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Ixda Lightning Sessions!

Apologies for the delay, but the lightning sessions from ixd11 are now up on vimeo, ixda.org soon: bit.ly/HYF1v

And now for your viewing pleasure...

Video of all seven Interaction11 keynotes is available.

a few more notes...

“Examples trump abstractions” Because we are seeing more non-designers involved in design decisions, telling stories can make more sense than presenting abstract models and wireframes.

Do you Twitter? - I signed up for Twitter in 2006, but admittedly I am still behind the curve. However, I became a full convert when I experienced how helpful it can be at a conference to get alternate points of view, notes or further discussions. Visit a capture of the twitter stream from IxDA11.

"Content as Navigation" Pentagram's Lisa Strausfield reinforced the idea that content can be a tool for navigation. Check this out.

-tf

It's easy to be different; it’s difficult to be better.

Jonathan Ive

A good reminder...

As I was going back through my notes from the conference, I ran across this quote from Dick Buchanan:

"I don't come to your <expletive> website to see pretty colors. I'm here to do something..."

While the visual design is a key component of what we create, we should always keep the needs of our audience a top priority.

-tf

There have been 24,750 Tweets (From beginning of conference until right now)

"Utility can be the single most powerful way of engaging customers." Short video from R/GA on branded platforms/applications.

-jp

Reading +

I'll continue to add to this list...but here's a few to get you started.

Thoughts on Interaction Design Jon Kolko Designing for Interaction Dan Saffer Discovering Design Richard Buchanan In the Bubble John Thackara Envisioning Information Edward Tufte Designing Visual Interfaces Jenifer Tidwell Design Research Brenda Laurel The Art of Innovation Tom Kelly

Others Good Design in the Digital Age Richard Buchanan Incomplete Manifesto for Growth Bruce Mau

-tf

New encyclopedia on Interactive Design, Usability and User Experience

Interaction-Design.org has just released a free online encyclopedia dealing with the topics of Interactive Design, Usability, and User Experience. It has taken the opposite approach of Wikipedia and crowd-sourcing: All entries are written by leading figures who either invented or contributed significantly to each topic.

The encyclopedia has been developed under the manifesto of "Democratization of Knowledge", as it aims for people from all the far corners of the world to get free access to world-class educational materials. Added bonus ... Jon Kolko is on the advisory board!

They need help spreading the word, so share this link with all. http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/

-jp

Topic: The nature of having a point of view as a designer and the role and responsibility that comes with it. Very interesting group Q&A with:

Austin Brown and Lindsay Moore from EffectiveUI

Kalani Kordus and Karl Adam from smudgeproof

Richard Buchanan, Professor of Design, Management and Information Systems, Case Western Reserve University

Kaleem Khan Partner, True Insight

Steven Johnson, Senior Product Manager, Disney Online/USC Annenberg School of Journalism -jp

For those @ IxDA11 I spoke to about Louisiana's Digital Media Incentive and the Louisiana FastStart™ workforce training program -- here are the links:

Louisiana FastStart™ & Digital Media Incentive

I had the privilege of listening to one of the founders of Ushihidi, Erik Hersman, speak on the constraints placed on the building of “digital community” in Africa.

Bandwidth: Bandwidth has made it difficult for people to create new sites and services, but more importantly, how the uptake of those is limited by consumer use of the Internet due to costs and speeds.

Mobile: Due to the fact that mobile is the primary device for Africans and usually the first device that people have a meaningful interaction with the internet on, is creating a different type of user. How the entrepreneurs in Africa’s web space are thinking of it from a mobile context and how they build services to address their audience.

Culture: How this culture of mobile first plays out. Where the phone number trumps the email address on user signup, and where transactions happen due to that norm.

-jp

A reoccurring theme keeps coming up for me @IxDA11. It is the need to find balance between usability and desire in interaction design. Engendering desire in users sometimes requires us to explore unorthodox solutions.

Tim Wood from EffectiveUI puts it this way: “Designers have grown complacent — overly dependent on anachronistic design patterns to provide ready-made solutions for the design problem at hand. Additionally, the pressure to design a ‘usable’ system often prevents designers from taking risks and exploring superior solutions than what may be found by using traditional ‘off the self’ GUI widgets and UI patterns.”

I think it comes down this: convergent thinking which generally has some sort of evidence that makes it appear to be the proper, safe and familiar route needs to be balanced with the divergent. By divergent, I mean one needs to constantly challenge traditional ways of thinking about the interface and the interaction.

Divergent thinking can be risky, but it can also lead to innovative new ideas. In this very crowded marketplace, we need to strive for the different, the memorable – the desirable.

-jp

http://www.effectiveui.com/

Friday night John and I went to an interesting party. Well, party is a loose term when you consider that it's a party to further the discourse of interaction design. However, we met a really nice fellow - Andrei Herasimchuk. Andrei has spent last last 20+ years designing and developing products that you and I use everyday. If you have ever powered up Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, you have seen Andrei's interface handy work.

He recently joined Yahoo! in Sept of 2009 as Sr. Director of Product Design for Apps and is currently leading the redesign efforts for Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Flickr, Groups, Answers and Delicious, across browser, desktop and mobile platforms.

The video above is from when he was the CDO at Involution Studios in 2009.

Follow him on Twitter: @trenti

-tf

Intersecting the physical + digital

There has been a historical divide between interaction design for the physical world — considered the domain of industrial designers and engineers — and the digital world — the domain of user-experience designers, information architects, etc. However, as technology changes, we are speeding towards an era of ubiquitous computing where digital experiences will no longer be limited to desktop computers and mobile devices and will seamlessly integrate into everyday objects and activities.

Austin Brown and Lindsay Moore from Effective UI talked about the design aspects that these two disciplines can learn from one another, such as:

1. Using affordances to help users understand how to interact with an interface 2. Providing feedback about what a system is doing or how an interface is reacting to an input or action 3. Using mappings and mental models to enhance understanding and learnability 4. Using data visualization to increase understanding and motivate behavior 5. Using gaming models to incentivize participation/use and to increase user enjoyment 6. Using joy or moments of delight to help users build a relationship with a product or grow into a product through exploration

-tf

The information is the interface.

In the real world, buttons are an abstraction. Touch is changing the way people are thinking about interfaces. The information is the interface. The content is the control.

Josh Clark

-jp

It's impossible for a human being to experience a system.

Dick Buchanan

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