A quick link to start the new year and attempt to hold on a new year’s resolution to make this blog a bit more lively: a lovely initiative by Jakub Linowski: Wireframes Magazine, a collaborative blog intending to reference design documentation approaches. Looking forward to see what comes next, I’ll definitely keep an eye on it!
Happy new year everyone !
Another must-read, or better in this case, a must-have for all designers, product developers and pretty much everyone involved in application design: Working through Screens: 100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work, an amazing online publication by Jakob Burghardt, a User Experience consultant from Seattle unning his own consultancy.
Working through Screens is an online book for product teams creating new or iteratively improved applications for thinking work. Written for use during early, formative conversations, it provides teams with a broad range of considerations for setting the overall direction and priorities for their onscreen tools. With hundreds of envisioning questions and fictional examples from clinical research, financial trading, and architecture, this volume can help definers and designers to explore innovative new directions for their products.
Available in 3 formats: HTML, printable PDF, and a pretty valuable summarized PDF version entitled Idea Cards to use in early workshops, this “book” basically walks us through a very broad range of topics, questions and ideas common or recurrent in Knowledge work applications, with very concrete examples and propositions, each time beautifully illustrated by very comprehensive and inspiring diagrams.
I haven’t had a chance yet to read it completely, but from what I’ve seen so far, I believe it’s definitely a fantastic way to educate and communicate on innovation and its added values, as well as a great reference to keep during the whole application ideation process.
Last but not least, as a cherry on a cake, even though it’s already a very dense publication, apparently it’s only the first of a serie… I’m really looking forward the sequel (*), congrats !
(*) I’m actually also looking forward a printed version (I think I’d love to see this in a nice binder) I could buy 
A must-read imho: Alan Cooper’s closing keynote at the latest Agile08 Conference… The following abstract should be enough to get you interested
My belief in the value of detailed written design has often led enthusiasts of Agile to assume that I am an adherent of the obsolete, and justly maligned, waterfall method of software construction. I was pleased to have this opportunity to state my position with clarity and precision, not to mention making the case for effective collaboration between interaction designers and Agile programmers.
Wow, almost 2 months since I last posted on this blog (and on LC’s blog as well actually). I’m not going to pretend I’m over-surprised as I pretty much knew about my deficiencies regarding blog updates, but hey, this doesn’t mean I don’t have any excuses:
That being said, there has been some rather important news happening from the Adobe Consulting front-end over the last weeks, with two pretty major projects moved to opensource.adobe.com, which I thought were worth mentioning:
and Xavier’s posts for more details.Speak to you on monday, enjoy the summer weekend
A new excellent initiative by Peter Elst: RIAJobs, a new job board directed at RIA practitioners, with already a bunch of offers from leading agencies, even some from Belgium ! My only wish so far would be to see UX-related jobs appear and flourish on the site, but anyway for now, great initiative, looking forward to see how this evolves, congrats Peter and good luck !
(Via Kalle) Moodstream is a new, highly innovative, application by Getty Images, basically offering a new approach to media research and mood board composition.
For those of you not familiar with moodboards, these are basically an early stage deliverable of the design process, presenting an assembly of materials of all kinds (fabrics, images, videos, sounds, textures etc…), capturing a specific ambiance/mood one wishes to communicate with a design. Moodstream allows you to research the Getty Images media bank, via a rich interface where you can specify and fine tune the ambiance you are looking for, and receive in return a live stream of medias (images, videos, sounds) that reflect that specified mood. When you see/hear something that fits your needs, you can add it to a virtual moodboard that can be saved, replayed, and of course you can buy the selected media from Getty ^^.
Obviously we could argue over the question to know wether this works better or not than classical search interfaces, but what is certain for me is that I’m definitely convinced that the best way to figure it out and discover new, innovative solutions is to try things out… And given the organic nature of “mood boarding”, I think this application is truly a great way to approach the problem. And it’s beautifully executed.
No, this post isn’t about doing a comparative review of these interaction design tools. It’s about relaying an astonishing news I just read on the IxDA message board: iRise just filed a lawsuit against Axure for “patent infringement”.
For those who don’t know about these 2 applications, iRise and Axure are two rather specialized software design applications that pretty much simply take the wireframing process a step further, by allowing designers to make their wireframes interactive and simulate the actual application interactions and flows. Interesting stuff, but utterly specialized niche market. I must also say that while these two tools share a rather similar objective, their accompanying business approach are very different, with Axure being marketed at a reasonnable 589$, while iRise specifically targets large business corporations with a 6-10,000$ price tag.
Now, I’m not going to get into the specifics of both applications (after all, both are Lovely Charts competitors, huhuhu ^^), but I just wanted to relay this (absolutely silly) astonishing information. I’ll try to investigate more on the patent and lawsuit details over the weekend to make sure only exact and complete information is relayed on this blog, but meanwhile, the fact is iRise is suing Axure, and they seem to be proud of it. Can’t help to wonder if and how this will affect tools like Thermo, specially when reading things like “The invention covered by this patent is the use of a graphical, drag-and-drop interface to allow non-technical users to define functionally rich simulations – without resorting to software code to generate them.” (iRise patent no. 7,174,286)
Brrrrr, scary. Think twice the next time you want to annotate a wireframe, that’s an iRise invention. Sad, very sad, and another evidence that software and interaction patents are evil.
Last minute addition: all the patent’s details can be found here.
Stumbled upon this excellent presentation by Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path on Making Good Design Decisions, discussing the mysteries behind the every day guesses every designer makes… And the rationales behind these ^^. It reminded me of this famous presentation by Jared Spool: The Dawning of the age of Experience where he notably makes this amusing but nevertheless very relevant comparison with chicken sexing, basically claiming that experience design “can be learned, but is not opened to introspection”.
Expert chick sexers are able to quickly and reliably determine the sex of day-old chicks on the basis of very subtle perceptual cues. They claim that in many cases they have no idea how they make their decisions. They just look at the rear end of a chick, and ‘see’ that it is either male or female. (from cogprints)
If you are a designer, doesn’t this sound familiar to you?
