Methods

Luke Wroblewski - Parti and the Design Sandwich

In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling?

Mike Kruzeniski - Poetry & Polemics in Creating Experience

The handoff from Design to Engineering is often the point where designers begin to step away from a project to focus their attention on the next. It is at this point however, that the subjective qualities of a design will naturally start to take a back seat to the very real, very hard engineering problems ahead. Without guidance, the purely practical aspects of engineering a new product can become over-prioritized, while the aesthetic are easily downplayed.

Livia Labate - Ceci n’est pas une KPI

“What are the Key Performance Indicators of a succesful user experience?” asked the business stakeholder, “It depends” answered the wise interaction designer…

Inquiries about measuring or managing anything seek to answer an underlying question: How do we know we are doing a good job?

(So, how DO you know you are doing a good job in the work that you do?)

Nicolas Nova - From Observing Failures to Provoking Them

One of the reasons why product and technology failures are important is that they can be seen as “seeds of the future” or “good ideas before their time”. A common example lies in the use of personal communication with pictures, which failed several times in its phone instantiation, but is now a huge success with laptops, PCs, webcams and Skype.

In the context of design, this talk with discuss how failures can be explored through field research and eventually help creating innovative products or services.

Denise Wilton - Writing for Relationships (and applications)

A successful company forges good relationships with its customers.

There are many potential relationship catalysts: an enticing homepage design, a well crafted page found via search, an easy-to-use application.

Writing engaging copy for an online application is more than a set of useful instructions on process. If your process is that intuitive, it probably doesn’t need much copy anyway – what do you do then? How do you draw people in, make them feel part of something bigger and open up the dialogue?