A quote that I stumbled on during grad school stuck with me. From the story of the elder’s box as told by Eber Hampton, it sums up my philosophy of working and teaching: “How many sides do you see?” “One,” I said. He pulled the box towards his chest and turned it so one corner…
Case Studies
From the early Christians to the Eames, we’ve been telling stories in space. Now that media installations are becoming more prevalent, how do we use them to inspire and effect users? Second Story faced that challenge when they created an installation for the University
of Oregon.
Content Strategy — in 3D!
How does Agile work effectively when redesigning a site? James Kelway uses case studies as starting points to explore how Agile and UCD can work together during wholesale redesigns.
Case study of agile and UCD working together
Finding the holistic solution
Nate and Tony tell us about their research and design strategy approach for Stanford University’s local governments emergency response templates during the H1N1 outbreak.
Google, Stanford, and The Government Fight Swine Flu
One of the central tensions when
managing a Wiki is between centralized control and anarchy. Matthew Clarke presents a case study and guidelines
for effective use of Wikis in an
enterprise setting.
Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage
Video game research is mostly focus groups and controlled lab play. For EA’s Spore, Bolt|Peters set out to do better by letting the users play the game in a natural environment, without interference from other players, researchers, or arbitrary tasks.
Researching Video Games the UX Way
A Look at How Bolt|Peters Researched Usability for Spore
Though popular in the development process, designers can use comics for communication to consumers as well. Rahel Anne Bailie digs into her past to show us how she has used comics in the past in the hope that we can utilize them with a wider audience.
Comics for Consumer Communication
Reaching Users with Word and Image
Some failure allows organizations to learn and grow; others times it can be catastrophic. In Part 2 of his series, Peter Jones explores timing dynamics of large projects and alternatives to the framing of UX roles and organizations today.
We Tried To Warn You, Part 2
Failure is a matter of timing
Some failure allows complex organizations to learn and grow; others can be catastrophic. Peter Jones explores
how, as designers, we have a
responsibility to detect and assess
the potential for large-scale failure.
How can we help stop the train?
We Tried To Warn You, Part 1
The organizational architecture of failure
In the quest to gather more data on user behavior, some researchers and designers look to server log files for usability analysis. While the logs do provide a great deal of information, Karl Groves demonstrates why they are are inappropriate for gathering usability data.