Adaptive Path Podcast

Many museums present exhibitions about architecture and design. In doing so, they typically treat buildings and other designed objects much as they do paintings, drawings, or sculptures — as individual creative works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or craftsmanship.

Every now and again, a project just jumps the rails — all the best intentions and planning just don’t stack up to the unanticipated challenges. After the dust settles, all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move on.

Apart from information discovery and aggregation, not much has been written about how semantic technology can be leveraged to improve user experience as a whole. This is unfortunate for a technology where the “semantic” is often overshadowed by the “web.”

Flow diagrams are a key component of an interaction design specification. Jesse James Garrett’s Visual Vocabulary uses a set of simple shapes to diagram user flow and illustrate basic relationships between webpages.

CNN.com recently unveiled the latest evolution in online news: an intuitive, integrated Web site that gives users the global, national, and local news they find most relevant to them. The goal of this undertaking was to enhance and simplify online news for consumers to allow them to interact with news in more ways than ever before.

This session will focus on the ways in which human-centered researchers team with colleagues across disciplines to transform a mass of data -- field observations, contextual interviews, secondary research and anecdotal stories -- into actionable design principles.

Every document created by web designers contains many layers of information. Too few layers, and the ideas within lose context and meaning. Too many, and the important ideas become obscured. Choosing the right ideas to include can make or break a document, or even the entire project.

As the technology for supporting more personalized experiences becomes available, we’re entering a new era of “adaptive interfaces,” where functionality is revealed over time and interface elements change based on individual usage. We can create interfaces that respond, suggest or change based on actual usage data.

We listen to stories for enlightenment and tell stories for education and entertainment. Everyday people are convinced, impressed, enlightened, discouraged, encouraged and swayed by the stories others tell in the workplace. In business time may be money, but the power of a good story, well told at the right time, has changed the course of individual careers, corporations and entire industries.

Most of us who practice user experience design are generalists. We need to know enough about technology to work with engineers. We need to know enough about visual design to work with designers.

Creating engaging and enjoyable user experiences requires a solid understanding of the people your product or service is meant to serve. Unfortunately, many companies don’t really understand their customers — even companies with large research groups. But understanding people takes more than simply hiring researchers armed with PhDs and the latest methodologies. […]

Businesses that pay attention to the entire spectrum of customer interaction, and actually get it right (at least most of the time), win their customers’ attention and loyalty. And the key to creating a business that addresses the entire spectrum of user experience is to build empathy with your customers.

As Ajax, RIA’s and Agile methods become ever more common, we increasingly hear about the value of prototypes for design and development. Unfortunately, choosing the right prototype can be an exercise in uncertainty. To get a better handle on the prototype process, we will survey several different types of prototypes, with special focus on the appropriate […]

User and usability testing of mobile applications requires an understanding of when to use devices, emulators, laboratories and field testing. This session targets user-experience professionals, teaching them how to expand and adjust their current testing procedures to address mobile applications and websites.

There are dozens of development platforms in the mobile sphere. And 1,700 different devices on the market, each with its own rendering idiosyncrasies. Of course you also have to contend with carrier influence and distribution.

Creative Project Leads and Team Managers face numerous challenges in a corporate environment. Often their working styles or problem-solving skills differ from the methods used in other departments, creating communication and collaboration issues.

The cluster of practices and professions we’ve come to think of as supporting User-Experience Design is still a new, strange territory for many of us. How does a person’s discipline define that person’s work? What skills, methods and tools should be the purview of a given role? It turns out that these are age-old issues […]

Like every other design discipline, an important component of self-education is learning to critically examine what others have produced. And when it comes to interaction design, there are plenty of good and bad examples to guide us.