Category: User Experience Design
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My Aeron Chair
This is not an Aeron chair. I’m quoted in the September 25 issue of New York Magazine about my thoughts on the Aeron chair. Because, you know, I’m an expert and all. It may not be clear from the article, but I’m really not among those who find the Aeron to be the world champion…
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Class and Web Design, Part 2: What Class are You?
As I discussed in my previous post, class is one of the few things Americans simply don’t like to talk about. Paul Fussell discusses this reluctance in the introduction to his excellent Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (a classic book I read many years ago and just picked up again to help…
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Class and Web Design, Part 1: The Class Struggle
Three ugly ducklings by zefrank. In the last year or so, hundreds of articles, blog posts, and conversations in the web design world have revolved around the question of “Why does bad design succeed?” MySpace, eBay, Google, and craigslist are usually cited as examples of “bad design” (or even “ugly design”) that works. And everyone…
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The Empathy Test
“Let me tell you about my mother…” In the movie Blade Runner, the “Voight-Kampff Empathy Test” detects whether or not a test subject is a real human being or an android “replicant”. A machine reads the body’s physical reactions to various psychologically- provocative scenarios (“Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil.…
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Elegance through Nomenclature
New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but…
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There’s a Ring at Lincoln Center, and it ain’t Wagner
Johannes Brahms, clearly pissed off at Avery Fisher Hall. How is it possible that New York’s most dedicated Brahms lovers can excuse Lincoln Center? A couple of nights ago I went to see a concert of chamber music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, on one of the final nights…
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Measuring The Morville Honeycomb
Peter Morville’s well-known “honeycomb” diagram (and accompanying article) illustrates seven qualities or “facets” of user experience design, going beyond just usability into six other areas where the user experience designer’s work is cut out for them. It’s a great diagram — I use it with clients to describe all the things we need to address,…
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Where Writers Can Learn from Programmers
I generally consider myself a capable writer, at least in the technical sense. In particular, I think I have a pretty good understanding of how to punctuate properly in written English. But there are some areas where the language’s “standards” are in continual dispute, some areas where I think the standards are just plain logically…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 5: Non-Scientific User Research isn’t a Bad Thing
(This is Part 5 — the final part. Please read Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , and Part 4 first.) I would certainly agree that more rigorous methodologies can’t hurt in our field. But at the same time, I think that we need to be a little more honest about the value…