Sketching for innovation at the SA|UX forum

Sketching is an essential tool for innovation. If you don’t explore new ideas effectively and cheaply at the start of a project, you risk expensive failures. At the fifth SA|UX forum Cape Town meet-up, we had some great presentations about the subject. My talk covered the essentials of sketching for innovation: I’ve guest blogged it over on …

Vodacom service: Experience the dancing bear

Signing up with Vodacom for an iPhone: it worked, but only just. Next to Apple’s amazing user experience design, Vodacom’s service design looks distinctly shabby. Sorting it out would benefit customers and shareholders. A “dancing bear” is Alan Cooper’s term for a piece of technology that gets accepted because it does something valuable – not …

Completed UX project: Desktop design tool for antenna engineers

“Awesomeness” was one of the project goals. User-centred design helped to deliver it. As we use wi-fi networks, satellite TV, mobile phones, we don’t give a thought to the antennas that makes them work. But designing antennas is hard. It’s almost as much an art as a science, takes lots of knowledge, dedication and experience… …

Balsamiq starts to show promise

Rapid interface sketching tool Balsamiq allows anyone to throw simple clickable interfaces together quickly. But if decides to become a professional tool for interaction designers, it still has a way to go. Balsamiq is a tool for creating rapid interface sketches. Due to skilful social marketing, its reputation is spreading fast.  And at $79.99 it’s …

Three blades to Occam’s Razor

The principle of Occam’s Razor offers interaction designers three ways to keep complexity under control. Occam’s razor has been really useful to me on several projects recently. It’s nothing new. Occam was around in the 14th Century. And it wasn’t even his idea: it might well have been Aristotle’s. Perhaps that long history proves that …

Ten things user experience design is NOT

Whitney Hess has written a really good post on Mashable which summarises ten major misconceptions that organisations often have about user experience. I don’t usually post straight pointers to other people’s work, but this one is a beauty. The 10 things user experience design is NOT… 1. …user interface design 2. …a step in the …

Quick tip for using a big monitor productively

Last year I got a big monitor, because I thought it would boost my productivity. It did, but only after I added a special piece of window management software. I got a 22 inch Samsung with a resolution of 1680×1050. This was a mistake: To really boost productivity I should have bought a bigger one. …