User Experience Design Blog

May 13, 2008 - Interview with UX Book Publisher Rosenfeld Media Last week, UX Matters interviewed Lou Rosenfeld, founder, and Liz Danico, Sr. Development Editor of Rosenfeld Media. The interview covers how the small publishing house hopes to confront the publishing industry, and reflects on the experience of bringing user experience design to publishing books–including show-and-tell sessions, testing readers with [...]

May 7, 2008 - “Simplicity isn’t a bad design goal; complexity isn’t a good one” Joshua Porter from UIE responds to Don Norman’s article, “Simplicity is Overrated.” Citing the work of Barry Schwartz, who writes on consumer behavior and trade-offs in “The Paradox of Choice,” Porter observes that users tend to choose more complex products not because they prefer complexity, [...]

Apr 29, 2008 - We all know the saying “too many cooks spoil the broth,” yet it is common during the design process for too many stakeholders to become design decision-makers. When reviews go beyond discussing issues in the user experience and gathering new information and ideas, stakeholders with varying points can sometimes begin to dictate the direction of [...]

Apr 22, 2008 - Design + Management: Want Respect? Smash the Table! Dan Saffer quotes a fall 2007 Design Observer article in his blog post about designers and their relationship with management. Although there may be a persistent desire on the part of designers to get a place at the management table “where the big decisions are made,” Saffer reminds [...]

Apr 15, 2008 - Don’t Block YouTube In an interview with F@st Company, Gartner researcher Tom Austin suggests that companies think twice about blocking access to sites like YouTube and MySpace. Instead, Austin suggests companies leverage the social networking media of Web 2.0 to “enhance collaboration and productivity.” Business remains fundamentally about human interactions, and the Internet has skyrocketed the [...]

Apr 8, 2008 - Making Money on the Internet “The internet is a copy machine.” Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired Magazine, notes on his blog that if the “super-distribution” system of the Internet and its endless free copying of information has undercut the structure of wealth built upon selling precious copies, “how does one make money?” Kelly defines eight categories of [...]

Apr 1, 2008 - Web of Flow On Sunday, Lo?Øc Le Meur wrote on the centralization provided by services mybloglog, friendfeed, and socialthing. However, Le Meur would prefer it if the centralization occurred on his blog, rather than with a third party service. Monday, Stowe Boyd responded to Le Meur’s lamentation to say, “conversation is moving from a very static and [...]

Mar 18, 2008 - Is That A Kiosk In Your Pocket? Electronic Airline Ticketing The next step in electronic ticketing has arrived. While those print-your-own boarding pass kiosks have been around since 1995, and half a dozen airlines in the U.S. now allow passengers to check-in using mobile devices, Continental Airlines has begun testing an electronic boarding pass. The boarding [...]

Mar 11, 2008 - “Sexy Money:” Kleiner Perkins’ $100 million pledge for iPhone Apps Last week, Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins pledged $100 million to fund iPhone software development. Though developers have been writing browser-based iPhone apps since the beginning, and more than that since the SDK release in June, Wired Magazine reports development may move to the mainstream [...]

Mar 4, 2008 - Death of Mobile Apps Michael Mace, former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, writes about the death of mobile applications on his blog. The post contends that given the barriers to platform access put in place by mobile carriers–”shrinking distribution channels”–and the lack of alignment between mobile platforms and vertical markets, the [...]