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.'
#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
#35307
Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience
From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.
Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2009). Articles>Usability>User Experience>User Interface
#35309
The Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging: Sin #3, Being Boring
Being boring is sin #3 in my list of the seven deadly sins (which include being fake, irrelevant, boring, unreadable, irresponsible, inaccessible, and inattentive). Perhaps a more tactful way of saying something is boring is to say the writer neglects to “keep the audience’s attention.”
Johnson, Tom H. I'd Rather Be Writing (2009). Articles>Writing>Blogging>User Experience
#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
#35352
There seems to be this idea going around that usability testing is bad, or that the cool kids don’t do it. That it’s old skool. That designers don’t need to do it. What if I told you that usability testing is the hottest thing in experience design research? Every time a person has a great experience with a website, a web app, a gadget, or a service, it’s because a design team made excellent decisions about both design and implementation—decisions based on data about how people use designs. And how can you get that data? Usability testing.
Chisnell, Dana E. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Usability>Testing>User Experience
#35356
Three Decades of Research and Professional Practice on Printed Software Tutorials for Novices 
Provides a historic overview of research on printed software tutorials. Describes developments in design approaches, refinements in design, and user experience.
van der Meij, Hans, Joyce Karreman and Michaël Steehouder. Technical Communication Online (2009). Articles>Documentation>Help>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
#35368
Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process
Prototyping is a big deal right now. We get wrapped up in mailing list threads, new tools are released at an astonishing pace, books are being published, and articles show up on Boxes & Arrows. Clients are even asking for prototypes. But here’s the thing… prototyping is not a silver bullet. There is no one right way to do it. However, prototyping is a high silver content bullet. When aimed well, a prototype can answer design questions and communicate design ideas. In this article, I talk about the dimensions of prototype fidelity and how you can use them to choose the most effective prototyping method for the questions you need answered.
Beecher, Frederick. Boxes and Arrows (2009). Articles>User Experience>Prototyping>Methods
#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
#35489
Can You Say That in English? Explaining UX Research to Clients
It's hard for clients to understand the true value of user experience research. As much as you'd like to tell your clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call you back when they’re done, that won’t cut it in a professional services environment. David Sherwin creates a cheat sheet to help you pitch UX research using plain, client-friendly language that focuses on the business value of each exercise.
Sherwin, David. List Apart, A (2009). Articles>Consulting>User Experience>Research
#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
#35498
The Future of Interface Design
The future of how we interact with computers is exciting to say the least. What once seemed like nonsense outside of Hollywood and Science Fiction is now starting to find it’s way into reality, and some of the technology is a bit overwhelming. Have a taste of what the future of interface design has to offer:
Leggett, David. UX Booth (2009). Articles>Human Computer Interaction>User Experience
#35501
Leah Buley on How to Get a Good Design Faster
Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path, and she will be running a Bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York to teach others how they can more productively and efficiently work together to create great designs and better user experiences. Leah recently spoke to us about her approach and how designers can apply it to their own situations.
Pike, Kaitlin and Leah Buley. Web 2.0 Expo (2009). Articles>Interviews>User Experience
#35504
There are a multitude of digital media companies in Brighton and many different networking groups. However there are very few opportunities to talk in detail about design both theory and practice. Let’s see how many people we can get together to form an informal group of user experience / interaction / web designers. The aim would be to meet on a semi regular basis maybe using the 20×20 Pecha Kucha presentation format maybe just bringing in problems / concepts or whatever to discuss in an atmosphere of open collaboration.
UXBrighton. Organizations>User Experience>Regional>United Kingdom
#35529
Why Technical Communicators Should Help with Product Text
A huge problem for projects is the lack of a common language between the developers and the users. When my colleague and I were preparing a presentation for an internal conference on this subject, he said something that has stuck with me. He said, “The goal of the project is to make the user successful.” I added to that: It’s not to write code or validate code. It’s not even to ship a product or make money (of course, this last one is especially true in a non-profit organization). At least, it shouldn’t be these things.
Minson, Benjamin. Gryphon Mountain (2009). Articles>TC>Technical Writing>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
#35573
Preferences Considered Harmful
Every programmer and user interface designer eventually comes to this point: You can’t decide how a specific part of your user interface should behave. It’s easy, of course. Just make it a preference, and everyone will be happy.
Mathis, Lukas. ignore the code (2008). Articles>User Interface>Usability>User Experience
#35576
Designing the User Experience at Autodesk
Designing the User Experience at Autodesk provides a venue for the individuals across our global user experience teams-including user researchers, designers, and user assistance professionals-to share insights on methods & practices, innovation, leadership, design’s connection to achieving business objectives, and reflections on topical interests in the design community.
Typepad.com (2009). Resources>User Experience>Blogs
#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
#35592
Design Partners: Passing on the Knowledge of UX
The two main drivers for a successful relationship were to respect each other’s opinion and to use active listening to understand what the other was saying.
Richkus, Rebecca. Designing the User Experience at Autodesk (2009). Articles>Knowledge Management>User Experience>Collaboration
