User Research and Design, Usability engineering, usability testing, User Centered Design, HCI, User Interface, UI, Human Computer Interaction, Usability in India
Adobe and Condé Nast (publisher of various magazines including Vogue, GQ and Wired) unveiled a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine at the TED conference in Long Beach, California. Built on Adobe AIR and developed with Condé Nast, the tablet prototype illustrated the possibilities for magazine publishers to reach readers in new ways. The concept enables immersive content experience in digital form and allows new interactive features to stimulate reader engagement, including
content designed specifically for the touch screen experience
easy navigation methods, including an innovative zoomed-out ‘browse mode’
the ability to browse image slideshows
embedded 360 degree object viewers
support for video and audio content
the ability to rotate content using device accelerometer functionality
In this video, Dave Gray provides an introduction with 5 basic principles for making better napkin sketches.
About Dave Gray
Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, a leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s researches and writes on visual business and speaks and coaches educators, corporate clients and the public. He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.
He is author of the book (on consultative selling) called Selling to the VP and is currently working on a book for O’Reilly media Sunni Brown called The Visual Thinking Playbook, which is due out in January of 2010.
10GUI is Calyton Mill’s concept for an input device that uses all fingers that expands the bandwidth of interaction that is otherwise restricted by the mouse. The video talks about how the mouse restricts interaction and how multi-touch monitors are stressful because the user has to stretch out to use it- (something I fully agree with and believe will lead to its failure). It goes on to illustrate a GUI that is better optimized for usage with the proposed input device.
In the Google TechTalks video from 2006, Jen Fitzpatrick talks about the art and science behind Google’s design process and share examples of how design, usability and engineering come together at Google to create great products.
About Jen Fitzpatrick
Jen Patricks is an Engineering Director at Google, who at least was then managing Google’s user experience team. A founding member of Google’s UI team, Jen has also led the UI design, testing and implementation of numerous features and changes to the Google.com site.
She joined Google in June 1999 as a software engineer and has also served as Engineering Director for Google Adwords and Google’s Internal Systems engineering group.
Jen is a graduate of Stanford University where she received a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and an M.S. in Computer Science.
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Jon Kolko talks on Design Synthesis, offering two sense making methods to translate research into meaningful insights.
The methods he talks about are Insight Combination, a method of building on established design patterns in order to create initial design ideas and Reframing, a method of shifting semantic perspective in order to see things in a new way.
Jon Kolko talks about Design Synthesis because he feels interaction design research activities produce an enormous quantity of raw data, and while this must be systematically and rigorously analyzed in order to extract meaning and insight, these methods of analysis are poorly documented and rarely taught. And because of the pragmatic time constraints associated with shipping products, there is often no time dedicated in a project to a practice of formal synthesis. As a result, raw design research data is inappropriately positioned as insight, and the value of research activities is marginalized– in fact, stakeholders may lose faith in the entire research practice, as they don’t see direct return on the investment of research activities.
About Jon Kolko
Jon Kolko is a Senior Design Analyst at frog design in Austin, Texas. His professional work deals with the manipulation of complicated business and technological constraints in order to best solve the problems of Fortune 500 clients. The work spans the boundaries of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and Usability Engineering; the common underlying theme of these problems and projects is the creation of a solution that is useful, usable, and desirable.
Kolko is the author of the text Thoughts on Interaction Design; he is also the 2008-2011 Editor-in-Chief of Interactions Magazine, published by the ACM.
You can watch the video in WMV format if you don’t have Sliverlight.
Dan Roam, author of the book, ‘The back of the napkin’ talks about how to use pictures to clarify and solve problems and how to sell ideas to who ever it may be. The selling ideas bit is extremely important for everyone, and we all know how important this is while working in user experience. There’s always something you are trying to sell at whatever level you are to your product manager, project/ program manager, client, business head, the list goes on and on. This presentation shows how to use the pictures you can create to persuade other people to take action.
About Dan Roam
Dan Roam is the founder of Digital Roam Inc, a management consulting company that helps business executives solve complex problems through visual thinking. His business book “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures” was published March 2008 by Penguin Portfolio.
Dan received two degrees at the University of California, Santa Cruz: one in fine art and the second in biology. This combination of creative art and hard science began Dan’s cross-disciplinary approach to problem solving that is the backbone of his work and seminars. Dan has applied his business-oriented visual thinking skills while living and working in Switzerland, Russia, Thailand, France, Holland, and the US.
John Maeda talks about Simplicity in life and his book, Laws of Simplicity.
About John Maeda
John Maeda a Japanese-American graphic designer, computer scientist, university professor, and author.
Maeda was originally a software engineering student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) After completing his bachelors and masters degrees at MIT, Maeda studied in Japan at Tsukuba University’s Institute of Art and Design to complete his Ph.D. in design.
In 1999, he was named one of the 21 most important people in the 21st century by Esquire. In 2001, he received the National Design Award for Communication Design in the United States and Japan’s Mainichi Design Prize.
John Maeda is currently the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.
“Sixth Sense” is spearheaded by Pranav Mistry at MIT. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for a profound, data-rich interaction with our environment. Imagine Minority Report.
About Pranav Mistry
Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. He got his master and bachelor degree from IIT Mumbai in India, and has the background in Computer Science, and Design. Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher. Mistry is passionate about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.
Some previous projects from Mistry’s work at MIT includes intelligent sticky notes, Quickies, that can be searched and can send reminders; a pen that draws in 3D; and TaPuMa, a tangible public map that can act as Google of physical world. His research interests also include Gestural and Tangible Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, AI, Machine Vision, Collective Intelligence and Robotics.
In the 1990s, Maes’ Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they’d never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.
Her newly founded Fluid Interfaces Group, also part of the MIT Media Lab, aims to rethink the ways in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer.
Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform and OS on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.
Side Note:
Not that this is related to the topic, but just because it struck me so much, you should have a look at the Tiny Icon Factory, made by another member of Taco Lab called Brent. 210300 icons down and counting. View the icons and add to the collection.
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More choice doesn’t necessarily mean better options or greater satisfaction. In fact, Barry Schwartz would like to suggest the opposite. Schwartz, an American psychologist talks about the abundance of choice in modern society, and why less choice is better than more and choice paralysis. The Paradox of Choice is a phenomenon extensively researched by experts on choice, Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, their analyses being cited frequently in the talk.
is also the name of Schwartz’s book published in 2004 which popularized this phenomenon. 