March 2012
24 posts
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A Sign of Respect
I had a most satisfying day. One of the primary points of my Working with Developers talk is that designers should participate in the entire product development process. In my own practice, I extend this to authoring of user guides and even training of users on the software I design. Sure, user testing will give you a lot of great feedback and observations, but if you really want to know how...
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Design Vocabulary: Combo Box
A combo box is a graphical user interface widget that combines a text field with a drop-down list. It allows the user to select an option from the list or type in their own. It is common to hear people refer to a drop-down list as a combo box, but this is technically incorrect. Unfortunately, the combo box is not one of the standard web browser form widgets, so designers have developed a number of...
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United We Stand?
The latest project in my information visualization class was directly tied to the Designing for the Divide conference. The chair, Eve Faulkes, wanted a number of large-format posters that addressed the divides that would be discussed during the conference. Lindsey Estep chose to focus on the economy. She selected four pairs of competing stances, each pair composed of a liberal and conservative...
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Designing for Change
There were a lot of outstanding talks at Designing for the Divide last weekend, but the speaker that really inspired me was Emily Pilloton, a designer that moved from San Francisco to Bertie County, North Carolina, at the behest of Dr. Chip Zullinger, the school superintendent. What started as a request to build an educational playground system evolved into a design-build high school curriculum.
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Designing for the Divide
Whether we think of issues of governance, religion, race, the environment, economic development, education, or healthcare, the inability to communicate, cooperate or compromise erodes social capital and weakens the ability to draw on diverse skill sets to address common challenges.
This conference calls for ideas that help bridge social divides from the fields of communication design, service...
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Trends in Distracted Driving
Kofi Opoku took a look at distracted driving for his time series assignment. While he was able to find auto accident data going back to 1995, incident data for distracted driving was only available starting in 2004. His first graph compares distracted driving fatalities with the steady increase in wireless subscribers. The second compares distracted driving fatalities with the number of people...
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Meet Me at Midwest UX
The best sort of lectures are the ones you get lost in, never realizing the time passing. We at Midwest UX feel that each one of the following talks embodies that exact quality. Immersive, reflective, and innovative: each presentation brimming with fresh ideas and concepts designed to inspire.
I’ll certainly do my best to live up to that ideal. I’m happy to announce that I’ve been engaged to...
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The Art of Video Games: Videos
The new Smithsonian exhibit, The Art of Video Games, has finally opened. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to catch it while it’s running—through September 30th—which is a shame, because I’m quite interested in the subject. However, I wanted to make you all aware of some great resources that the Smithsonian has made available online. There is a series of videos, including interviews with some of...
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The Real Challenge
My career as a designer has been all about solving other people’s problems. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s something I quite enjoy, and I seem to be good at it. At the same time, however, I am more than a problem-solver—I am a creative. I have a desire to invent, to innovate, to create something that didn’t exist before. Sir Jonathan Ive’s comment in an interview with Mark Prigg of the...
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Working with Developers: Testing
Only 36% of the designers I surveyed participate in functional testing. In fact, the only activities with less participation are bug fixing, implementation, and the writing of user guides. That’s a shame, because designers make great testers! Good designers are detail oriented, a trait that is also important to testing. Designers use the system more like the users will than like the developers use...
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Melanoma in the United States
Lindsey Estep decided to research Melanoma for her time series project, and she found some interesting data.
Although melanoma of the skin appears less significant than other major cancers, its incidence rates have been steadily increasing. Perhaps surprising, the effects of this stealthy cancer are not limited to sunny, coastal areas.
Her graphs show that while the occurrence of melanoma is...
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They’re Heeeeere
It’s been a month since Interaction 12 wrapped up, but the conference goodness didn’t end there. Six keynote videos have been released in the Resources section of IxDA.org. I recommend starting with my favorite, the one that kicked off the conference proper, Luke Williams – The Disruptive Age: Thriving in an Era of Constant Change. Luke, a Fellow at Frog and author of the book Disrupt: Think the...
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Hypocriticalmorphism
Interaction Designers and UX professionals have been ganging up on Apple for its skeuomorphic user interfaces. I mean, they’ve really been hammering hard. They make claims such as that decorating UIs with Corinthian leather is lying to the user. The UI designers baby us. They are holding back the progression of sophistication in UI literacy by chaining us to our analog past. James Higgs states on...
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Working with Developers: Documentation
Design documentation is not a one-size-fits-all product. There are a lot of differences between a small partnership building their own iApp and a software development firm doing millions in government contracts. Their documentation requirements are completely different. We need to design our documentation with the users in mind—specifically, the users of the documentation. Some documentation is...
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The Future of Funding
It seems Kickstarter and its ilk are going to play a significant role in the future of our society. From entertainment to product innovation to urban development, people are finding monetary support for ideas that wouldn’t otherwise have seen the light of day. Take LowLine, for example. Dan Barasch and James Ramsey have a vision to turn an abandoned trolley terminal on the Lower East Side of...
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Designer’s Toolbelt: xScope
The Iconfactory has released version 3 of one of my favorite little utilities: xScope. This is a significant update the makes the already awesome suite of tools, well, more awesome. Take the Loupe tool, for example. It now has two modes: the original mode that showed an enlarged view of the area around the cursor and one in which the window itself is a magnifying glass, allowing you to set it over...
