“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem” – Albert Einstein My work involves helping people to understand how to best plan circumstances in which users are engaged and satisfied with their experience. Yet, I do not call myself a user experience designer. I am an information architect. I…
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Parental advisory for strong language, guru deflating and semantics. A couple of years ago, I was asked to speak about “design thinking” at a web conference. The conference-speaking part was nothing new, but the topic certainly was. With the “design thinking” wave having just recently peaked, I had yet to even come up with…
The Music Outlives the Band
I’m tired of discussing “user experience.” What it is, what it isn’t. I’m tired of talking about wireframes vs prototypes. I’m tired of the agile-lean-waterfall debates. I’m weary from discussing personas and sitemaps. I’m wary of design patterns, and I’m pretty sure the term “user” has held us back. Above all, I’m tired of defining…
What is User Experience?
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…
Mythic Design
There is no UX for us That’s right! I said it. For us (designers, information architects, interaction designers, usability professionals, HCI researchers, visual designers, architects, content strategists, writers, industrial designers, interactive designers, etc.) the term user experience design (UX) is useless. It is such an over generalized term that you can never tell if someone…
User Experience Go Away
Like a lot of folks, I find the term “user experience design” awkward and unsatisfying, at once vague and grandiose, and not accurately descriptive of what I do. Too often it seems like a term untethered, in search of something — anything — we might use it to name. And yet I often call myself…
Whither “User Experience Design”?
If you can place your core offering firmly at the center of your design, then all other elements in the site help both the users and the business reach their goals.
Kalbach and Lindemann show how the Core+Paths method keeps the design focused on your goals.
Designing Screens Using Cores and Paths
Designing from the inside out
Once there was a big debate on: Is experience design about online and mobile interfaces or is it something more?
Ten years later, not only is it part of our professional language, designers are exploring its potential, learning from everything from science fiction to behavioral psychology.
The Past and Future of Experience Design
What a difference 10 years make
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.