Good Interaction Designers Borrow, Great Ones Steal...

When you’re knee-deep in wireframes or CSS it’s all too easy to end up in a bubble of IxD books and blogs. One option is to take inspiration from vintage art and nature, but what about what other smart people are doing in their respective disciplines? In other words, why not steal from them? Here are my picks of a few other fields with ideas worth appropriating, or at least glancing at.

Telnaki, Vicky. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Information Design>Interaction Design

Applying Curiosity to Interaction Design: Tell Me Something I Don’t Know

Given just a bit of information, we naturally crave more. Given a puzzle, we have to solve it. So, as interaction designers, how are we using this bit of insight into human behavior?

Anderson, Stephen. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>User Centered Design>Interaction Design>Cognitive Psychology

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

Organizational Culture 101: A Practical How-To For Interaction Designers

It’s happened to all of us. We walk into what we think is a Web redesign project, only to find we have unwittingly ignited the fires of WW III in our client’s organization. What begins as a simple design project descends – quickly – into an intra-organizational battle, with the unprepared interaction designer caught in the crossfire. What is it about design projects that seem to attract such power struggles? Contrary to what you might think, being stuck in the middle of an internecine battle is actually an opportunity to effect meaningful change on your client’s organization. But it requires a set of practical tools to negotiate these battles and a more sophisticated language and knowledge to exploit these events to create meaningful change.

Ladner, Sam. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Project Management>Interaction Design>Workplace

Are We The Puppet Masters?

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

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

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

Low-Budget Prototyping Techniques

We believe user research is too important to give up. So we have to run tests quickly and cheaply for our clients to accept the cost - and we have to clearly show how it brings value. Because of this, we’ve developed a toolbox of quick, cheap UX research techniques. In this article, we’ll talk about one technique known as fast prototyping, and how we effectively used it in a recent project for Vodafone Ireland.

Barros, Belén, Colin Bentley and Elizabeth McGuane. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Usability>Prototyping>Testing

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

How to Combine Multiple Research Methods: Practical Triangulation

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

Kennedy, Patrick. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods

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

Manipulating Data: Analysis Techniques, Part 3

One of the key characteristics of a manipulation technique versus related techniques like transformation is that the underlying data remains unchanged. The main thing we’re doing is changing the relationship - logical or physical - that one piece of data has with another. Reorganizing the data helps us to identify patterns that may otherwise not be apparent. In fact, it is almost certain that most patterns won’t be visible at first glance. Let’s start by taking a more detailed look at some of the processes that contribute to the manipulation of data.

Baty, Steve. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods>User Centered Design

Deconstructing Analysis Techniques

On a recent project I needed to collect and analyze the content management templates in use across a large enterprise Intranet. We were looking to inventory the diversity of templates in use; whether they existed outside or within the enterprise content management system; what changes might be made to the ‘official’ template set to reduce the overall number of templates, and to prepare for the migration of all content to a new design a few months down the track. I looked around at the literature for information architecture and Web design generally and found quite a few references to content inventories and content analysis, but nothing on analyzing templates.

Baty, Steve. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Research>Methods>Web Design

The Social Life of Visualization: Part 1

In 2009 we are in the midst of an interesting era for data visualization, particularly as it becomes coupled with the social web. Increasing processing speed, bandwidth and storage capacity are making it relatively simple to render and access visual representations of data. Developers have released libraries of code so we can easily create our own visualizations; and access to all kinds of data is becoming incredibly standardized, particularly through the use of APIs. So as visualization becomes much more straightforward to integrate into online environments, it makes sense to rethink how it can best be used in this setting.

Yuille, Jeremy and Hugh Macdonald. Johnny Holland (2009). Articles>Graphic Design>Visual Rhetoric>Charts and Graphs