Yesterday I went down to a client’s with one of my team members to start a new project. He rented a car and ended up with a Mazda 7. While driving, we tried to adjust the temperature in the car but had little success. The dashboard offers 3 dials – 3 – yes 3, for…
You know you want to. You really do want to learn all you can about design patterns. Perhaps even write a batch and contribute to the open patterns movement. Or maybe you want to bring some order to the chaos in your studio and save your company some money. We’ll show you how. Design Patterns:…
We, Christian Crumlish, Lucas Pettinati and I, taught our Patterns Library workshop on Friday morning and I think it went really well. The feedback has been good so far and now I am very excited about taking the longer workshop to the IA Summit. We have more material and more exercises and ideas for more…
Published today on Boxes and Arrows, Will Evans interviews Christian Crumlish, Lucas Pettinati and I about design patterns, building pattern libraries and things like constraints and ethics. “Constraints are a fact of life. Patterns are just tools to guide decisions. Converting every pattern to a component solution with skin and code will limit a designers…
(meant to blog this when it came out and obviously I forgot) whitney hess writes a timely and well thought out article about common misconceptions in user experience design. I am quoted twice in the piece. Several of my peeps are quoted as well. Whitney did a great job crafting the piece around all these…
The other night at dinner, a friend asked how the book was coming and what part I was working on now. I mentioned I was writing about communication and activity and about to start a chapter in our “What’s Next” section of the book. The question started us talking about what IS coming next? Everything…
The conference season is coming up and I will be speaking and teaching a host of workshops in the coming months. Should be an interesting spring talking about patterns and patterns for social design. Stop by and say hi or sign up for one of our workshops – they should be fun and interactive. IxDA…
As I have made the transition to consulting and back to hands on work, I find that the tools I have been using are insufficient for my needs. I can wireframe and create flows and use cases very easily with Omnigraffle, but I find it lacking for creating interactive prototypes. I have investigated Axure and…
from the blog TheHappinessProject a post about new year’s resolutions and writing up your personal commandments. The author has her 12 for the year but at the end of the post she listed these items out that others had shared. The bolded items are ones I think I will pay special attention to this coming…
BJ Fogg and a bunch of other really smart people from Stanford are looking at the psychology of Facebook and how persuasion in the social environment affects behavior. They are collecting essays into a book and are curating it online in a public way. The table of contents is up for review and there is…
The School of Visual Arts is taking applications for its very first MFA in Interaction Design. I am proud to say that my friend and former colleague at Boxes and Arrows, Liz Danzico is the chair and the brains behind this new venture. They have a crack group of faculty, drawing from some of the…
As the writing of the book hits a good momentum, we are starting to share our work with our editors and the patterns with the public. It’s an interesting process, in that we are writing in DocBook – an xml format – and doing all the styling for the final online presentation as we go….
As Christian and I start to get deeper into our book, we have discussed between ourselves and our editor, the idea of opening the process up to those interested in Social Patterns. We have created a wiki at designingsocialinterfaces.com and are starting to post the patterns we are writing as we work through the chapters….
last night as the polls were closing and the election data was coming in, I stayed up to date by flipping around the tv channels AND visiting several websites. I was impressed by the interactive maps and information design of the NYTimes and MSNBC. Both sites had very clear information, fun interactions to get more…
i have had grandiose plans to blog frequently but then lately lots of things have come up and i keep forgetting. the book writing is in full swing and we are working through how to share the patterns in progress with the community. we have a blog and a wiki set up over on our…