User experience design is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user's perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting 'all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.'
#35052
Usability Matters: Software Development and the Balancing Act Between Design and Usability
Marketing departments – especially in IT – like to speak in the modern lingo about a product’s innovative “Look and Feel”. While “Look“ refers to the design of the solution, “Feel” means usability, the quality of use. Developers of Content Management Systems and other enterprise IT solutions have to walk a fine line to meet the exacting demands of users in both areas. But in recent years a clear trend has become apparent: There is a drive towards the modern, “cool” product design where at a minimum usability takes a back seat, often to its detriment.
Bodemann, Jörn. Content Wrangler, The (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Usability
#35099
Defining Social Media Settings
As we explore what social technologies can offer and the boundaries they can cross—boundaries that had confined the traditional Web—UX professionals must now take up a new design challenge. We must address the changing needs for social media and facilitate users’ taking better advantage of everything social media has to offer.
Asad, Junaid. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Social Networking>User Experience
#35101
Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality
While ubiquitous computing remains an unpleasant mouthful of techno-babble to most people who know the term, and everyware is still an essentially unknown idea, the visibility of augmented reality has surged in the last twelve months.
Lamantia, Joe. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Interface>User Experience>Information Design
#35102
Online Advertising: Factors That Influence Customer Experience
In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web.
Kirmani, Shazeeye and Shamugam Rajasekaran. UXmatters (2009). Articles>Web Design>Marketing>User Experience
#35178
Using Wikis to Document UI Specifications
The role of the interaction designer is to specify the interface’s behaviors and elements, so that engineers know what to build and how the product should operate. This documentation is commonly known as a UI specification or UI spec. There are several applications for authoring a UI spec, with wikis being a relatively new tool. However, designers should be aware of a wiki’s benefits and drawbacks for documentation, since UI specs uniquely reflect a project and its context. The documentation needs are often based on the size of the project, launch date, team dynamics, audience, technology, and the product development process. The development process usually plays a major role in how teams interact and how work is completed or delivered, thus, there is a direct relationship between the UI spec and the process the team is using.
Gremett, Peter. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Functional Specifications
#35230
iPhone Is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for UX Design
I live and breathe user experience design, and yet it took me two years to get myself the device referenced by almost every single presentation about user experience since 2007… Apple’s iPhone. My reasons were very specific and perhaps boring, but what is interesting is the perspective this wait has afforded me. Since it was released, the iPhone has grabbed an astonishing share of mobile Web traffic, been regarded as a “game-changer” in both the design and business worlds, and has even been referred to as the “Jesus Phone.” Now that I’ve owned one for two weeks I’ve developed a different perspective. The iPhone is surprisingly difficult to use, but it sure is fun! And that is why it’s a game-changer.
Beecher, Frederick. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Usability>Interaction Design>User Experience
#35232
Through the designs we create, we have the ability to directly influence another person’s behavior. The ethical implications of this are important and not easily definable. I was interested in ethics before I ever considered becoming a designer, but the lessons I learned while studying philosophy impacts the way I view my designs. In nature, our goal is a good one. We strive to help others by improving the interactions that define their life. This drives us to create and innovate new ways of interacting with old concepts. The question remains, do we have the right to influence another person? Further, are there guiding principles we can follow that can keep us on the moral path? The answers to these questions rests on the shoulders of the whole community, not a single person or group.
Nunnally, Brad. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Rhetoric
#35233
The watchclock is another kind of interaction design, one whose function corrals the user into a single, linear, constrained sort of behavior. The night watchman has a fundamental social constraint — the desire to not get fired from their job. This constraint allows the watchclock patrol system to work so effectively (some would say insidiously) as an interaction design instrument of control.
Fahey, Christopher. Graphpaper (2009). Articles>User Experience>Management>Interaction Design
#35235
Understanding the Experience of Social Network Sites
Although social networking sites have become the commonplace over the past eight years since the introduction of Friendster in 2002, designers have not yet explored two important notions: 1) What kind of social experience do social networking sites foster?; and 2) Do social networking sites encourage community?
Zollers, Alla. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Web Design>Social Networking>User Experience
#35236
Design for Interaction: Ideation and Design Principles
Once you’ve come up with tons of ideas, how do you choose which ones are worth pursuing? You use a set of design principles that will not only help select the best ideas, but guide the design through refinement, prototyping, development, and beyond. But first, let’s diverge and come up with concepts.
Saffer, Dan. Johnny Holland (2009). Design>User Experience>Interaction Design
#35238
Engaging the User: What We Can Learn from Games
As an Interaction Designer, I’m perpetually impressed with the continual design success inherent in most video games. We are taught to know our users by understanding their goals, leveraging mental models, and taking ourselves out of the equation in order to design useful and appropriate interfaces. And although a user-centered design approach is invaluable, I can’t help but wonder how game designers just seem to nail it time and again for what are large and diverse audiences.
Sasinski, Marc. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Games
#35240
User Stories: A Strategic Design Tool
A collaborative approach enables clients to actively participate in the process, increasing the likelihood of achieving a collective vision for the project. This article focuses on the first step in the journey towards collaboratively developing a User Experience Strategy and is concerned specifically with how user stories are generated, themed and prioritized.
Hagen, Penny and Michelle Gilmore. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Personas
#35330
Designing the Total User Experience: Implications for Research and Program Development 
Information design has traditionally focused on usability as measured by functionality and efficiency in the execution of user tasks. Newer approaches to experience design and new communication technologies such as the so-called Web 2.0 platform and its Ajax engine emphasize total user engagement with the technology and richer collaborations among users. These developments complicate traditional notions of agency by highlighting the role of technology as mediator between and among users. A project in Tech-Mediated Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by the Society for Technical Communication, illustrates how these developments impact the development of novel and creative information resources, with several experiments in cross-cultural, community-oriented, and educational systems design. This work also emphasizes the need to develop research agendas and programmatic initiatives that support interdisciplinary collaborative design activities and thus help technical communicators to meet their collective responsibility to influence and shape the mediating technologies of the future by creating more engaging and more collaborative total user experiences.
Zappen, James P. and Cheryl Geisler. Programmatic Perspectives (2009). Articles>Education>Information Design>User Experience
#35367
When a screenwriter can summarize a story in one sentence, he has a compass that can guide him throughout the writing process. Cindy Chastain chronicles how we can translate this approach to help us remember the quality and value of the experience we intend to deliver.
Chastain, Cindy. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Collaboration
#35372
Non-UX Designers Can Pay Attention to User Experience Too!
Concepts, principals, and parts of User Experience Design can often times be difficult to approach—and this tends to create barriers with new bloggers. This begs the question: Do ordinary bloggers have to worry about UX Design?
Leggett, David. Fuel Your Blogging (2009). Articles>Web Design>User Experience>Blogging
#35381
We don't really know what attention is, despite all the mumbo-jumbo spouted by Nobel laureates. My guess: most of what people say about attention is hogwash: mere anecdotes, or flimsy cultural norms offered up in a 'be productive, be happy' wrapper. Whenever business thinkers seek to apply an economic metaphor to human cognition, it is a mess: remember "knowledge management"?
Boyd, Stowe. SlideShare (2007). Articles>User Centered Design>User Experience>Emotions
#35487
Designing for B2B and Enterprise Applications
It's not uncommon to hear people complaining about the poor user experience of some B2B and enterprise applications. Read through these top tips to help you design enterprise applications that offer a better user experience and increase productivity.
Baxevanis, Alexander. Webcredible (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience
#35493
When writing software, *please* don't give error messages that are only meaningful to developers of the software. Microsoft used to be awful for this: "System fault at DEAD:BEEF, please contact your system administrator". Which would've been cool, except that I *was* the system administrator.
Bailey, Jeff. LiveJournal (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Centered Design>User Experience
#35552
Connecting the Dots of User Experience 
The article presents a point of view about analyzing and designing the user experience within pervasive networks made of distributed services and applications, where the user is the primary actor who freely and opportunistically connects and activates the system components following an activity-driven process. A digital content case study is used to outline the main characteristics of this scenario and to introduce a tool for user experience modelling and designing. From the application of this model are proposed some considerations about how the design process could change to support this vision.
Brugnoli, Gianluca. Journal of Information Architecture (2009). Articles>Information Design>User Experience>Case Studies
#35590
The site focuses on web usability, user research, usability testing, accessibility and standards focused design.
Herrod, Lisa. Scenario Girl. Resources>Web Design>User Experience>User Centered Design
#35598
The Foundation of a Great User Experience
I’m part of the AEC User Experience Team at Autodesk. Our goal is to design a great user experience for our customers, but just what does that mean? Our definition of user experience focuses on all the touchpoints that current or new users have with our product. For example, the downloading of software trials is often the beginning of one’s user experience with a product. If you have to fill out forms that ask for too much information, (should “cell phone number” be a required field on a trial download form?) or present you with too many obstacles, the likelihood of a positive user experience will be low. Your interactions with technical support, documentation, the product, and even other products that you use, are all aspects of the user experience.
Wilson, Chauncey E. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Usability>User Centered Design
#35600
Design Essentials for Non-Designers
This tutorial is intended for practitioners who have come to interaction design from a research, psychology, information architecture, or other non-design background. It focuses on what happens after the requirements are done and before you build your first prototype. Design fields such as graphic arts, architecture, and industrial design have long-standing practices for innovative design, and these apply well to interaction design.
Schrag, John and Ian Hooper. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Design>User Experience>Interaction Design
#35604
As interaction designers at Autodesk, we sometimes engage in design and thought investigations that are not directly related to the task at hand. These investigations are ways to frame problems by venturing into related design disciplines. For example, in order to understand what might be an appropriate transition when changing views in a 3d model, we try to understand how a video artist would create a transition between two scenes in a video. To understand how to improve the graphic quality of elements drawn in a building information model, we look at lots of pencil sketches drawn by architects. We think, what would happen if an on-screen element was made from physical material?
Nikolovska, Lira. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>User Experience>Graphic Design
#35643
In my column, On Good Behavior, I’ll explore the essentials of good interaction design. This first column provides a brief introduction to interaction design—defining the scope this column will cover—then explores some key design principles. What is interaction design?
Gabriel-Petit, Pabini. UXmatters (2009). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design>Workflow
#35797
Fluency as an Experiential Quality in Augmented Spaces 
The use of digital products and services has expanded from largely instrumental, work-oriented settings to include entertainment, leisure, personal communication, and other classes of hedonistic use. The development of foundational concepts in the interaction design community to succeed usability and utility has lagged behind considerably. I argue that interaction design would benefit from attempts to articulate experiential qualities of digital products and services, and illustrate the approach by presenting the concept of fluency. It refers to the degree of gracefulness with which the user deals with multiple demands for her attention and action, particularly in augmented spaces where the user moves through shifting ecologies of people, physical objects, and digital media. I develop the concept of fluency by analyzing a range of digital artifacts in use situations, addressing the main themes of (1) social norms and practices and (2) peripheral interaction and calm technology. In terms of research methodology, this paper illustrates how design and criticism can be merged to construct elements of transferable knowledge for communication with design-research communities.
Löwgren, Jonas. International Journal of Design (2007). Articles>User Experience>Interaction Design
