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IxDA Event: Why We Fail

I attended IxDA NYC's September event last night, which was Victor Lombardi's presentation, "Why We Fail: Learning From Experience Design Failures", hosted by Rapp.

He highlighted several of the case studies from his new book of the same name.

Some things I plan on digging more into based on my notes include:

Don Norman's distinctions between Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective design

The similarities between Lean Startup methodology and the Scientific Method: Observe, Hypothesize, Test, Analyze

It was a great talk, and was a chance for me to catch up with an old friend from the past, as Victor and I used to be colleagues together at Razorfish back in the day.

Congrats on the new book, Victor!

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There are lots of opportunities for UXers to improve the usability of interfaces outside of the web. 

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A very cool visual display of the data being uploaded to the Internet every second (e.g. tweets, Google searches, Facebook likes).

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Exploratory Research & Innovation Games

Last night I attended an IxDA- and BNY Mellon-sponsored event on exploratory UX research techniques. Liang Zhang, of AnswerLab, explained how innovation games can be used in exploratory research during early-stage development to uncover opportunities to differentiate. Innovation games are defined as "open-ended, primary research processes for unlocking people's creative confidence through game play in order to generate ideas about a product or concept." Basically, they are methods that engage participants in fun exercises that ultimately helps to identify pain points, generate features, or prioritize features. See the presentation and more here: http://answerlab.com/clients/explore/

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Love this circular arrangement of the NYC subway system via FastCo

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Another fantastic NYT infographic exploring the Silk Road. Great usage of subtly moving GIF-like videos and scrolling animations.

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Uber, the on-demand car requesting app, just added Fare Splitting, which lets you split the cost of a ride with other passengers right from the app.

It's features like these that show how they're taking a user-centric approach to enhancing their service. How many times have you wanted to split the bill for a cab ride, but found it too awkward or too much of a hassle?

Nice touch, Uber.

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Attended a great talk by Dan Saffer on "Microinteractions", where he gave examples from his new book on the subject.

Thanks to Smart Design for hosting in their great space overlooking the Hudson.

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Fantastic infographic showing how money controls our government. In this case, visualization is so much more effective than text. 

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“This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product.”These are the opening words of Apple’s heartstring-tugging “Designed In California" commercial. Read them to yourself a few times. Then wonder why someone inside the company didn’t insist upon this copy edit: “This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a person.”

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Great, in-depth article on demonstrating findings from usability tests through video clips. "Getting people to look forward to your presentations, to pay attention, and to take away vivid memories of your findings is always a good thing." 

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Ryan Singer: "Design isn’t a sea of pixels and code isn’t a tangle of functions. The more you see how each piece of design and code supports a specific capability, the easier it is to find order in the chaos of product development."

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Microinteractions Quick Reference

Smart Design put out a handy guide to Dan Saffer's book, "Microinteractions", that nicely sums up these "contained product moments."

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I love the collapsing logo on the Whitney's new site. I've noticed that subtly animating logos on scroll has become a fun trend. I also like how the navigation links get grayed out except the one you're looking at, great way to help the user focus on content! 

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A few months ago, we came across darkpatterns.org, a site that exposes "user interface(s) that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things..." 

On a recent business trip, I booked a hotel through a hotel booking website and came across a dark pattern. What I thought was a hotel phone number to contact them directly was actually the website's phone number. 

Find more dark patterns at darkpatterns.org

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  Ultimately, the most important thing is to have icons that make it clear to as many people as possible what they do in the interface. It’s better to have 80% of users see the floppy disk, dig back into their memories of childhood technology and connect to this image as representing the act of saving, than have 100% of users see a downward facing arrow and wonder what it means.

  Icons: The Happiness Collection