Partial Recall » Rob Fay

Links for 2012-05-01

Rob Fay — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:36:53 +0000

How to Win the UX War Within Your Organization [UX Booth - May 01, 2012] – When companies don’t care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren’t willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling. A large part of our job as UX advocates, then, is explaining design’s impact on the company as a whole. Determining which battles to win and which battles to lose – even intentionally — can help you win the UX war.
4 Key Insights From The 57-Day, Blitzkrieg Redesign Of Google+ [Co.Design - Apr 25, 2012] – Co.Design talked to Google+ lead designer Fred Gilbert to unpack the subtle brilliance behind their awesome redesign–a redesign that was completed in less than two months–and his notes are full of lessons that could hone the experience of almost any product.
Firms Push Visual Note Taking to Spark Creativity, Sharpen Focus [Wall Street Journal - Apr 24, 2012] – Put down that smartphone; pick up that pencil. Employees are being encouraged by their companies to try visual note-taking to explain complicated concepts to colleagues and clients.

Links for 2012-04-17

Rob Fay — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 15:35:30 +0000

In Silicon Valley, Designers Emerge As Rock Stars [Business Insider - Apr 13, 2012] – The new breed of “user experience” designers – part sketch artist, part programmer, with a dash of behavioral scientist thrown in – are some of the most sought-after employees in technology.
More potent experiences come from ‘reductive’ design [Cisco Web Experience - Feb 19, 2012] – Sometimes, to create a high-quality experience, a product just needs some time to simmer.
Soups, sauces, and consommé are the result of boiling down to an intensely flavorful product and technology can benefit from a similar process of distillation.

The reductive process in cooking derives a more concentrated mixture with less volume than before the boiling but with a much greater quality. With frequent stirring, the impurities are brought to the surface and removed, leaving a more concentrated, and potent, product.

Links for 2012-03-08

Rob Fay — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:16:59 +0000

Pinterest’s Founding Designer Shares His Dead-Simple Design Philosophy [Co.Design - Mar 07, 2012] – Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists. Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole. Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it.
How Apple’s Top Secret Product Development Process Works [The Next Web - Jan 24, 2012] – Many aspects of Apple’s product development process have long been shrouded in mystery. The process is discussed in a new book Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – and Secretive – Company Really Works, by Adam Lashinsky, which is out now. The book talks about a variety of different aspects of Apple as a company; its philosophy, its hiring process and its legendary secrecy.
Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS? [Functioning Form - Feb 29, 2012] – As more organizations realize they need to invest heavily in multi-device Web designs, the inevitable question of “how” comes up. Responsive Web design, separate sites, or something in between?

Links for 2012-02-13

Rob Fay — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:15:43 +0000

Out of the box [Vitamins - Sep, 2011] – Most phones come with flimsy manuals with complicated language and jargon. These books, which can live on a bookshelf actually contain the phone. Each page reveals the elements of the phone in the right order, helping the user to set up the sim card, the battery and even slide the case onto the phone. The second book is the main manual – the phone actually slots into this and becomes the center of attention. Arrows point to the exact locations the user should press, avoiding confusion and eliminating the feeling of being lost in a menu.
Integrating UX into the Product Backlog [Boxes and Arrows - Feb 03, 2012] – Teams moving to agile often struggle to integrate agile with best practices in user-centered design (UCD) and user experience (UX) in general. Fortunately, using a UX Integration Matrix helps integrate UX and agile by including UX information and requirements right in the product backlog.

Links for 2012-01-31

Rob Fay — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:19:29 +0000

How to Approach a Responsive Design [Upstatement - Jan 26, 2012] – Here at Upstatement, we experimented with how to solve design and layout problems within a responsive framework. We learned a helluva lot as we went, like how to choose the right design software, strategies for thinking through breakpoints, and some best practices for designing in the browser.
The Eye of the Brainstorm [Cooper Journal - Jan 31, 2012] – While people think and behave differently when they are in large groups versus when they are alone, I also believe that people behave still differently when they are in the presence of only one other person. This is often overlooked, yet I believe that creative people can be at their most effective when they work in pairs.
The Shift From Watching TV to Experiencing TV [ReadWriteWeb - Jan 25, 2012] – As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. It’s hard enough to use your PC sometimes, let alone fiddle with the remote on your Internet connected TV! So over the coming months we’ll be exploring the world of User Experience design (a.k.a. UX design). We’ll be interviewing UX experts and reviewing products that get it right – and some that get it wrong. We’ll start by looking at how the user experience of televisions is becoming more interactive and what this will mean to your TV consumption habits.

Links for 2012-01-04

Rob Fay — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:17:31 +0000

Why Best Buy is Going out of Business…Gradually [Forbes - Jan 01, 2012] – I’m not shilling for Amazon or any other successful online retailer here. My point is much more basic. Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else. It simply does what consumers want. Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays. That’s not a strategy – or not a winning strategy, in any case, now that retail consumers aren’t stuck with the store closest to home.
A Journey Across the Main Stream: Games for My Mother-in-Law [Gamasutra - Sep 01, 2010] – Veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer Dave Grossman says gaming’s limited appeal could come down to “some very basic assumptions we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience.” So he tested Telltale’s Sam & Max adventure game series on his mother-in-law.
The 5 Hardest Jobs to Fill in 2012 [Inc. - Dec 19, 2011] – After engineers, the biggest challenge for companies is finding high-quality creative design and user-experience talent. Since almost every company is trying to create a highly compelling user experience that keeps people engaged with their product, it is tough to find people who have this type of experience (especially with mobile devices including tablets) and a demonstrated track record of success.

Links for 2011-12-14

Rob Fay — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 19:24:13 +0000

The Messy Art Of UX Sketching [Smashing UX Design - Dec 13, 2011] – Many articles discuss the power of sketching and why you should do it, but they don’t go into the how or the methods involved. Sketching seems straightforward, but there are certain ways to do it effectively. In this article, we’ll cover a collection of tools and techniques that I (and many other UX and design folks) use every day.
A Cane For The Blind Improves Social Interactions, Sunday Strolls [Co.Exist] – As scientists make slow and steady progress on sensors to help the blind see and move, this cane helps them say hi to friends.
A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design [Worry Dream - Nov 08, 2011] – This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

Links for 2011-12-01

Rob Fay — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:23:14 +0000

The Anatomy of an Experience Map [Adaptive Path - Nov 30, 2011] – Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It’s becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space.
Using Storyboards and Sentiment Charts to Quantify Customer Experience [UXmatters - Nov 07, 2011] – In the fields of user experience and service design, we use storyboards to illustrate our solutions, so clients can walk in the shoes of their customers, staff, or community and see our solutions as we see them. Storyboards are appealing at an aesthetic level, but are trickier to use in persuading clients who are more used to cold, hard numbers, charts, and tables. Offering more tangible measures of customer sentiment helps clients make connections between the experiences we depict and the sorts of technology, financial, and resource decisions that are necessary to make those experiences happen.
Team WhiteBoarding with Twiddla – Painless Team Collaboration for the Web – Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Browse the web with your friends or make that conference call more productive than ever. No plug-ins, downloads, or firewall voodoo – it’s all here, ready to go when you are. Browser-agnostic, user-friendly.

Links for 2011-11-03

Rob Fay — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:22:11 +0000

How our social circles influence what we do, where we go, and how we decide (Video) [Adaptive Path UX Week 2011 - Aug 25, 2011] – In this talk, you will hear stories that illustrate the social patterns in our lives, and how businesses can use that knowledge to build new products, market themselves in more relevant ways, and create experiences that people value. Paul will share stories about how people we are close to, and people we’ve never met, may or may not influence us, and explain how norms learned from people’s local culture impact how much they can be influenced. His goal is for you to walk away with concrete ideas about building great products built around social behavior.
UX, It’s Time to Define CXO [UX Magazine - Oct 28, 2011] – But now that the CXO title has been around for a few years, I ask you: what does the CXO really do and how have things changed for us? How have we, as a profession, taken ownership of this role? What are you doing differently now that you have a CXO in your organization, and does that CXO even have a UX background? Furthermore, how do we ensure the CXO seat is filled by UX, and what skills does someone need to fill it?
An Event Apart: Design Principles [Functioning Form - Oct 24, 2011] – In his Design Principles presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC 2011 Jeremy Keith outlined the design principles behind the World Wide Web and how they continue to shape its future. Here are my notes from his talk:

Links for 2011-10-20

Rob Fay — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:19:22 +0000

Getting the first click right [Measuring Usability - Oct 19, 2011] – Few things affect task success more than the navigation of website. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, not much else matters. If it were easy to get the navigation right, there wouldn’t be books and a profession dedicated to it.
First impressions matter in life and that’s also the case with website navigation. Research has shown that when users first click is down the right path, 87% eventually succeed. When they click down an incorrect path, only 46% eventually succeed.
The 10 principles of interaction design [.Net - Oct 19, 2011] – I got my start as an interaction designer during the first internet bubble. Since then I’ve worked on interactive marketing and products for everything including finance, automotive, electronics, packaged consumer goods, pharmaceuticals and healthcare. In that time and experience I have come to know that there are a few key things that make good interaction designs and designers. Here are 10 of them.
Storyboarding & UX – part 2: creating your own [Johnny Holland - Oct 17, 2011] – When thinking about storyboarding, most people fixate on their ability – or perceived inability — to draw. What is far more important is working out the point you wish to make with your storyboard, and the actual story that will carry that point from your storyboard across the room and into the hearts and minds of your audience. In this article explores the value of establishing a reason for the storyboard first, and then how you can create a storyboard using the thinking you’re already using and the skills you already have.