hFIDO Blog

“[T]he importance of visual storytelling is clearly one of the year’s breakout trends. Facebook Timeline, Pinterest, and Instagram are forcing brands to think and act more visually. Couple that with the impact of mobile browsing, and these emerging trends give new meaning to the phrase ‘show, don’t tell.’ In other words, the ‘beautification of the web’ era is upon us. How does this shift toward visual storytelling impact your content marketing plan? Let’s explore some trends that illustrate where we are and where we’re going.”

Read the full article on Mashable.

“Since the early days of GUIs, the scrollbar has provided a way for users to navigate around an object that’s too large to fit within a window. However, over the past few years, users have been given other ways to scroll: mice with scrollwheels, laptop trackpads with scrolling capabilities, and a new set of gestures for mobile devices and tablets. With this reduction of the role of scrollbars, it’s important for designers to be conscious of the scrollbar’s benefits and drawbacks, and to know how to replace it with other elements that have similar benefits.”

Read the full article on UX Magazine.

From 1-2 PM on Friday, November 1, Steven Dow of Carnegie Mellon University will discuss how technologies and services improve through iterative design - refreshments will be offered. Steven Dow is an Assistant Professor at the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he researches human-computer interaction, design education, and social computing. He is co-recipient of two National Science Foundation grants, Stanford’s Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. He received an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.

How do iterative practices such as critique and reflection affect design results for individuals, groups, and crowds? Dow’s experiments have found that, even under tight time constraints when the common intuition is to stop iterating and start refining, iterative prototyping practices such as critique and reflection helps designers learn. Results also show that creating and receiving feedback on multiple designs in parallel—as opposed to serial iteration—leads to more divergent ideation, more explicit comparison, less investment in a single concept, and better overall performance. Small groups who produce and share multiple designs report a greater increase in rapport, exchange more verbal information, share more features, and reach a better consensus. Dow’s work demonstrates that crowd workers perform better and learn from iterative assessments. Visit the MIT site for more details.

The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) will be held at the Westin Boston Waterfront, October 22-26. User Experience Day is a dedicated programming track geared for user experience (UX) professionals on Wednesday, October 24, 8:30 am to 7:00 pm.

The goal is to deliver a great program of techni­cal sessions and networking opportunities for all attendees. This is your chance to make personal connections with a variety of UX professionals from around the world. The full day of high-quality programming includes something for everyone:

• 8:30 to 10:00 am - Invited speaker Bill Buxton, author and principal UX researcher at Microsoft Re­search, presents “The Human Factors of ‘Simple’ Devices”
• 10:30 am to 12:00 noon - “UX and Agile Development” panel discussion chaired by Marc L. Resnick of Bentley University with John F. (Jeff) Kelley of IBM, Jay Elkerton of Emerson Process Management, Russ Beebe of Vanderbilt University, and Ania Rodriguez of Key Lime Interactive
• 1:30 to 3:00 pm - Best UX paper competition
• TBD - Future leaders speed networking (by invitation only), sponsored by Key Lime Inter­active
• 5:30 to 7:00 pm - Happy hour at Lucky’s Lounge, sponsored by Emerson Process Management

Interested? Learn more about User Experience Day events  and also HFES conference information.