Yancho

Brewing the perfect brainstorm A little write-up I did for Rain based on a presentation I gave there and for the IxDA Utah group.

From an article in UX magazine : ... let’s take a quick look back to see how this new discipline fits into a simplified history of user experience: Human-computer interaction is about paying attention to people and their relationship with computing. Information architecture is about making things findable. Interaction design is about making things usable. Content strategy is about making things meaningful. Experience design is about making things seamless. Persuasive design is about making things influential. The trend goes towards deeper meanings and bigger impacts. As the design discipline gets better at the basics of understanding and enabling behavior, it moves towards creating meaningful impacts by influencing behavior. But this influence must be built on top of successes in the more basic elements of UX such as good research and seamless usability. This points to design as not merely being about aesthetics and veneer, but about designing with a purpose, an outco...

This article on password security is a good one. Article on password security

I like Kristi Olsen's definition of UX: As UX researchers, our goal is to identify customer pain points and obstacles in a given workflow or process, then tell a compelling story about their risks and provide general recommendations for alleviating those risks. It's pretty succinct and clear. Methods vary, but the goal is the same. Mike Hughes on UX Matters  argues that we sometimes make a faulty assumption in our view of the "user". Users are  not  spherical. They are irregular, lumpy beings who introduce spin and resistance into your well-planned happy paths. Walk through a design, explicitly asking at each step:  What might a reasonable person do that could lead to failure?  Examine the consequences, then change your design to prevent, mitigate, or repair the damage that could result. If you need to convince others to implement your solution, either involve them directly in the walkthrough or document negative scenarios to the same level of detail tha...

A thought from Colleen Jones, the author of Clout, in an interview on UXMatters.com marketing and media tend to focus on influencing  attitude , while usability and technical communication focus on supporting  action.  There’s a time and a place for content that influences attitude—and for content that guides action. More and more, a  complete  user experience must plan content that influences  both  attitude  and  action. That’s easier said than done This is an area that probably needs more attention -- the idea of melding attitude and action, somehow making instruction or experiences attend to both, because internal to a person attitude and action are reciprocal and will often spiral with each other.

From  David Brooks Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories: Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer. Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings. Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations. Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups. Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people se...