Design
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Finally, The Iraq War Ends
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1 min read
…not really, unfortunately. But that was the headline on a “special edition” of the “New York Times” today. The credibility was in question from the start, as the paper was handed out free at the subway which is never the case with the Times. The production is quite accurate, but a quick glance at the…
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A New Service: Future Practice Webinars
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1 min read
We’re pleased as punch to partner with our good friend Lou Rosenfeld at Rosenfeld Media to offer you Future Practice Webinars. Our first two events are Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski and Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy with Indi Young. When we created them we wanted to accomplish two things: Provide…
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Did You Know Brainstorming Is 70 Years Old?
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2 min read
That’s right, Alex Osborn started popularizing brainstorming in the late 1930’s. It’s a classic tool I still use, but I have to wonder if there’s something better. Brainstorming is simple, and I would bet this simplicity is the key to its popularity. Yet even the basic rules that Osborn set out aren’t very common. Brainstorming…
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Spontaneous Interaction Design Group Work Styles
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2 min read
There was a New York City IxDA event at Roundarch last night that challenged 10 teams of designers to invent the portable electronic ink magic paper of the future. In addition to the usual functional stuff, fun ideas emerged like using it as a yoga mat, a DDR mat, or modules that could be connected…
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A friend is contracting with a design firm for work that will include web analytics, so I asked my colleague and expert Marko Hurst for resources that would provide a gentle introduction, mostly from a marketing perspective. He recommends: Web Analytics Demystified — A bit more technical, but not a tech book geared for someone…
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New Article on Concept Design Tools
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2 min read
The nice folks at Digital Web Magazine published my new article on Concept Design Tools. It’s already received some nice reviews in the Twitterverse… For those of you who haven’t seen Victor Lombardi’s new article on concept design tools, it’s a must read… …it’s brilliant stuff and super accessible. It’s great to see solid thinking…
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Keep status meetings to .5 hour, but do them every week Establish a natural way for the team to share what everyone is doing — eating together, or tasks we all do together — while protecting personal time to think and work individually Set up a team mailing list and liberally copy everyone on everything;…
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No-Click is the New Click
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1 min read
I’m bummed I’ll miss Dan Saffer’s talk tonight on Tap is the New Click (though happy I’ll finally get to try Five Points as I take a client out to dinner). But on that topic, I just came across some examples of interaction design that do away with the click altogether. It’s radical enough to…
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You need a great design to please your customers, and a great business model to pay for the design, so we’re offering classes on both topics to help user experience practitioners, managers, and entrepreneurs thrive in New York City. For 10% off any class, enter the code NBS when registering. If you plan to attend…
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A Schedule for Planning a Presentation
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1 min read
I tend to think and think and think and think and, at the last minute, throw together slides that represent what I want to say. This time I resolved to be more prepared. Here’s my deadlines: Aug 29 – Make schedule; list all potential points I could make; filter points to ones I should make…
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How Recruiting iPhone Designers is Like Raising Kids
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2 min read
When two of the really amazing thinkers I admire — Ken Bain and Jeanne Liedtka — both say they admire Carol Dweck, I figure it’s time to figure out who Dweck is. Her latest book, Mindset, provides some fascinating psychological support for the power of play and prototyping, as she says… People who believe in…
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Using Real Options to Value Design Concepts
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3 min read
The common way that financial people will judge the potential value of a project, or a design concept representing a potential future concept, is by building a model, usually a discounted cash flow model like Net Present Value (NPV). The calculation essentially asks, if we do this project and gain the profit we think we’ll…
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Studio 360 on A Pattern Language
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1 min read
This morning Studio 360 broadcast a piece on Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, and the influence of patterns in software development. If you know the story, you know the story. Still, I always like hearing Alexander speak, and this is the first time I’ve heard Ward Cunningham’s voice.
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Concept Design: Name the Baby!
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2 min read
When you create a product or service concept, you should give it a name. Sounds like a no-duh idea, but in the heat of the moment we forget to do this. Sometimes… we give them numbers or letters. “You see the change in materiality here in concept 2…” or “Clearly Concept C is a total…
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Two Things Design Experts Do That Novices Don’t
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2 min read
In my research on concept design processes, I’ve come across two ideas that jumped out as vital behavior that differentiates expert designers from novices. The first comes from Nigel Cross of Open University, UK, who seems to have studied designers and their processes more than anyone I’ve come across. In his Expertise in Design (pdf)…