A week ago, Jesse James Garret veritably bellowed the words “user experience designer” in his plenary address at this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, attempting to create some common ground between the information architects and interaction designers in the room and across the industry. In a strong and deeply-felt speech, he admonished the community (-ies?) … Continue reading Experience Design User
The Innocent Eye, 1981 Mark Tansey In the web design consulting business, there’s always been an unspoken assumption that our clients just don’t get the web. I’m sure this is true with many other consulting businesses, but for web consultants this has been particularly true. And it’s easy to see why: Until recently, it actually … Continue reading The Myth of the Ignorant Client
Bruce Nussbaum, BusinessWeek’s editor and blogger on the design and innovation beat, has declared that “‘Innovation’ is Dead” and that “Transformation” is the new “key concept” of 2009. He correctly observes that the word “innovation” is overused in the business world. This, of course, has been obvious for a long time to a great many … Continue reading Innovation, Transformation, Therapy, Practice
Today is the seventh anniversary of the incorporation of Behavior, the humble web and user experience design consultancy I helped found in 2001. Happy birthday to us! My four awesome partners and I started the company in what at the time seemed like the worst possible economic climate to launch a new business. The one-two … Continue reading Behavior is Seven!
What if someone paid you thousands of dollars to design a user interface or an application for just one person? Most design work is done for audiences: whether designing mass market products or niche objects of desire, we seldom have a single, real person in mind when we work. We think of audiences as groups … Continue reading Designing for One User (Bespoke User Interfaces)
From “The Seduction of the Interface“ Saturday’s New York Times (in the Business section, of course) had an interesting article about “design thinking”. For starters, it included by far the clearest summary of what design thinking is that I’ve ever read, including from all the design thinking leaders: While definitions vary, design thinking usually involves … Continue reading Design Thinking Out Of The Box
When I was just 20 years old, I went on a student exchange program to Amsterdam to study sculpture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Those six months I spent in Europe, impoverished and starry-eyed, shaped a lot of who I am, both personally and creatively. I’m delighted to say that I will be back in … Continue reading Going to Amsterdam
Last week I delivered a brand new presentation at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo, right here in New York City, entitled The Seduction of the Innocent: Merchandising in Interactive Product Design. (I’m presenting it again this Friday at the Euro IA Summit in Amsterdam, hopefully with a few enhancements.) The topic itself went through an … Continue reading Seducing Web 2.0