by Lauren Cramer | May 7, 2014 | Interaction Design Blog, Resources
Yup, that’s right, on June 26th UX Thursday will return to Detroit with a bevy of UX luminaries. And you can join them all for just $99 bucks! (Your cell phone bill is higher than that, right?) Keynotes will include Jared Spool and Dana Chisnell from UsabilityWorks and will be held at the city’s iconic Gem Theater. As always, there will be 6 other top local speakers there to share case studies of real-world UX projects, so start getting excited NOW! Stay tuned for more information on the amazing speakers and presentations we’ve got in store for you. You can also check out this video of last year’s show highlights. We hope to see you there but these events always sell out quickly, so don’t wait to sign...
by Lauren Cramer | Apr 22, 2014 | Resources
Registration now open for the User Interface 19 Conference. Find out what’s going on. Find out what matters most....
by Jared Spool | Feb 11, 2014 | Resources
Applications built on public data (think flight and train schedules) bring great benefits to their users. But the benefits they bring are highly dependent on how well the applications are designed. Designs will get better if the designers really watch users with the applications and use their feedback for updates. Today’s article by Cyd Harrell is an excerpt from chapter 12 in the book Beyond Transparency. She discusses the relationship between data, design and the end user. Cyd’s workshop, Conducting Usability Research for Mobile Apps, dives into the usability research that captures these relationships in addition to other valuable information. Here’s an excerpt from the article: The past decade has brought enormous and growing benefits to ordinary citizens through applications built on public data. Any release of data offers advantages to experts, such as developers and journalists, but there is a crucial common factor in the most successful open data applications for non-experts: excellent design. In fact, open data and citizen-centered design are natural partners, especially as the government 2.0 movement turns to improving service delivery and government interaction in tandem with transparency. It’s nearly impossible to design innovative citizen experiences without data, but that data will not reach its full potential without careful choices about how to aggregate, present, and enable interaction with it. Read the article The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship: Data and Design in Innovative Citizen Experiences. What choices has your team made to present innovative experiences with both public and private data? Tell us about it...
by Lauren Cramer | Feb 6, 2014 | Resources
The increasing use of mobile devices makes designing sites and apps more complex. To design for the user, you have to completely change the ways you work and learn new tools, techniques, and patterns for success. We built the UX Immersion Mobile Conference in Denver, CO April 7-9 to help you meet those challenges. You’ll be exposed to UX luminaries through intensive full-day workshops specifically focused around the skills and techniques you need to become better at designing for the user. The price to attend all three days of the conference goes up $300 after February 11 (it goes up $100 if you’re just attending for one day). Put the money you save by registering now towards your flight or accommodations. Explore the workshops and video trailers to learn more about each...
by Jared Spool | Jan 29, 2014 | Resources
In today’s UIEtips, we’re publishing an excerpt from the UXmatters article “Developing UX Agility: Letting Go of Perfection” by Carissa Demetris, Chris Farnum, Joanna Markel, and Serena Rosenhan. In it, Chris Farnum talks about design deliverables and their role in an incremental approach to your design. If you want to hear more about Chris’ thinking on design deliverables join us for our January 30 virtual seminar Choosing the Right Wireframe Strategy for Your Project. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Once you have a firm grasp of the goals for a project and the functionality you need to design, the next steps for many UX professionals are creating user stories, wireframes, and prototypes. To kick off design, we often brainstorm and sketch. Often, cutting edge Web sites and a desire to meet or exceed competitors fuel our ideas in part. While you are in brainstorm mode, it’s certainly a good idea to sketch out a full user experience, complete with all the latest bells and whistles that would delight users and impress stakeholders. But when you begin to craft a user experience for the initial stories that you’ll deliver to your Development team for implementation, you’ll need to be a strict editor and include only the core user interface elements. Limiting scope in this way can be challenging when you are used to waterfall approach, in which you may have only one chance to document all of the user interface elements you think your design should include. Read the article Designs and Deliverables are Haikus, Not Epic Poems. How does your team limit project scope in the early design stages? Tell us about it...