Christina Wodtke

Christina Wodtke is an itinerant instigator and maker of things to happen. She is currently on sabbatical, advising start-ups and gardening. Most recently she led new product development and reinvention as a general manager of Zynga.com at Zynga, was general manager of Social at Myspace, principal product manager at Linkedin, and senior director of design at Yahoo! back when Yahoo! was pretty neat. As well, she likes founding things: She founded a startup where she developed the collaborative blogging tool PublicSquare; founded Boxes and Arrows, an on-line magazine of design; and co-founded the Information Architecture Institute. She may found again.

Stories by Christina Wodtke

When I agreed to teach a twelve-week course on user experience design, I did what anyone of us would do: I went to find something to copy. I trolled the articles and syllabi I could find online, and I was horrified. Sometime in the years between Jesse James Garrett’s lovely diagram and his incendiary demand…

November 13th, 2012

Mythic Design

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When Boxes and Arrows was founded a little over ten years ago, there was nothing quite like it online. There were peer-reviewed journals, and basic how-to articles. A List Apart was much more concerned with the CSS behind the interface back then, and UX Matters, Johnny Holland and Smashing Magazine were not even a twinkle in…

November 13th, 2012

Not Dead Yet

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As the web design community explores using game design principles in our work, we must be aware of how and when they are appropriate.

Christina Wodtke takes a closer look at two key principles, mastery and flow, and explains how we might use them in application design.

June 8th, 2012

Flow, Mastery and Ease-of-Use

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Why haven’t we figured out search yet? Amanda Spink talks with Christina Wodtke on why searchers still can’t ask a useful question of a search engine, and how Google may be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

October 17th, 2006

Long Tails and Short Queries

An Interview with Amanda Spink

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