What the design student needs is a design course that stresses usability, human factors, and clarity, instead of the typical branding and interpretation problems they usually encounter in their other design classes. James Spahr recounts a year of teaching at Pratt Institute that attempts to cross those boundaries.
Continue readingPolar Bear book co-author Peter Morville shares the inside stories about the making of the new edition—from its original scribblings on an airsick bag to the ideas that didn’t make it in—and his thoughts about how the field has changed since their book was first published.
Continue readingIvy-covered halls are filling up again with eager students of the user experience fields ready to change the world (or at least to study out the recession). But are these programs really teaching them what they need to know?
Continue readingThink you’d like to set up shop as an independent information architecture consultant? Polar Bear book co-author Louis Rosenfeld has a few words of advice: it’s not your IA skills that are necessarily the most important ones.
Continue readingPart of me feels for Jakob Nielsen for the grief he’s taken over deciding to work with Macromedia after declaring “Flash 99 percent bad.” After all, the pressures and temptations to provide simple answers to complex issues are ones we all face in our professional practices.
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