The dubberly design group has some great concept maps on their site along with an interesting book:  How do you design?  Their stuff is great so just go over and take a look. Because I’m not going to talk about their stuff — at least directly.  What is the real process of design?  Design would seem to have a basic requirement that it serves some purpose.  Ideally it makes the world better — at the very least it pays the designers well (adulation if not cold hard cash).  How do we design well?  In the software world we get Agile, Waterfall and all manner of other variants. Which one is right?  How about none of them?  And all of them?

Read the rest of this entry »

I was an inaugural subscriber to Make Magazine, and haven’t missed an issue since with the count now at volume 21.  I have  collected a tool box full on all sorts of odd electronic parts, drawn by the electronics hacker ideal, but haven’t actually built anything electronic.  Well that is all about to change, as I’ve signed up for a physical computing workshop led by Jonathan Zalben.    Our hacking is based around the Arduino controller.  So far we learned how to get an LED to blink.  Not much, but it does give a nice sense of accomplishment.  Next week we tackle the one skill I’ve never quite mastered — soldering. Read the rest of this entry »

I am not running Windows 7 yet, but the Pivot software demo looks worth a try if you have it.  As stated by Gary Flake in the TED demo.  for web pages it “makes the sum greater than the parts…See patterns that were otherwise hidden.” The video only lasts 5 minutes, but the demo is impressive.  As the web grows many people are looking for new ways to create visual representations.  For instance the open source, cross-platform, VUE project does an impressive job with more structured data like RSS feeds.  Visualizations can be really effective in revealing patterns and information not seen in traditional text-based representations.  And maybe Microsoft is on the right track.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a couple of good links with examples of user experience design in action on event calendar listings, along with sets of design principles.  The event calendar UX pattern raises some great points, and nicely matches with a couple of projects that have come my way lately.  For instance we often seem to spend time considering how to display the event data in a traditional calendar format.  But the design pattern points out that people think in buckets of time — next week, next  month, tonight.  Calendars are good for organizing your personal schedule, but not very useful for searching for events.  For instance for a TV listing page how do you want to see it?  CNN Live is used as an example of good design.

Read the rest of this entry »

In many ways the web has always been about interactivity — what is hypertext except a way for the user to interact with a web resource.  But the rise of web based applications like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube may indicate that the time has come to rethink how designers conceptualize web site design.  Is there a shift underway from the notion of information architecture toward user experience?  Certainly the importance of a nice homepage with its linked page hierarchy seems less useful to visitors in this age of Google searches.   And users will more often consume content from multiple platforms, with the traditional computer-based web browser supplemented by smart phones and other mobile devices.  Which makes it less likely users will experience the pages as the designers intended or follow the expected path through the site content.   Perhaps the most important question is where should the focus be?  On the content holders desire to present their information their way?  Or on the users needs to access the information their way?  It seems to me that on the internet betting against user wants and desires never really pays off.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am leading an effort at our university to create a community resource site to support the work of our distributed web developers.  Our school has the fairly typical situation where individual or small groups (2 or 3) handle web design/programming work for departments, centers and other units.  They work with a high level of autonomy, serving the needs of their department with little coordination with any centralized resource.  Over the last couple of years a growing group has joined an informal web developers round table, meeting periodically in forums where people showcase their latest projects, and use those as jumping off points for the group to share ideas, lessons learned and other knowledge.

Read the rest of this entry »