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Learning From Others

Drilling Into Lean UX

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Overall I found Lean UX to be an incredibly insightful and helpful compilation of principles and suggestions for practice/improving process and collaboration as outlined in my review of the book. As I was reading, though, I had some questions come up that I felt weren’t answered–or maybe I missed the answer. Since others may have these same questions, we appreciate Jeff Gothelf agreeing to answer them for Boxes and Arrows. Ambrose: In a couple places, you mention the value of

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Design Principles / Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

Emotional Design with A.C.T. – Part 2

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Back in Part 1, we looked at how the emotions expressed by people and products communicate personality traits over time. We also learned that customers are attracted to things that have an aesthetic personality that’s similar to their own,1 but they prefer products that take on a complementary role during interaction.2 In Part 2, we’ll look at how relationships are formed when people interact with products over time, and we’ll explore how people experience the emotion of “love.” Then, we’ll examine how

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Design Principles / Visual and Visible

In Defense of Floppy Disks: The Vocabulary of the Interface

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I work on interfaces used by college students to search for academic articles. Librarians buy these databases. Librarians happen to be wonderful clients to build products for because they always let you know what they don’t like. A few years ago, my department started hearing complaints about the “save” icon on our interface. The librarians were concerned that, since college students had never seen floppy disks, they wouldn’t know what the icon meant. In the next round of user testing,

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Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others / Social UX

Researching User Experience: A Knowledge Ecology Model

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When we think of learning environments, we think of books, lectures, databases perhaps. But in my recent research, I discovered that the interactions we have with people in our networks play an even more important role in what we learn and how we turn information into actionable knowledge. All of the people in my study were learning how to be lecturers and how to progress their careers after spending considerable amounts of time as practitioners in a variety of industries such

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Conferences and Events

2013 User Experience Awards

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The 2013 User Experience Awards were presented Tuesday, May 21, 2013, at Parson’s Tischman Auditorium in New York. The host and organizer of the ceremony was Beverly May, Founder and President of Oxford Technology Ventures. A keynote address was given by Robyn Peterson, CTO of Mashable. Before introducing the jurors, Beverly spoke about the mission of the UX Awards, which is “not just to celebrate the winners, but to determine what great, award-winning UX is.” After messages from sponsors, the

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