26, 2009 www.chia.org Even though touchscreen and gestural technology has been around for decades, Nintendo's Wii, Apple's iPhone and Microsoft Surface have heralded a new era of interaction design where gestures in space and touches on a screen will be as prominent as pointing and clicking.But how do you create products for this new paradigm? While most of us know how to design for web and desktop applications, many are still wondering how to adequately design for interactive gestures. This talk covers the basics: ergonomics, a brief history of gestural technology, prototyping and documenting, and how to communicate the presence of a gestural interface to users. Dan Saffer, a founder and principal designer at Kicker Studio, has designed interactive products since 1995 that are currently used by millions every day. Dan has led projects for large organizations like Nokia and Time Warner to start-ups such as Ning and Foxmarks. An international speaker and author, his acclaimed book Designing for Interaction (New Riders) has been called "a bookshelf must-have for anyone thinking of creating new designs" and has been translated into several languages. His new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces (O'Reilly) was published in December 2008.Dan is an internationally-recognized thought leader on design who has spoken at conferences and taught workshops on interaction design all over the world. Dan's writings on design have appeared in BusinessWeek, Vitamin, and Boxes and Arrows. He has a Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Paul Reijnierse is a passionated interaction designer, together with two friends he set up the design studio De Monsters. Through their work they saw a problem for managing the workflows and decision making during the design process. As they could not find an appropriated tool fulfilling their needs, they decided to create it by themselves. The result is a workflow management tool in the language of designers providing a completely new approach to organizing the creative process.But best you check it out by yourself. And if the interview is not enough for you, there is a great video on vimeo to demonstrate how the air based software works.