Chris van der Walt & P.J. Onori of HunchWorks on Applying Human-centric Design to Complex Global Problems

Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett on Creating Engagement on Twitter

Kristian Simsarian on Educating the Next Generation of Interaction Designers

Teresa Brazen and Kate Rutter on Intentional Environments: Designing a Culture of Co-creation

Jon Wiley on “Whoa, Google Has Designers!”

Steven Pemberton on The Computer as Extended Phenotype

Chad Jennings on Creating People Powered Businesses

Rob Maigret on Tomorrowland Is Today

R. Brian Stone on Stop Watching and Start Experiencing Web Enabled TV

Adam Lisagor on Video as User Experience

Adam Goldstein on UX As Product Strategy: Differentiation in a Crowded Market

Alexa Andrzejewski on Lessons from a UX Driven Startup

Jaron Lanier

Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)

Rajat talks about how designers can address fundamental human needs and desires (like status, achievement, reward, competition, self-expression) to make experiences both compelling and satisfying.

He talks about how game designers have known for years on how to incentivise and motivate players by addressing these needs through the use of mechanics like points, levels, leaderboards, virtual goods, challenges, and real-time feedback. He covers the migration of these mechanics out of the gaming world and into the world at large, including destination sites, devices, productivity applications, corporate intranets, and the professional networking platform, LinkedIn.

About Rajat Paharia

Rajat Paharia is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Bunchball. He created the world’s first gamification platform for brand engagement, Nitro, in 2007. Rajat’s skill set combines a unique expertise in technology, design and human behavior that he developed while working at the design firm IDEO, and through his masters in computer science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at Stanford university.

Bunchball’s clients include Fortune 500 companies like NBC, Warner Brothers, Comcast and Hewlett-Packard, who are helped with crafting gamification strategies that engage customers, partners and employees.

Related Links

Rajat Paharia on twitter: @rajatrocks
Bunchball website
Bunchball on twitter: @bunchball

If you need to get your stakeholders thinking about taking their first step (or their next step- from unplanned to get thinking and developing a strategy) in social media, then you will find this video helpful in collecting examples and data points that show how organizations have benefited from social media.

Being a video infographic, rather than text or an image means quicker assimilation of what it is trying to convey. While its a great way to share knowledge with your team, it makes even more sense to show it to your stakeholders.

About the video

This video was made in 2009 by Erik Qualman of Socialnomics. I came across it on day one of KM Singapore at Michelle Lambert’s masterclass on developing a social media strategy.

In 1998, ABC’s Nightline news show asked IDEO to create a new shopping cart concept, considering issues such as maneuverability, shopping behavior, child safety, and maintenance cost. The resulting episode demonstrates IDEO’s design process, showing the multidisciplinary team brainstorming, researching, prototyping, and gathering user feedback on a design in order to move all the way from an idea to a prototype in just four days time.

Interestingly, the cart went on to win an IDSA IDEA Silver award in 1999.

About IDEO

IDEO is an international design and innovation consultancy founded in Palo Alto, USA with other national and international offices. IDEO helps design products, services, environments, and digital experiences. It has become increasingly involved in management consulting and organizational design.

Related Links

IDEO website

Alexis talks about some of the notable paradigm shifts that are happening around technology and media and how these affect the user experience; like the web shifting from a paradigm of publishing to communicating, and from people finding content to content finding people.

She discusses the implications of these changes in technology and consumer behavior for news content publishers, and how it can be used to facilitate innovative content experiences.

About Alexis Lloyd

Alexis Lloyd is a creative technologist for the research and development group at The New York Times. She is responsible for researching technology trends and prototyping future interfaces for content consumption across platforms and devices.

Related Links

Alexis’ website

From the feedback I have received, I could not be more glad in knowing how much it has helped many of you- at times when you have needed it most, or how you have used it to slowly build your knowledge in user experience or a particular area within it.

If you are a usability engineer, user researcher, human factors specialist, interaction designer or an information architect, then the UX Bookmark is a resource specially for you.

The UX Bookmark

1. Copy the cells of the column you want to convert to a row.
2. Right-click the first cell of the row you want to move the data to.
3. Click ‘Paste special’ from the context menu
4. Select ‘Transpose’ (at the lower right of the dialog box) and then ‘OK’

You’re done.

Insightico is a collaborative research web application that lets you look for insights in your research data in a simple and easy manner.

You really should sign up for the beta.

What is Insightico?

In Insightico, you first create a project and then add research artifacts (audio, video, images, spreadsheets, PDF’s and more) with the option to categorize them according to the different research activities you conduct (could be user interview audio files and transcripts, usability test videos, and such).

You can then add team members to the project and all begin adding insights to any of the artifacts (called sources in Insightico) contained. Insights can be added to a particular section of a document, image, audio or video file for all your team members to see, and tag them with relevant descriptors. Analyze the tags to discover relationships and patterns.

(Disclaimer: I work with PebbleRoad, the company that has built Insightico)

Alan Siegel talks of how tax forms, credit agreements and understanding healthcare legislation can be so difficult to understand. He calls for a simple, sensible redesign, and plain English, to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us. Simple language, as I have written about earlier, is something that needs to be used in such documents, if we want them to be easily and quickly understood by its readers.

About Alan Siegel

Siegel is the founder and chairman of brand consultancy Siegel+Gale, and is one of the leading authorities on business communication, and has spent decades trying to bring clarity to complex documents such as insurance policies, bank loans, mutual fund agreements and government communications.

Related Links

Siegel+Gale website