Monday, March 22, 2010
Connect or Die: How to survive in a Music 2.0 world
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The end of publishing...the future of publishing.
Make sure you watch it up to at least the halfway point...brilliant. This video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books. Originally meant solely for a DK sales conference, the video was such a hit internally that it is now being shared externally. Read an interview with the creator of the video on the Penguin Blog: http://bit.ly/futureofpublishing
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Monday, March 15, 2010
Personas
Great collection of introductory resources on personas and UX process from Australia's Dey Alexander.
An introduction to personas and how to create them Getting started with personas (PDF) How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 1 How personas and scenarios can change your website for the better, part 2 Accessibility in the analysis phase: personas Accessibility in the analysis phase: user group profiles Ad-hoc personas and empathetic focus A persona 'ah-ha' (PDF) Bringing your personas to life in real life Creating personas for information rich websites Creating quality personas: understanding the levers that drive user behaviour (PDF) Customer story-telling at the heart of business success Getting from research to personas: harnessing the power of data Is this you? (Reader persona design: an example) Key steps in creating your reader persona Making personas more powerful: details to drive strategic and tactical design Making personas sparkle like diamonds, part 1 Making personas sparkle like diamonds, part 2 Perfecting your personas Persona creation and usage toolkit (PDF) Persona development and the law of averages Persona development for information rich designs (PDF) Persona-led heuristic inspection is here Persona non grata Personas and contextual design Personas and storytelling Personas and the customer decision-making process Personas and user profiles Personas, goals and emotional design Persona sketching Personas: matching a design to the users' goals Personas: practice and theory (PDF) Personas: setting the stage for building usable information sites Practical persona creation Reconciling market segments and personas Taking the "you" out of user: my experience using personas The origin of personas The power of the persona (PDF) The return on investment for personas The role of personas in successful scenario design Three important benefits of personas Using personas to create user documentation When you create personas, stay clear of stereotypes Why is it so hard to make products that people love? Yahoo's approach to keeping personas alive Introducing personas in a software project (PDF) Creating and using personas and scenarios to guide site design (PDF) Data driven design research personas How to effectively focus on your website users: creating personas Personas: Bringing Users Alive (PDF) Putting Personas to Work (PDF) The user is always right: making personas work for your site Example personas Example personas Example user group profiles Example personas (PDF) Organisational management personas (PDF) Persona chart (Word) Personas for the S2S Project Persona templates Personal templates V2 Razorfish personas (PDF) Web Accessibility Initiative personas Web Master Portal - roles and scenarios
"This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own."
(Tina Calabria - Step Two Designs)
"This whitepaper will go through the basic persona building steps. It is based on a collection of persona building blog posts from FutureNow’s GrokDotCom blog."
(Howard Kaplan - FutureNow)
"This is the first of two articles in which I’ll be making the business case for using personas and scenarios to improve your website. I’ll give you a flavour of what’s involved in using the personas and scenarios and provide a few examples of the kinds of problems we’ve solved for our clients using these techniques. In this first article, we’ll look at the core concepts of personas, leaving scenarios until next month."
(John Wood - IQ Content)
"Personas and scenarios are techniques for representing your users and the things they do on your website. They are one of the key tools in iQ Content’s arsenal, and we deploy them at every opportunity because they deliver more benefits for less effort than anything else that we do. In fact, we have seen this technique transform confused and failing web projects by providing a sense of direction and purpose that set the team on the road to success."
(John Wood - IQ Content)Discussion articles
"The purpose of personas is to make the users seem more real, to help designers keep realistic ideas of users throughout the design process. A persona with a disability includes the same specific characteristics, demographics, experience level, and personal details as other personas. Personas that include accessibility considerations also include a description of the limiting condition (disability or situational limitation) and the adaptive strategies for using the product."
(Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)
"User group profiles describe the characteristics of product users, the people who use a product. Because many designers start out with little or no familiarity with accessibility issues, adding accessibility considerations to user group profiles is particularly important."
(Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)
"Do Personas have to be accurate? Do they require a large body of research? Not always, I conclude. The Personas must indeed reflect the target group for the design team, but for some purposes, that is sufficient."
(Donald Norman)
"In an attempt to communicate that “ah-ha” moment of mental re-organization brought on by a really valid persona, I’ve attached a simplified before personas and after personas scenario. I hope you find it useful."
(Bonnie Rind)
"When presenting, talking about your personas, or referring to them in writing, communicate as though they are real people, people that you know. Express it like you are talking about a friend."
(Elan Freydenson - Boxes and Arrows)
"Design personas are one of the most powerful tools in a designer’s toolbox. They help bring the vibrant, living presence of 'a specific user' into your design process. They facilitate communication between your engineering, marketing and design teams. Trouble is, how to get started with the making or creation of personas."
(Rashmi Sinha)
"The best personas will also go the extra step to describe key behaviors such as a decision making process, an information browsing approach, or a shopping mode - the drivers that affect how people approach a given solution."
(Shannon Ford)
"As most of us know by now, customer personas and scenarios are vehicles for helping an organization continuously keep their customers in their line of sight. Traditional segmentation identifies and categorizes a current or potential audience based upon common characteristics, including demographics, attitudes, behavior, transactions, frequency of interaction, spend, and more. They are discovered by 'doing the math', which may include data aggregation, cluster analysis, factor analysis, and other statistical methods applied to large sample sets. And then segments are given catchy names like Savvy Skeptics, Active Balancers, Indulgent Nutritionist, or Trade-Uppers. When done right, segments are statistically derived from the analysis and synthesis of quantitative data and are a solid foundation for customer understanding. We create personas to build upon that platform by bringing the individuals within those segments to life. These are prototypical, but fundamentally real, stories of the multidimensional lives of specific customers. This report discusses how the Arc Worldwide’s Experience Planning group uses storytelling and multidimensional customer-based stories to provide relevance, direction, and resonance in today’s business planning landscape."
(Parrish Hanna - Boxes and Arrows)
"The usefulness of personas in defining and designing interactive products has become more widely accepted in the last few years, but lack of published information has, unfortunately, left room for a lot of misconceptions about how personas are created, and about what information actually comprises a persona."
(Kim Goodwin - Cooper)
"Do you work in a medium-to-large organization whose web content you feel could be put to better use? If so, you’re my target reader."
(Gerry McGovern - New Thinking)
"The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide what readers you are not going to focus on. Good web management is often more about what you exclude than what you include."
(Gerry McGovern - New Thinking)
"Personas ought to be one of the defining techniques in user-focused design, but they've unfortunately become more of a check-off item than a useful tool. So how did we get here?"
(George Olsen - Boxes and Arrows)
"Early in our company's life, persona development was largely an intuitive process. We wanted to develop a process we could use to train clients and partners to duplicate the persona development process. To do this, we delved into literature and film to understand character development. We were fortunate to be introduced to a prominent Hollywood screenwriter and script evaluator, David Freeman. Freeman taught us about 'character diamonds'... Today we'll share what we learned."
(Bryan Eisenberg - ClickZ)
"Last week, we discussed what we learned from David Freeman's character diamonds and masks. This week, we study these, and their applications, in more depth. Here's more from David Freeman."
(Bryan Eisenberg - ClickZ)
"It's easy to assemble a set of user characteristics and call it a persona, but it's not so easy to create personas that are truly effective design and communication tools. If you have begun to create your own personas, here are some tips to help you perfect them."
(Kim Goodwin - Cooper)
"This toolkit provides resources for a variety of situations. enables you to build up detailed profiles of the personas themselves, their relationship to the product, and the context in which they use the product. The intended user of the toolkit is the product’s designer."
(George Olsen)
"Persona is a hot buzzword in this industry, yet most companies that create personas haven't fully embraced everything they have to offer. Most personas are watered-down and hard to relate to. The worst of the lot are lifeless outlines of a company's demographic targets. Most often, they don't deliver the expected outcome from using the persona approach."
(Bryan Eisenberg - Clickz)
"Defining information architecture for complex web sites requires understanding user information needs and mental models in that domain. Personas, or user archetypes, created for such domains should also reflect types of information needs, and usage of information set. We have created a statistical technique to identify important underlying groupings of information needs. In a preliminary study, we show how designers can use this information in conjunction with data from interviews and observations to generate and refine personas."
(Rashmi Sinha)
"Sometimes we need to review a product for usability in circumstances where usability testing isn’t an option. Lack of time, lack of budget, unwilling client: you name it. So an improvement on the heuristic inspection would be a great idea."
(Caroline Jarrett - Usability News)
"Without any research to back assumptions, it's easy to end up with a product built for what designers think the users are like, rather than what the users really are like. It's the difference between reading about someone and actually meeting them, between fantasy and reality. The best personas are really conceptual models, which help you to digest the user research in a coherent way. They put a name and face to an observed pattern of behavior."
(Dan Saffer - Adaptive Path)
"Personas, introduced by Alan Cooper, are a technique of goal-directed design that is meant to help designers gain clarity and provide focus during the design process. They describe the goals and activities of archetypal users in a 1-2 page description based on a few ethnographic interviews with real users. Aside from the fact that personas are a current design trend, what makes personas interesting? Certainly they are seductive to design teams since they can be quick to create if they only require a few (2-3) interviews and a good writer. But good designers and managers know that reliable requirements gathering and design that meets the needs of the business, the market, and the user is not so simply constructed. So something else must be going on."
(Karen Holzblatt - InContext)
"Personas work because they tell stories. Stories are part of every community. They communicate culture, organize and transmit information. Most importantly, they spark the imagination as you explore new ideas. They can ignite action."
(Whitney Quesenbery)
"With this case study I want to show how our team used the concept of personas - fictional, representative user archetypes - and the customer decision-making process model in a project, in order to capture the nature of customers and their needs and concerns as they progress through the customer decision-making process."
(Henrik Olsen - guuui.com)
A collection of resources from STC Usability SIG. Includes articles on creating personas, case studies, sample personas.
"In the first three chapters of Emotional Design, Norman presents his three-level theory of cognitive processing and discusses its potential importance to design. However, Emotional Design does not suggest a method for systematically integrating Norman’s insightful model of cognition and affect into the practice of user experience design."
(Robert Reimann - UXmatters)
"The value of personas in Web design is certainly debatable, but I've found them very useful, if for nothing else then using them to help pull your clients and stakeholders into a discussion about the people what interact with your designs. As well, they can be use for many other things aside from informing Web design and can be a great way to pull business and user goals together."
(D. Keith Robinson)
"By closely adhering to the goals of a specific persona, the designers satisfy the needs of the many users who have goals similar to those of the persona. The process is even more effective when designers design for several personas simultaneously, as they can satisfy an even larger number of users."
(Christine Perfetti - User Interface Engineering)
"In three years of use, our colleagues have extended Cooper's technique to make personas a powerful complement to other usability methods. This article describes our approach and outlines the psychological theory that explains why personas are more engaging than design based on scenarios."
(John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft)
"As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them."
(Alison J Head - Information Today)
"What I'll do here is show you a quick and easy method to help you create your personas, as well as the basics of how they can be used. This is by no means going to be the only way this can be done, nor is it the only way personas can be used. There is much more to the world of personas than I'll be discussing here."
(D Keith Robinson - evolt.org)
"Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organisations can use to design and sell successful products."
(Elaine Brechin - Cooper)
"In 1999, I co-founded a small San Francisco-based start-up called Pyra. Our plan was to build a web-based project management tool and we chose to focus initially on web development teams for our target audience since, as web developers ourselves, we had intimate knowledge of the user group..."
(Meg Hourihan - Boxes and Arrows)
"The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, published in 1998, introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Based on the single-chapter discussion in that book, personas rapidly gained popularity in the software industry due to their unusual power and effectiveness."
(Alan Cooper - Cooper)
"Personas enhance focus, communication and collaboration on any project. You should particularly consider using personas in your company when there are conflicting visions of the product, when you experience difficulties in communication between Product Management, Development, and/or Marketing, or whenever your products seem to be falling short of your users' expectations."
(Bonnie Rind)
"Extract from The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind throughout Product Design by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin."
(Anne Light - Usability News)
"Scenario design helps users achieve their goals. How do you plan scenarios? Well, if you're designing scenarios for a commercial Web site, one that demonstrates return on investment (ROI) by getting sales, leads, or registrants, you design persuasive scenarios by turning the information you have on your users into personas."
(FutureNow)
"Personas are becoming a regular staple in many of the development teams we talk to. The method helps teams make a smooth translation between requirements and design, resulting with much cleaner designs. The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come."
(Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)
"Personas and other user-modelling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too."
(Steve Calde - Cooper)
"You might not see their faces out there behind the computer screens and your Web analytics, but you are dealing with real people who have real needs and complicated motivations. Create a persuasive architecture based on stereotypes, and you’re gonna miss the boat."
(grokdotcom)
"Business people don’t sit in their offices wondering how they can make a product uglier, and designers don’t want to create products that won’t sell. Everybody (usually) wants to do the right thing for the company, the products and the customers. So why do so many good designs get trampled during the product development process? To make successful products, designers and business people need to speak each other's language. They need a translator to help them understand each others’ goals and decision-making process so that instead of inadvertently working against each other, they can make each others’ jobs easier. Personas are excellent translators between design and business. "
(Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt - AIGA Design Forum)
"One of the big struggles teams have is creating a long-term adoption of their target personas. While personas are often accepted initially, it’s hard for the team to keep them 'alive' for the entire project duration. Our research has shown those teams which manage to keep them alive are more likely to produce more usable designs, so we’re always interested in new techniques."
(Jared M Spool - User Interface Engineering)
This Masters thesis investigates the process of creating personas and introducing their use into an ongoing software project, with the objective of providing the development team with information on user goals and characteristics as well as tools to use this information effectively.
A presentation on the development and use of personas by Razorfish.
(Dai Pham, Janiece Greene)
"Data driven design research personas and the persona DNA profile."
(Todd Warfel - Messagefirst)
"You can effectively focus on your website and intranet users by creating personas. Common complaints, mistakes and problems and be solved through using personas to provide a clear focus for website and intranet design. Case Study and benefits of using personas are provided."
(Catherine Elder - Prescient Digital Media)
Presentation from 2003
(Whitney Quesenbery)
"Improving your scenarios, reviews and usability testing with personas"
(Whitney Quesenbery)
"How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need and deliver results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. Discover the latest techniques for creating personas, including advice on conducting user interviews, new methods for applying quantitative research such as surveys and log file analysis, approaches for generating persona segmentation, and fun ideas for making your personas real. It's time to take personas to the next level."
(Steve Mulder - Mulder Media)Examples and templates
"Fictional examples of personas that include accessibility considerations."
(Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)
"One thing to point out, depending on the site and the requirements the information gathered may be different. With these I asked alot of questions about online shopping and other things related to the Daisy Bead site."
(Keith D Robinson - Asterisk)
"Fictional examples of user group profiles that include accessibility considerations."
(Shawn L Henry - Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design)
Three example personas drawn from client work by Quarry Integrated Communications.
A set of personas for a HR application, showing primary, secondary and other personas.
From Adaptive Path, a document showing the format for a sample persona.
Personas for a software development project.
"I'm sharing the source file templates for my data-driven personas. The main file is an InDesign (INDD) file and the visual chart is in Illustrator file. I've included a few versions, including PDF, CS3 and CS4. The CS3 and CS4 versions include a PDF."
(Todd Warfel)
"Based on a few requests, I’ve included a few versions, including PDF, CS3 and CS4. The CS3 and CS4 versions include a PDF."
(Todd Warfel)
A set of three personas for a financial investment website, showing personal narrative and key characteristics along with scenarios of use.
Set of personas apparently developed for use during the redevelopment of the WAI website.
Includes a persona of a webmaster.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Thinking like a storyteller
One of the great things about being an IXDA member is the nearly 18,000 other members and the resources that are shared.
Cindy Chastain-Thinking Like a Storyteller from Interaction Design Association.
"Storytelling is all about engagement. Designing with a narrative in mind can make a difference between a product that merely functions will and one that engages the minds and emotions of users. This session will explore how an understanding of narrative techniques can make us better designers."
As interaction designers we do well at facilitating the complex dialogue between people and the interactive products they use. But we often neglect to consider the story that evolves through the interactions people have with the things we make. Designing with a narrative in mind can make a difference between a product that merely functions well and a product that engages the minds, emotions and imaginations of users.
Drawing on personal experience, narrative theory and examples ranging from interactive products to film, this presentation is a call to action for designers to equip themselves with a deeper understanding of narrative techniques. It focuses on core aspects such as theme, scene-making, and sequencing to illustrate how thinking like a storyteller can make you a better designer. You’ll also learn how this approach can be a powerful basis for holistic design.
Cindy Chastain-Rapp has been exploring ways to engage an audience through storytelling, teaching, writing and design for over twelve years. Just recently she took on the role of Creative Director, Experience Architecture at Rapp, a global, full-service agency based in NYC. She has led projects for clients ranging from BBC Worldwide to Showtime, Fuse, Madison Square Garden, Coca-Cola and Unilever. Read Cindy's blog here:
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Making Money.
A simple and concise animated tour through the development of our the modern monetary system.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Handy meter
You never know when you might need the handy device below:
(I tried it out this morning while reading the latest plea from Tiger Woods' college girlfriend, public feedback on the Canadian federal budget, speculation on the iPad, and the spotty past of Jihad Jane)
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Scobleizer chats with Adobe about the Flash Platform on mobile
Scobleizer chats with folks from the Adobe Platform BU about Adobe Flash on mobile phones.
Covers three recent announcements:
1. A new 10.1 Flash Player for Android and Palm, with other platforms coming soon.
2. A new compiler/converter for packaging Flash apps up and shipping them on the iPhone and iPad.
3. A new AIR runtime for mobile phones so developers can ship AIR/Flash apps like Tweetdeck or Seesmic directly onto Android or Palm without doing additional work.
Erik Schonfeld's post gives a good tour of the issues and important points.
Posted via web from bitpakkit
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Handvetica - comp-y awesomeness
Found this great font for decks and docs around UX and UID work. I know it would be good for the right site or print piece as well, but this definitely keeps the handmade approach without having to resort to all the comic sans lookalikes which are hard to take seriously.You can make a title png or grab the whole font here.
It was handmade in Switzerland by Studio Kmzero, who have authored a few more excellent contemporary and well designed fonts. You can see those here.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
2010 - and where are they now?
You have a choice - make it work, keep your promise, and help people get stuff done - or fade away forever. It's never the whole story, but bringing a pure internal, ivory-tower, self indulgent, ICT-lead thinking approach to new products and strategies ensures you will have more of a chance to fail than ever before.
On that note, I was following a Google Buzz outburst on "where are they now" and it netted out a random collection of links to stories and posts about the new new thing that was not to be. In no particular order (and I will let someone else rant about the benefits or bonkers-ness of each) some of the ones that came up were:
- Virtual Boy
- Sinclair C5
- Consumer surface
- Palm Foleo 2.0
- Microsoft Courier
- iPhone tethering
- JooJoo
- XOXO OLPC laptop
- Duke Nukem Forever
- Microsoft's Cairo
- Apple's Taligent
- The CueCat
- CDN iPhone tethering
- Joost
- KnockaTV
- Vidoop
- CD-i
- Wikia
- Tipjoy
- Pownce
- Flowgram
- AllPeers
- Delver
- UMTS 3G video calls
- Modu
- The CueCat
- Two year battery for cell phones
- Teledesic
I know there's way more...what are they? Should some of these not be on the list? Why?
Someone else reminded me of the connection to this thread that sits squarely in Daniel Gilbert's book "Stumbling into Happiness" <-official site, not buy now link talks about our inability to predict the future. I love this quote from Gilbert's site, "Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan."
While we are not total failures, as evidenced by all our successes in improving the life of our peeps, I think we may cloud our view of the new new thing simply by focusing on the success of others sometimes. Call this a reality check...users will protect us from ourselves.
Now let's hope someone can turn this nonsense into an actually useful article.
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