Bill Scott, author of Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, recently posted a ton of videos illustrating the design patterns from his book on Flickr. To get a complete sense of the value of employing design patterns for web sites (or anything else you might design), I recommend reading Scott’s book alongside The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition) and Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.
Posted in design, interaction design, user experience design, web design | Tagged design patterns, interaction design, interaction patterns, rich interactions | Leave a Comment »
David Malouf recently posted the wonderful IxDA booklist he and Will Evans compiled to the IA Institute’s discussion list. Here are a few other must-reads I would add to their list.
- Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations
- David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous
- Michael Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
- Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin
- Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
- Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge
- Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity
The last four books move beyond the areas of interaction & experience design and into the related realms of visual thinking, physical architecture, decision architecture, and what Kluger dubs “the art of making complex things simple.” William J. Mitchell’s essays on the intersection of physical architecture and digital information networks (collected in such books as Me++, e-topia, City of Bits and Placing Words) are also worth exploring for anyone interested in understanding how the “endless flow of information” unleashed by the web and related technologies is challenging architects to find new ways to integrate the physical and virtual realms.
Of the books on and Malouf & Evans’ list, Alan Cooper’s About Face 3.0, Bill Buxton’s Sketching User Experiences, and Lidwell/Holden/Butler’s Universal Principles of Design have been regulars on my bedside reading table of late. I highly recommend all three.
Posted in design, documentation, experience integration, information architecture, user experience design, web design | Tagged books, experience design, interaction design, IxDA, reading list, visual design | Leave a Comment »
Peter Morville’s Search Patterns is definitely worth checking out, as is dgray_xplane’s Visual Thinking. I also love this Flickr hack dgray_explane came up with to illustrate a concept for browsing the future.
Posted in documentation, findability, information architecture, innovation | Tagged flickr, pattern library | Leave a Comment »
Catriona Cornett has created a interesting new blog with a very specific aim: to catalog inspiring and thought-provoking quotations in relation to user experience design. Here’s how she describes it: “The idea behind it is pretty simple. I post user experience quotes that display the impact UX has on the world, and put them into images for people to save or print to keep the quote visible and memorable.”
Check it out at: http://www.inspireux.com
Posted in user experience design | Tagged inspiration, user experience | Leave a Comment »
Slides for my IA Summit presentation (”Embodying IA“) are now available on Slideshare. I look forward to hearing your feedback!
Posted in experience integration, library 2.0 | Tagged architecture, experience integration, public libraries, renovation, user centered design, user experience, web design | Leave a Comment »
The Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of American Libraries features an article by the omnipresent Stephen J. Bell on the benefits of taking a design approach to the delivery of library services. By Googling his name I also came across this interesting handout on “Librarianship by Design” — basically a bibliography of design-related resources for librarians — and the blog Designing Better Libraries.
The American Libraries article provides a handy overview of how libraries might leverage user experience design techniques (and specifically the IDEO method) to ensure that their patrons enjoy happier, or at least less frustrating, library interactions. I was surprised however that Bell didn’t really pursue the importance of integrating patrons’ online and physical experiences — a key point of emphasis in the MAYA design group’s work on the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which Bell highlights – or spend much time exploring the importance of taking a user experience approach when implementing social software and Web 2.0 technologies, which are all the buzz in the library world these days. I’d really like to see him tackle those topics in depth, through specific case studies….
Posted in experience integration, information architecture, library 2.0 | Tagged design, experience integration, information architecture, library 2.0, public libraries | 1 Comment »
Started reading William J. Mitchell’s Placing Words: Symbols, Space and the City over the weekend and am delighted I purchased this book on a whim while Christmas shopping at Borders. This quote alone is almost worth the price of admission ($19.95 in paperback):
“The social and cultural functions of built spaces have become inseparable from the simultaneous operation of multiple communication systems within and among them. Architecture no longer can (if it ever could) be understood as an autonomous medium of mass, space, and light, but now serves as the constructed ground for encountering and extracting meaning from cross-connected flows of aural, textual, and graphic, and digital information through global networks” (page 19 ).
This quote immediately reinforced two thoughts that I’ve had floating around my head for a while. Continue Reading »
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Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Books, 2005) is an engaging, readable survey of the many wayfinding and networking technologies that have reconfigured our cultural landscape over the past decade or so. Beginning with a meditation on how the “humble keyword” has teamed with the richness of the World Wide Web to deliver a previously unimaginable range of information resources and consumer choices, and proceeding through brief histories of wayfinding and information interaction, Morville hits his stride in central chapters on “intertwingling,” “push and pull” and “the sociosemantic web.”
Posted in experience integration, findability, information architecture, innovation, web design | Tagged experience design, experience integration, findability, information architecture, innovation, technology, web design | Leave a Comment »
Dan Brown’s Communicating Design contains a wealth of examples of the ten main types of documentation that can inform a web site design. Brown begins by describing three key user needs documents (personas, usability test plans, and usability reports), then moves on to discussing strategy documents (competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories) and ends with a detailed analysis of four types of design documents (site maps, flow charts, wireframes and screen designs).
Posted in documentation, information architecture, web design | Tagged communication, design, diagramming, documentation, information archecture, usability | Leave a Comment »
