Thank you so much to the 20 or so folks who showed up for the second week of Whit Hour — my new weekly one-hour video chat to answer any and all of your questions about user experience, consulting, and whatever else you throw at me. Join me next week on Sunday, August 16, 9-10pm [Keep Reading…]
User Centered Design is now closed
Last year at IA Summit 2008, Jared Spool declared that it was time for us to retire the dogma of user-centered design, citing that the most effective design teams don’t follow a specific methodology, but instead have a whole toolbox of techniques and tricks to use when the time is right. Flip through his slides [Keep Reading…]
Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity Applied to Building Your Personal Brand
I’ve been thinking a lot about acts of giving lately. It’s been an incredible year for me and so many people have given me so much. It seems impossible to give back. In Judaism, it’s common to follow Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Tzedakah (the Hebrew word for charity or justice). The aim is to give [Keep Reading…]
Redesigning the boxee experience
It’s been a few weeks in the making, but today boxee announced that they’ve hired me to help redesign their user experience from the ground up. If you haven’t heard of boxee, where have you been hiding? They’ve been in the top 10 trending topics on Twitter for the past month. They’re blowing up the [Keep Reading…]
“Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy” webinar with Indi Young
Do you know about the new webinar series co-produced by Rosenfeld Media and Smart Experience called Future Practice? It’s a great new series with some of the best voices in user experience talking about how they see best practices turning into next practices. The first webinar was “Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski” and [Keep Reading…]
Personas in the 2008 Presidental Election
I’ve talked before about how designers use personas to capture user needs, behaviors and motivations. If you were ever wondering how those insights help guide the product design, this pretty much says it all: [via gregoire] Questions?
Who coined the term “wireframes”?
Wireframes, wireframes, wireframes. It’s one of the those “insider” terms that gets thrown around the user experience design community all the time. We go to great lengths to explain what they are — to our colleagues, our clients, and our friends (“What exactly do you do again?”). [Dan Brown‘s explanation on Boxes and Arrows; Sarah [Keep Reading…]
Web 2.0 Expo NY: “10 Tips for Creative Environments” with Adaptive Path’s Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson
The last session I attended on Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo NY was a talk by two members of Adaptive Path. Sarah Nelson is a design strategist and Bryan Mason is the former COO and currently a board member. My Twitter notes from the session: The Neo-Futurists: 30 plays in 60 minutes. 2-12 new plays [Keep Reading…]
UX Bookshelf
In the right sidebar of my blog I promote my UX Bookshelf. I use Amazon Associates just to get the smallest kickback (I’ve never actually made any money with this, but I’d like to!). The other day I noticed that they have a new carousel widget (released in April) that allows you to display up [Keep Reading…]
Google’s Design Principles
I owe you a proper recap of Leah Buley‘s earth-shattering presentation at the IA Summit, but because my computer battery had died and I was taking notes on paper, I’ve been lazy about typing it all up. In any case, one of the things she talked about was the importance of using Design Principles to [Keep Reading…]