Researcher and Designer
Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit Forming Products is perhaps one of the best books on User Experience and how to design for it available today. Not only does it cast light on the reasons that designers can use these mechanisms to influence action, it’s a handbook for how to develop these products, with an … Read more
Schell’s The Art of Game Design is not designed to be a User Experience design text. But it is designed to be a user experience design text. It’s about designing experiences within the game realm, but unlike many other foundational texts in contemporary user experience design which ground themselves in the web and product, Schell grounds us … Read more
Expectations are high when one of the iconic names in UX puts out a book expectations are high. Don’t Make Me Think is rightfully considered essential reading among UX designers. But his work Rocket Surgery Made Easy tackles a topic more apt for a screed than a highly engaging manual; however, whereas it might have been essential in 2009, … Read more
Consideration of how a product makes a person is a critical part of what user experience can bring to a project; however, Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage offered a source of insight into some surprising results of a recent set of interviews. First the Project Staff members historically were tasked with planning a complex event. It involved … Read more
Often a subtle tension emerges over the course of a product. When your User Experience team manages both the business analyst hat and the interaction design, these concerns can often be smoothed over as a result of the UX process. Other times, these needs come to be represented by two different teams. It’s important to … Read more
As we are halfway through the year that thinkers and technology prognosticators thought would be the year of “Wearable Tech,” it seems like an appropriate time to review, but in particular reflecting on a key facet of the technology through a Microinteraction lens. The value of wearable One of the largest untapped ways a technology can … Read more
Perhaps one of the most striking recommendations in Cooper’s quintessential textbook on the topic of Interaction Design is the one that might be the most challenging for those of us who have been in the profession for a long time. A powerful tool in the early stages of developing scenarios is to pretend the interface is … Read more
Design by Consensus. Although Lean UX doesn’t call it out specifically, there’s moments where the recommendations seem to skew a little bit in the direction of this ineffective practice. Gothelf and Seiden call this out specifically “Lean UX is a collaborative process…but it’s not design-by-committee” (page 33). I feel though the process outlined demonstrates an effective way … Read more
From the “must read” files, filed under “buzzworthy” and “trending” is Gothelf and Seiden’s work on Lean UX, which posits that UX designers, with a few adjustments to their craft, can work in harmony with the agile philosophy that is all the rage amongst development teams. You know this is more than a fading trend, when … Read more
Among the potential lessons for UX [and designers in general] from Architecture is the way that the impact of spaces can differ from the impact of the whole. For example take a building. Does the emotional impact of a corridor necessarily need to match the grandeur of its exterior? Can a grand cathedral have a … Read more