I'm a User Experience Architect in Toronto. I have a MASc and BASc in Industrial Engineering.
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It amazes me how many times I've seen people liberally throw interface metaphors around on mobile touch devices (for individual interactions or aesthetic purposes) without considering all of the other interactions that those metaphors imply.
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A useful alternative way of thinking about requirements prioritization. I've worked on projects where users' basic expectation will not be met at launch because of technical limitations and timelines. I knew at the time that the frustrations created from not meeting basic expectations would likely override any delighters that the final product would provide. The Kano model is a good way of phrasing this type of argument to stakeholders and project members.
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Design patterns for Android interfaces.
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Designs shouldn't just be usable and efficient, they should also be pleasurable.
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A little bitter and direct, but there's truth in here about how user research can be misunderstood and misused. Similar mistakes can be made when using business stakeholders as a resource for requirements definition.
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Characteristics of the scroll and the card models for touch screen navigation. When should you use one or the other?
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Do you often look at your designs and tell yourself that they just aren't nefarious enough? Check out DarkPatterns: How designers more evil than you trick their users into doing what they want them to.
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A summary of the notes that Luke Wroblewski took throughout the Web App Masters Tour. I've posted a few of these already, but this summary posts links to all of them. Lots of good stuff in here.
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A long article discussing the importance of designing for internal and external consistency. The article covers pretty straightforward stuff, but I find that reading this type of article serves as a good refresher every once-in-a-while.
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An interesting theory on why Google can't seem to figure out the social web.
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A high-level classification of the objectives of applying ethnography in industry. I wish that the article touched a little bit on how to apply ethnographic methods in industry, but a nice overview all-the-same.
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Content strategy is something that I'm going to have to develop a firm grasp of. This post (courtesy of Toronto's own Teehan+Lax) provides a good introduction to some ways of modelling and representing it.
In a related note, I've just installed ImageSpark (which was created and is run by Teehan+Lax) onto my work Macbook. I haven't played around with it yet, but I'm going to see if it'll be useful in helping me furnish the much larger apartment that I'll be moving into in a few weeks.
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Content strategy is something that I'm having a hard time conceptually separating from the UXD role. UXD and content strategy require the same input and are aiming for the same ultimate goals, so how can you manage to cleanly separate them into two roles? But I guess you can say that about a lot of things.
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Article on what UXD is not. Likely a good read if you're gearing up to explain to someone what exactly it is you do.
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The author suggests three principles of designing happiness into experiences:
1. Mindfulness - anticipating a providing for the users' needs and goals, even before they realize what they are
2. Flow - making the users' tasks and the transitions between them so smooth and so immersive that they lose track of time
3. Meaning - creating the perception that the user is changing the world in some way.
I'm not sure if the word "Flow" fully captures what the author is presenting it as, and the word implies a relationship with how she defines "Mindfulness". Shouldn't "mindful" design, as it is defined in the article, require and encompass good "flow"?
By "Flow", it seems like author is speaking more about the infusion of game design theory into non-game design. This is the type of thing that keeps people playing Farmville. In any case, even though I think better themes might be able to be defined for designing for happiness, the examples that the author provides are all good and worth looking over.
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Overview of why making a user experience strategy tangible is important.
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Describes 'Experience Themes', a way of expressing high-level design goals that have been generated through analysis of user and system research. Intended to allow the project team to focus all of the disperate aspects of a project--requirements, IA, creative, copy, content, etc--on the ultimate intended goal. I like this a lot. By making this a required deliverable, you can solidly enforce and capture essential strategic-level research, analysis, and design.
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