Much, much, MUCH overdue is the recap of Andrew Hinton‘s closing plenary titled “Linkosophy” at this year’s IA Summit. Andrew’s talk, equal parts intellectualism and practicality, was just what our field has been hungry for. Andrew is a uniter, not a divider, and I greatly appreciated the plain, honest tone he used when he told [Keep Reading…]

Unfortunately my laptop battery died just before I went into Leah Buley‘s sermon titled “How to be a UX Team of One” at the IA Summit. I call it a sermon because at the end of Leah’s talk, she had a veritable congregation of worshippers. Since I wasn’t able to Twitter, I had to reconstruct [Keep Reading…]

I always love hearing case studies from client-vendor partnerships. In “Checking the feel of your UI with an interaction audit,” Josh Damon Williams from Hot Studio presented the work his company did with Peter Stahl‘s user experience team at eBay. Twitter notes here: Peter Stahl separates feel from the phrase “look and feel” — it’s [Keep Reading…]

Christian Crumlish of Yahoo! and Austin Govella of Comcast joined together at this year’s IA Summit to discuss their use of design patterns. Here are my Twitter notes: Christian Crumlish: Starting off with Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” Reference to Jennifer Tidwell’s “Designing Interfaces” Yahoo’s Pattern Library (which Christian curates) launched in 2005. Article by [Keep Reading…]

Todd Zaki Warfel of MessageFirst had a completely different presentation style than the rest of the presenters at IA Summit. His talk, titled “Data Driven Design Research Personas,” was more of a conversation than a lecture. He was down the center aisle most of the time asking people questions about their experiences with user research [Keep Reading…]

Nathan Curtis of EightShapes asked a very simple question, “Why don’t we spend more time designing our deliverables?” My Twitter notes are below: How do we produce deliverables better, faster? Audience: execs, PMs, strategists, visual designers, Dev, QA, copywriters, us Artifacts: strategy, concept model, map, flow, storyboard, wireframe, spec, mockup, style guide Wow. Great matrix [Keep Reading…]

Christian Crumlish hosted a panel on “Presence, identity, and attention in social web architecture” starring Andrew Hinton, Andrew Crow, Gene Smith and the crazy/incredible Christina Wodtke who’d had back surgery earlier in the week but was determined to make it to IA Summit. The topic is very timely and each of the panelists had some [Keep Reading…]

I love presentations that at the surface seem irrelevant but underneath have a lot to teach us about how we approach our work and think about our practice. Matthew Milan of Critical Mass did just that with his talk titled “The IA and the Fighter Pilot.” Thanks goes to David Armano for insisting that I [Keep Reading…]