Dan Saffer’s article on design research is a great overview for someone trying to understand what design research is all about. He does an excellent job setting the stage of what design research is and why it is important. Hopefully it will excite more people to do design research on a regular basis.
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1389669&rll=1
Have you ever heard of Spezify?
It is a search engine that brings all the results back on an infinite plane. All the images of videos, pictures, text and tweets are spread across your desk top and you pan around looking for what you want.
Either you have many monitors that you are spread across or an extremely visual person. In either case, I found nothing but noise. This did not help narrow down the information or pull up things that I would be looking for.
I will keep playing with it. Maybe it just takes some getting used to?
On the HFI site Susan Weinschenk is doing a top 100 things you should know about humans. Her first item is Inattention Blindness. This stuff is so cool. I love the human brain. You can be asked to focus on one thing and in the process you ignore what seems to be the irrelvant items. Then when you are asked about the irrelevant you cannot recall what happened. Watch the videos it is fabulous.
Is UX becoming a commodity?
With an emphatic NO!!
I soooo disagree with Kem’s assertion, I even left a nice comment.
Kem Kramer on Johnny Holland declared:
“After 10 years in the field, I woke up one day to realise that my service as a UX practitioner had become a commodity. Usability had become the ‘in thing’ and everyone could do it and show that their products were better than the competition. Usability as a buzzword, populated Product Lifecycle processes in many organizations. So it comes as no suprise when the general attitude of stakeholders these days is one of a shopper saying: ‘One McUser Experience with usability fries please.’”
As a person who approaches design from the cognitive science and human factors angle, I think I resemble this quote.
“User interface experts are often suspicious of the role of visual aesthetics in user interfaces—and of designers who insist that graphic emotive impact and careful attention to a site’s visual framework really contribute to measurable success.”
Patrick Lynch continues in his article to support his argument with scientific references. Does it convince you?
“Affective and cognitive responses to visual stimuli are governed by a three-stage process in the brain, at visceral, behavioral, and reflective processing levels:”
Here is the whole article on the A List Apart site.
frictionless design 