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IDEA 2009 - Day 1

Boxes and Arrows

Download Making Virtual Worlds: Games and the Human for a Digital Age (IDEA 2009 Presentation) View more documents from tmmalaby. IDEA2009 had the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto’s MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society.

Design 78
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IDEA 2009 - Day 2

Boxes and Arrows

Innovation Parkour – IDEA 2009 View more documents from Normative. As a result, 90 percent of the word-of-mouth business she’s received since May 2009 can be tied directly to social media. IDEA2009 had the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners converge on Toronto’s MaRS Convention Center to share the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society.

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IDEA 2009: An Interview with Thomas Malaby

Boxes and Arrows

As IDEA 2009 draws closer, the IA Institute is conducting a series of interviews with the speakers for the conference. About IDEA (Information Design Experience Access) 2009: Social Experience Design IDEA2009 brings together the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners: sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society.

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IDEA 2009: An Interview with Leisa Reichelt

Boxes and Arrows

As IDEA 2009 draws closer, the IA Institute is conducting a series of interviews with the speakers for the conference. About IDEA (Information Design Experience Access) 2009: Social Experience Design IDEA2009 brings together the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners: sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society.

Design 61
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Experience Themes

Boxes and Arrows

There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing&# the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end).

Design 98
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Sketchy Wireframes

Boxes and Arrows

Introduction When it comes to user interface documentation, wireframes have long been the tool of choice. However, using traditional diagramming tools like Visio, OmniGraffle, and InDesign, most wireframes today look the same as their ancestors did from a decade ago – assembled with rigid, computer-drawn boxes, lines and text. While these artifacts have served us well, they can also be slow to produce, burdened with unnecessary detail and give a false impression of “completion.&#.

Tools 95
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Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process

Boxes and Arrows

“ Just like with any other UX research or design tool, context plays a critical role in determining how effective prototyping will be for you. ” Prototyping is a big deal right now. We get wrapped up in mailing list threads, new tools are released at an astonishing pace, books are being published, and articles show up on Boxes & Arrows. Clients are even asking for prototypes. But here’s the thing… prototyping is not a silver bullet. There is no one right way to do it.

Design 97
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5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

Boxes and Arrows

Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social&# ? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way.

Groups 87
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The Content Conundrum

Boxes and Arrows

As web designers and information architects, we often dismiss deep consideration of content when we design interactive experiences. By content I’m not only referring to the various forms of text (e.g., headers, body copy, error messages) but also imagery, graphics, and videos or audio that make up the full interactive experience. Sure, we have a sense of what content is available, and we’ve likely considered it to some extent when creating flows, wireframes, and prototypes.

Design 92
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What design researchers can learn from hostage negotiators

Boxes and Arrows

It’s 2 a.m., and a call comes across the radio that a young man with a gun has barricaded himself and his mother in his home. No shots have been fired, and little communication has been established between the man and police officers outside. The officers on the scene report that the young man has been struggling with the loss of his job and feels like there’s no reason to live. The crisis response team has been called, and hostage negotiators are en route.

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Tree Testing

Boxes and Arrows

A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical “tree&# of topics. But to date, the IA community hasn’t found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task.

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Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design

Boxes and Arrows

Gone, thankfully, are the days when the user experience and the user interface were an afterthought in the website design process, to be added on when programming was nearing completion. As our profession has increasingly gained importance, it also become increasingly specialized: information design, user experience design, interaction design, user research, persona development, ethnographic user research, usability testing—the list goes on and on.

Design 83
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Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage

Boxes and Arrows

The Balance of Power There are a wide variety of uses for Wikis and a level of interest in using them that’s matched by an extensive range of Wiki software. Wikis introduce to the Internet a collaborative model that not only allows, but explicitly encourages, broad and open participation. The idea that anyone can contribute reflects an assumption that both content quantity and quality will arise out of the ‘wisdom of the crowd.’

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UI Pattern Documentation Review

Boxes and Arrows

Introduction User interface (UI) patterns have the potential to make software development more efficient. The prospect of such efficiency gains has led to interest in user interface (UI) patterns by individuals and organizations looking for ways to increase quality while at the same time reducing the costs associated with software development. The very nature of UI patterns requires that they be familiar to end-users. An individual UI pattern is a discrete, repeatable unit of user experience.

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IA Summit 09 - Plenary

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™ IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Download. iTunes Del.icio.us

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Using Wikis to Document UI Specifications

Boxes and Arrows

Introduction The role of the interaction designer is to specify the interface’s behaviors and elements, so that engineers know what to build and how the product should operate. This documentation is commonly known as a UI specification or UI spec. There are several applications for authoring a UI spec, with wikis being a relatively new tool.

Agile 76
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UX Book Clubs

Boxes and Arrows

In early Nov 2008, I started to talk to a few people about the idea of a book club in Sydney to discuss User Experience (UX) books. Russ Unger and Donna Spencer encouraged me to let other people hear about it, and when I did – through the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) Members discussion list, and then through the Interaciton Design Associaton (IxDA) – many people thought it was a good idea.

Meeting 76
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IA Summit 09 - Day 2

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. See the Slideshare “IA Summit 2009&# :[link] page for up-to-the-minute lists of available presentations.

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Engaging Interaction

Boxes and Arrows

iTunes Del.icio.us Podcast music generously provided by Bumper Tunes. Download This evening I had the pleasure of speaking with Principal of Interaction Design at Kicker Studio Jennifer Bove. Jennifer is co-chairing Interaction10 the third annual Interaction Design Association conference taking place February 4-7th at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia.

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Research Logistics

Boxes and Arrows

With more companies today putting a stronger emphasis on gaining a deeper understanding of their customer, it’s not unusual for us to be called in for a project to find that our clients don’t have a lot of experience with research and don’t know what to expect.

Report 67
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Photos for interaction

Boxes and Arrows

When developing user interfaces, designers increasingly use custom graphical elements. As the web browser becomes basic technology for software interfaces, more and more elements derived from graphic and web design replace the traditional desktop approaches to the concrete design of human-computer interfaces. In the near future, this development will become even more relevant.

Design 76
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Designing the Democratic

Boxes and Arrows

The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or user experience (UX) designer is to help create architecture and interactions which will impact the user in constructive, meaningful ways. Sometimes the design choices are strategic and affect a broad interaction environment; other times they may be tactical and detailed, affecting few. But sometimes the design choices we make are not good enough for the users we’re trying to reach.

Design 70
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A Wiser Interaction

Boxes and Arrows

iTunes Download Del.icio.us Boxes and Arrows theme music generously provided by Bumper Tunes. Chris Baum speaks with Bill DeRouchey, co-chair for the 2010 Interaction Design Conference , about the upcoming conference and how the third annual conference will start to model the essence of Interaction Design. Looking Back Bill talks about the first two years of the conference, the lessons learned from those experiences, and why Interaction ‘10 returns to Savannah.

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Some basic rules for napkin-sketching

Xplaner

An introduction to some basic principles for making better napkin-sketches. Did you like this? If so, please consider buying me a coffee!

Video 98
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Researching Video Games the UX Way

Boxes and Arrows

Video games are often overlooked in the scope of usability testing simply because, in a broad sense, their raison d’etre is so different than that of a typical functional interface: fun, engagement, and immersion, rather than usability and efficiency. Players are supposed to get a feeling of satisfaction and control from the interface itself, and in that sense, interaction is both a means and an end.

Video 67
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Information Architecture for Audio: Doing It Right - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design

Boxes and Arrows

Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design Register or Log In Search Stories Ideas Forums People Events Jobs About December Issue, 2008 Jens Jacobsen 32 Reputation points Jens likes writing for multimedia and loves tracking down usability issues. He founded the company “ Content Crew ” in 2006, and is its CEO since this time. This company specializes on the production of podcast, with the focus on audio. Jens started as a technology writer.

Design 61
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Toward a theory of information relativity

Xplaner

See “Free the Facts” by Dave Gray, 2009. Visual thinking , originally uploaded by dgray_xplane. People often ask me how to visualize information. They ask things like “How can I visualize my industry ecosystem?” or “How can I visualize how my product works.” My first instinct is to try and back them up a bit. This is because they are already defining their project in terms of an answer or solution, and before you can deliver an answer you need to know the question.

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Pattern Languages for Interaction Design

Boxes and Arrows

Will Evans stalked and captured Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati to talk about design patterns, pattern libraries, styleguides, and innovation. Erin, Christian, and Lucas are leading a workshop on design patterns at this year’s Interactions in Vancouver; and, Erin and Christian are writing a book on patterns for designing social spaces for O’Rreilly. “ An interaction design pattern is not a step-by-step recipe or a specification.

Design 55
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IA Summit 09 - Day 1

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions (“see schedule&# :[link] The remaining Summit sessions will be published in the next two weeks. | “Preview&# :[link] | “Keynote&# :[link] | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | “Closing Plenary&# :[link] | iTunes Del.icio.us

Design 45
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Interaction 09 Follow-up

Boxes and Arrows

From February 5-8, 2009, IxDA hosted their second annual conference, Interaction 09 , in Vancouver, BC. The challenge for 2009 was to see if that energy could be recaptured a year later—in a new place and during undeniably pressing times. Last year’s inaugural conference in Savannah had a powerful and lasting impact on the community, filled with encouraging messages and the realization that for many of us that we had “found our tribe.&#

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Make Saving Money Fun.spread your wings, my creative students!

Bennett Cherry

Last evening marked the launch of this year's Global Innovation Tournament, a student contest sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation in anticipation of their Global Entrepreneurship Week festivities. Global Entrepreneurship Week will likely be celebrated by more than three million people around the world from November 16-22. Here's how this unique student contest works:a challenge theme is. creativity creativity contests ingenuity innovation solving a pain student entrepreneurs youth

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The Assumption of "Trust" in Social Networks

Bennett Cherry

I received an email today about Second Porch, a new startup that allows Facebook users to "trade and rent vacation homes among their trusted group of friends and networks". The concept is certainly intriguing as it marries up social networking with an oft-intimidating process: renting a vacation home. For many vacation-goers, they don't even consider the option of renting a vacation home for. innovation social networking trust wondering

Groups 40
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Learning from an Innovation CEO.Mark King, TaylorMade-adidas Golf

Bennett Cherry

Yesterday, my students and I had the great privilege of learning from a CEO. Mark King, of TaylorMade-adidas Golf, shared with us about the culture of innovation at TaylorMade. It's a culture that has been intentionally created by Mark and his leadership team over the past 9 years. Interestingly, the strategic shift initially came about as a result of a comment made by one of the senior team. corporate creativity education entrepreneurial mindset innovation TaylorMade teaching

Culture 40
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Improving the Tire

Bennett Cherry

On any given day, I filter through nearly 1000 RSS messages from some of my favorite blogs and Twitter feeds. Make Magazine is one of my favorites and they delivered a whopper again today. Check out these airless vehicle tires that are currently being developed for the U.S. military. Tire technology continues to change on a number of fronts. For example, nearly all of my cycling friends have. what if?" innovation solving a pain wondering

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IA Summit 09 - Day 3

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. See the Slideshare IA Summit 2009 page for up-to-the-minute lists of available presentations. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ( see schedule ). The remaining Summit sessions will be published in the next two weeks. Preview | Keynote | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Closing Plenary | iTunes Del.icio.us

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When Life Intervenes

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™ IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Still, she could look forward to 2009 as the Summit’s Chairperson. iTunes Download Del.icio.us Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions (“see schedule&# :[link].

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Jetsons, anyone?

Bennett Cherry

I grew up watching the Jetsons. Perhaps you did too? This disclosure ages me, but it's worth sharing with you given the recent news from Terrafugia, a startup formed with graduates from MIT. They are developing a car that morphs to its plane form in 20 seconds. After your flight (of no more than 500 miles), you can be back on the road and parking in your single car garage. I wonder if it. innovation Invention principles of innovation

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Getting a Form's Structure Right

Boxes and Arrows

iTunes Download Del.icio.us Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue. I had the opportunity to speak with Afshan Kirmani on her article, Getting a Form’s Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications Part 1. We talk about the design of an online web based application. Part 1 of the series focuses on the web based form where the user experience is critical before the user enters the application.

Design 40
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All It's Cracked Up To Be

Boxes and Arrows

When the Web first emerged, there was a hole in the user experience world. Many people were practicing interaction design, but their community was shoe-horned into those of other disciplines like IA, HCI , and Usability. At the time, many people felt like that was sufficient. Then the Web started to change and the conversation with it. That hole seemed all the more gaping. The “IxDA&# :[link] was formed in 2003 and fit nicely into a space amongst those other communities of practice.

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Wanted/Needed: UX Design for Collaboration 2.0

Boxes and Arrows

No current software supports the full process of collaboration. That’s a bold claim, and I hope that someone can prove me wrong. This article is more of a “Working Towards …” position paper than the final word; written in the hope that the ensuing discussion will either bring to light some software of which I’m not aware, or motivate the right people to develop what’s needed. There is plenty of hype about “Collaboration 2.0”

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IA Summit 09 - Keynote

Boxes and Arrows

IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™ IA Summit 2009 Podcasts The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. iTunes Download Del.icio.us

Culture 47
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Happy 13th Birthday Digital Tonto!

Digital Tonto

When I started this blog back in 2009, the world was a very different place. First, and perhaps most obvious, we used to come up with brand names for our blogs instead of just using our real names.

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how to discover the secrets of great new products: do the least you can do, fake it before you make it, and don’t be afraid of embarrassment

helloFUTURE

The definition of a Minimum Viable Product varies greatly – but in the purest sense, it should be “the least you can do” For example, I co-founded a startup in 2009 with two ex-Yahoo colleagues.