The Shift Back from Management Moving from management back into the role of an individual contributor — especially if you go out as a freelancer or consultant — can be as overwhelming and confusing as moving into leadership from an individual contributor role. Some of the reasons are similar but some are very different. When I left my management…
As part of my classes that I teach at CCA, interaction design patterns come up. Sometimes in their simple form of elements as captured in a style guide and sometimes in the context of the complete design and development toolkit like we are seeing today. I try to give my students a bit of history…
Thoughts from a digital packrat As a person who has created a lot of different types of social experiences over the years and who has written about social experiences (Designing Social Interfaces from O’Reilly Media), I have accounts all over the internet and my phone is littered with social apps that I tried a couple of…
I am currently teaching systems design at California College of Arts and we have been talking about the social architecture for social interfaces. Key to the foundation for social experiences is online identity and understanding the spectrum of ways that people can and want to represent themselves online. As designers we can give people the…
I have been working on this book material for awhile – I started writing the book about a year after we did our talk at the IA Summit and then it stalled as I began working on my Dr. Leslie book and then began teaching at CCA. So to force myself to continue and to…
In the spring I will be teaching a Systems class at CCA. I will be integrating systems which covers systems, mapping, information architecture with social interface design thinking as well since so much of developing a social design with reputation, identity, privacy, engagement and activities is essentially systems thinking. So while the mechanics are going…
I am thick in the middle of research for my book and I am having a blast. The rabbit trails that I find myself traversing is reinvigorating my love of the trivia and interesting things you can find on the internet and in the library. That serendipitous wandering that I used to do when the…
Last semester I taught a class. This semester, I have embarked again on the journey that is “writing a book”. I have picked back up, the project I started in 2004, which was a remix of my thesis project from graduate school—a book version with narrative and history about Dr. Robert L. Leslie and the Composing…
Combine an Interaction Design program, with a crash course in visual design, mix it up with how visual design principles, practices and approaches intersect and influence designing the full user experience and you get the class I am teaching. We are doing a crash course in the basics – gestalt principles, typography basics, type history,…
As part of the class I am teaching – Visual Interaction Design – we are doing a module on typography and type design. Tangential to that is type history – not specifically relevant but great background for the designers. So starting with the type history deck provided by Ellen Lupton, which is part of her…
UPDATED 2016 – I teach Visual Interaction Design at CCA (California College of the Arts) – which is a crash course in visual design for interaction designers. I reference a lot of great books that I think are worthy of having on the shelf as I work up my curriculum and syllabus. Some old standards have gone…
I’ll be doing a webcast of my Foundations of Social Interface Design over at O’Reilly on August 20, 2015. Here’s what I’ll be talking about – check it out and hope to see you there: Description: Designing social sites and mobile applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, entails unique challenges way…
I wrote a piece pondering some questions coming out of the Ellen Pao / Kleiner Perkins trial. I sat on the jury for five weeks and although I was an alternate and didn’t get to deliberate, I came away with a host of questions about our industry and how we in UX, nested inside tech,…
Christian and I are currently working on a revision of the Social patterns book. We talked to Mary Treseler last year at the IA Summit – where we signed free books – about a second version and finally by December we signed our contract. This time around though, we are on a super accelerated schedule…
I had the pleasure of teaching recently as part of the Design Writing Summit crafted together by Christina Wodtke and sponsored by Boxes and Arrows. It was as enlightening as exhilarating. Each of us had the opportunity to also participate in the sessions with the other session leaders so I got to participate in writing exercises…