This site posts inspiring user experience quotes on \”quote cards\” that you can save or print, to remind user experience designers of the impact that their work has on the world.

When I took my first look at the blog one of the quote cards jumped out at me immediately. It was a quote by Kathy Sierra under the post “The Best User Experiences are Enchanting.” Katy’s quote is as follows:

The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it’s the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project.

and my response:

I totally agree…when enchantment is what the user wants or needs. In many other cases the best user experiences are invisible. The people we design for are often delighted by simply accomplishing their intended goals. We as designers and UX practitioners are commonly guilty of creating disruptions along the way. In my experience, the most successful user experiences are defined at the overlap of business goals/objectives and user wants/needs. Leaning in one direction or the other is suboptimal. Enchantment sometimes fits perfectly in that overlap but its not as often as we might like to believe. Just ask your users :)

So go give InspireUX a look. Its a great concept with potential to add a lot to our community.

There are a small minority of people in the world who when they focus their attention in a specific direction something big always happens. More often than not they possess a rare combination of intellect, passion and skill allowing them to locate the haystack, assemble the team to find and remove the needle, and spin the straw into gold–all the while working toward a greater good!

Steve Wolf, a friend, colleague and inspiration, happens to be one of those people and he’s recently set out on a new path to stir up something big in the nonprofit space. To that end he’s launched a blog called FindingMyDotOrg where he intends to gather thoughts, inspiration and research toward his next venture while simultaneously allowing us to share in his journey.

I suggest you check it out. I know I’ll be watching!

For the average U.S. company, Gilmore and Pine have simple advice: think less about where to put ads—ubiquity is killing advertising’s power—and more about how to shape the places customers interact with their products. Example: REI, the outdoor-gear company. In 1996 REI opened a flagship location in Seattle with a climbing wall and a walking trail. The climbing wall isn’t some little display—in fact you have to pay to use it. The location also features a meeting space for local nonprofits. The store was more ambitious than any other the company had built, but it has become the city’s No. 2 tourist attraction after Pike Place Market. Consumers bond with REI’s goods in a way they never will with an ad. True, only 1.6 million people a year visit the REI store, but Gilmore and Pine reason that creating 1.6 million knowledgeable customers will be more lucrative than reaching 5 million with an ad campaign: “Stop saying what your offerings are through advertising and start creating places—permanent or temporary, physical or virtual—where people can experience what those offerings, as well as your enterprise, actually are.”

Andy Rutledge has written a nice piece over on A List Apart titled On Creativity. He does a great job at teasing out some of the same issues as he challenges and defines creativity. Great piece of work Andy!

Andrew:

Thanks for taking the time to share your perspective. Obviously a lot of thought went into this piece. Couple of comments to add.

1) Cooper’s approach to personas works well for Cooper however it doesn’t necessarily transfer to the rest of us working in our varied environments with myriad different partners and stakeholders.

2) The 37signals thoughts on designing for oneself are noted. I am familiar with this line of thinking and believe it works for some. I refer to this approach as Designer-Centered Design. My personal preference is to practice User-Centered Design. Here’s the continuum as I see it.

Design for Myself (hit or miss)
I am the user (good)
I asked the User (better)
I Observed the User (best)

Like many folks who’ve been in the this field for a while I started in product design and software before the Internet blossomed. I have always been a staunch believer in User-Centered Design even before I knew what it was. Designing software using a UCD methodology meant designing for the required user groups and involving them in the process from beginning to end. The end result was a designed product guided and approved by the people who would use it. Personas were not really necessary.

That all changed when individual software products were adopted and used by masses of people. Suddenly it became impossible to design for and involve all the user groups in the process. It was personas that allowed us to construct archetypal users from these masses. These personified users were developed in a way that allowed us to design for their needs and simultaneously meet the needs of the broader user groups.

In the beginning the personas were one off creations for a specific problem at hand. They were used by the internal team for a current project. IMO we began to run into all kinds of problems when our clients, partners and stakeholders took a liking to the personas we were creating. One the one hand this was a wonderful thing because it brought everyone together in the process. On the other hand there were several negative effects…a few include:

1) The personas were interpreted more deeply than the data behind them allowed.
2) The personas were used outside the scope of their intended use.
3) We began to make the personas more and more general to allow for mixed use which meant they were less useful for specific tasks at hand.

To this day I’m still a fan of a more rigorous approach to designing personas. I do think they can be extremely valuable tools for broader audiences and as such I have moved a bit more in the direction of generalizing them for multiple uses. I think it’s also worth noting that personas are not the end-all-be-all tool. There are times when alternative outputs from research are better suited to guide design.

Earlier this week, fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz discussed the new Samsung set top See’N'Search. The device is just one example of how search is going to evolve. I’ve said this before, yet it still has not sunk in for many. Search on the desktop is not the end game. It is the starting point today, and Google has won that medium. When we think about Mobile Search, Local Search, Video and Image Search — and even search on the set top, we have yet to declare a winner, and I would suggest we have yet to even meet all the players.

The closing paragraph of the Keynote study summed it up fairly well. “Whatever the front end, whatever the search domain, the news is sure to be good for users. With such intense competition, and so much money at stake, the leading search providers will continue to make the user experience better and better, and make it easier and easier to find whatever it is we seek.”

So, the future of SEO as defined today is a bleak one. Whether we merely change the description of SEO or use a new acronym like DAO, the days of success being optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page is going to end up just like our old description of the engines: as dinosaurs. Extinct dinosaurs.

Trixie Tracker is a full-featured online tool that allows new parents to keep detailed records and create visually striking charts for Sleep, Diapers, Bottles, Solids, Nursing, Pumping and Medicine. You’ll love the charting on diaper leaks, solid food intake, and the especially useful medicine tracker. Take a look at the breast milk inventory graphic:

Trixie Tracker was invented by a stay-at-home dad to help take better care of his new daughter. He knew there was a daily schedule and wanted to understand it, but it was too difficult to keep track of all the little baby care details.

Great tool. Check it out.

The game is staged in a virtual city where players complete tasks to earn the right to register for a cool prize–anti-gravity boots if I recall. The came is really well done, the lessons are solid and the play itself is enough to keep you engaged. Nice!

The International Journal of Design is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to publishing research papers in all fields of design, including industrial design, visual communication design, interface design, animation and game design, architectural design, urban design, and other design related fields.

Currently the organization seems to be viewing interaction design through a product/industrial design lense. Perhaps we can change that with a bit of prodding, participation, and patronage.