BUX – Bentley Human Factors & Information Design Organization

“As UX professionals, we generally have an abundant breadth of experience across different industries and businesses. Our clients, on the other hand, have great depth of knowledge in their own domain. However, only users themselves can intimately appreciate their own needs, and user experience is the only field that considers the user’s perspective at every stage of a project.” View the entire story at UXmatters.

“When you do a lot of writing, you’ll end up with lots of ideas and articles at various stages, including your idea lists, articles you’ve just started writing, halfway-finished articles, completed drafts that you need to review, final versions you’re waiting to publish, and articles that have already been published. It’s hard to keep track of all these pieces without good organization.” Learn more at UXmatters.

“Among iOS developers, the day that you finally submit your app for Apple’s approval can be a tense one. Even when you’ve seemingly followed the guidelines, polished the code and passed every field test, Apple can still reject your app for almost any reason.” Learn more at Mashable.

“The key statement of Fitts’s Law is that the time required to move a pointing device to a target is a function of the distance to the target and its size. In layman’s terms: the closer and larger a target, the faster it is to click on that target. This is easy to understand, not too difficult to implement and it doesn’t seem to make much sense to contradict such a simple and obvious statement. However…” Learn more on Smashing Magazine.

“The Semantic Web is a movement that aims to add value and utility to online information by structuring data in a way that both computers and humans can understand. The goal: computer systems that can understand and infer meaning – for instance, a computer system that knows the difference between an “organ” that is a musical instrument, and an “organ” that lives inside your body. Services like Siri, Wolfram Alpha, and Knowledge Graph have shown us what it’s like to consume content on the Semantic Web. But what if your business wants to create Semantic Web content?” View the full article on The Globe and Mail.

“In-person user research has been around the longest, and is still widely used as a great way to gather feedback on websites, advertisements, or software. In-person research usually involves letting users perform tasks on a computer while asking them questions, observing their behaviors and body language, or having them think out loud. Additional hardware can be used, such as eye tracking devices.” See the full story at UX Magazine.

“Are you worried about how customers in other countries will react to your product or service? Not really sure who your international customers even are, or what they want and need? To find out, it might be time to pop outside the domestic market and conduct an international user research study.” Read the full article at UX Magazine.

“The concept of responsive design—the practice of creating digital experiences that adapt to seamlessly deliver content suited to the device context of the user’s operating system, screen size, or orientation—has been around for quite some time. For a variety of reasons, more companies are now giving responsive design serious consideration. The implications of moving to a responsive approach of creating adaptable designs can seem overwhelming, but the benefits can be significant.” Read the complete article at UX Magazine.

Wireframes have played an increasingly leading role in the modern Web development process. They provide a simple way of validating user interface and layout and are cheaper and faster to produce than a final visual comp. However, most of the methods and techniques used to create them are far from being efficient, contradicting the principles and values that made wireframing useful in first place. – Read more about it at UX Magazine

Product designers are jacks-of-all-trades, expected to deliver interaction design, information architecture, visual design, and even front-end code. – Read more about it at Peter Me

What today’s end-users want are deeper experiences for fulfilment, both online and offline. The role of a business now is to orchestrate such experiences for its customers, in such a way that the memory itself becomes part of the product – the “experience”. – Read the full article at Hyper Island

“In 1977, the architect Christopher Alexander cowrote a book named A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, introducing the concept of pattern language as “a structured method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise.” The goal of the book was to give ordinary people — not just architects and governments — a blueprint for improving their own towns and communities.” Read the full article at Smashing Magazine.

“While the CIA’s The World Factbook may put the literacy rate of most highly developed nations at 99%—where those age 15 and older can read and write—that doesn’t account for how many can read and write well, or even comfortably. In the United States, one out of seven people have trouble reading anything more challenging than a single sentence, much less a string of them or a series of paragraphs. And in the United Kingdom, one in six struggles with literacy.” View the entire article at Raven Tools.

“At Google X, the company’s now-not-so-top-secret R&D lab, engineers and neuroscientists and artificial-intelligence experts dream up a future without the pressure of market deadlines: driverless cars, robots, space elevators. But for lead product manager Steve Lee, his X pursuits are anything but an exercise in the fantastical: Project Glass, the futuristic eyeware he’s developing with an interactive heads-up display, might just hit market in the near future alongside products like Gmail and Android.” Read the full story on Fast Co. Design.

“Over the last decade, the UX discipline has matured and demand for our skills has increased.  Many companies have created User Experience Design departments because they have come to recognize that product development efforts are vastly more successful when they include user research, task analysis, user-centered design, information architecture, and usability testing. We’ve built our understanding of our place in the product development world upon our ability to design great experiences, satisfy users, and reduce development risk and costs.” View the full article at UXmatters.

“Contextual inquiries require a difficult balance between traditional interviewing and ethnographic observation. The name contextual inquiry is foreign to most people outside the field of user experience, and people don’t understand what this approach involves, leading to a lot of misconceptions. In this article, I’ll discuss the most common problems you’ll face when conducting contextual inquiries and how to solve them.” Read the full piece at UXmatters.

“Survey Design DO’s & DON’Ts” – Miriam Gerver Donath, Mon. 2/4 @ 7:30-9:00 pm in Smith 122

Survey design is important because it affects response rate (item and unit) and data quality (introduce bias), which, in turn, affects survey results. As someone who might work directly or tangentially with a market research, or embark on your own research, this presentation will help you think about survey design issues and improve surveys you encounter, as well as give some guidelines and resources. These will be set within the cognitive response model of question comprehension, information retrieval, judgment in responding to a question, and providing a response. Learn more about Miriam Gerver Donath. This event will be recorded and can be attended remotely via Centra.

“Customer experience is always a little tricky to explain. It’s just so darn big. What doesn’t it cover (not much) and who is responsible (good question). Often, customer experience is translated into user experience – the front-end digital experience of users.” Read more via Disambiguity.

“In the U.S., individual identity is more important than the group, whose primary purpose is to support individual achievement. Americans subscribe to an optimistic concept of social mobility and feel free to ‘butterfly’ among multiple groups depending on their current passions, beliefs, or needs. In contrast, Europeans generally have a more restrictive sense of social class and group identity that shapes how they define themselves as individuals.” Read about it via Adaptive Path.

“I have an idea for a new product — can I tell you about it? It will take months to develop, and even though this kind of thing is usually given away for free, I’m going to charge for it. Oh, and the market for it probably won’t be very big… Wait, come back! Where are you going?!” Read more via Smashing Magazine.