I am so happy to announce that finally someone has reviewed my second volume of The Goldberg Variations: The Redemption of the Damned. In many ways this book is my most daring and innovative work to date. And the review is as lyrical as it is insightful, I have reprinted it below. But you can…
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The UX Designer’s Charlatan Test
A First Step towards UX Sanity Checking ABSTRACT This paper proposes an introspective test to see whether the reader of this paper is a charlatan UX practitioner. If so, it points ways the reader can professionalize their practice. For the non-UX professional this questionnaire can act as an interview script to ascertain how professional a…
Taking the Fast RIDE: Designing While Being Agile
A new year and a new post in my less than active blog, here is an article that originally appeared in interactions magazine. While many design methods are practiced “in the wild,” the most prevalent one appears to be “Design first and ask questions later”—also known as “Throw it over the wall and see if…
The mythical 80/20 rule
In a sad day for most digital products and services, an italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, observed that 80% of Italy’s wealth was owned by 20% of the population. From that economic observation has come a torrent of the most far flung interpretations of a non-existent 80-20 rule. There is no 80-20 rule. There never was…
Confusing a Heuristic with a Moral Imperative
Heuristics are excellent assistance in identifying potential problems with a given user interface design. The trouble lies when people come to rely on these as the sole input, that somehow they can come and overtake the more rigorous and far more accurate methods of evaluation. So please don’t read below as being anti-heuristic but rather…
Measuring the User Experience
This weeks post is a review of the book Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert. From time to time other book reviews will follow. Why a book review The current state of books on UX is deplorable. Many UX books can’t make up their mind if they are about a given…
Misleading Designs
(Adapted from a previous editorial I wrote for interactions Magazine) This editorial is from a controversial issue on measuring usability. This special issue covered CIF usability testing (a seemingly innocuous if important topic). Upon publication many took strong esxception to our coverage of CIF testing. But perhaps these critics also took exception to our criticizing…
Results Are In: Fidelity Deception Ranks High on Usability Problems
This editorial is from a controversial issue on measuring usability. This special issue covered CIF usability testing (a seemingly innocuous if important topic). Upon publication many took strong esxception to our coverage of CIF testing. But perhaps these critics also took exception to our criticizing a practice all too often employed: how to lie with…
Prototyping 1: What does a prototype do
A series on prototyping In the 10 years since my book on prototyping first came on the scene there was precious little written about the professional way to prototype. Today prototyping seems to be the hot topic, unfortunately most of the current stuff available on the internet only give an isolated tip or trick. What…
Prototyping 2: What is a prototype
In my last post I discussed what a prototype does. Now here comes a far trickier question: what is a prototype. A prototype turns out to be quite complex, and rightly so. Because to get the benefits of prototyping (the subject of my next post), a prototyper must understand these vital concepts, otherwise you are…