All eight talks from UX Thursday, each distilled into 100(ish) words based on the notes I took.
Marveling at the mundane
Counting down seconds, adding up keystrokes
Limiting a person’s checkout time isn’t the norm for most ecommerce sites, but in the ticketing world we’ve come to expect it. Sellers want to create urgency. As buyers, we want fairness.
But how much time? And how can designers of such experiences make sure they’re being fair to users while still meeting the requirement for urgency?
The imperative of change management
Sketchnote from last week's Refresh PGH
Best pro tip I took away from this: To test your full color designs and find out how effectively they convey contrast, switch them over to black and white and see what happens.
Steel City Codefest postscript
Quotable: Edward Tufte
"It is not how much empty space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is arranged."
~ Edward Tufte, "Envisioning Information"
On hackathons, UX, and communities that make things together
No more hemming & hawing: I am an information architect
Ever since I decided to pursue a career in UX, I’ve struggled to explain to the world at large exactly what I’m doing with my life. It’s happened with friends, with family, with new acquaintances who invariably ask, “So what do you do?” What I've done is freeze, trying to think up creative ways to answer.
This is the job
I'd rather take the bus, but Pittsburgh's public transit is doing its best to convince me to drive
And now for something completely different.
When I started blogging here, the point was to give myself a space where I could think through issues specifically related to information, design, and technology. But to paraphrase Ben Folds, today I have the urge to get on the microphone and talk about some shit that’s been on my mind … and it has nothing to do with UX.
What red food dye taught me about information architecture
You say empathic, I say empathetic: What it means in UX to have empathy as a skill
In UX today, it's well understood that empathy is important to user-centered design, but I also sense the word is overused to the point of banality. I wondered what the difference was between “empathic” and “empathetic" (if there was one), and I began to consider what UXers mean in the first place when we talk about empathy as a skill.
Weekend reading
If you need me, I'll be curled up with these and a pot of coffee.
Steve Krug's "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" and Jeff Johnson's "Designing with the Mind in Mind."
UX quotable: Jesse James Garrett
Straight from the sketchbook ...
... which reminds me that Garrett's closing plenary from the 2009 IA Summit really ought to be next at the top of my reading list.
Encounters, Vol. 1
Graduate school isn’t for finding yourself. (Until it is.)
Last night, I delivered my final presentation in my final class on my final day of graduate school. My idea of a celebration will be to hunker down today and intensify my search for a job, and try not to dwell so much on how I could complete a master’s degree with feeling like a master of so little.
What's in a homepage? Often, surprisingly little for users
Sketchnotes from "The Business of Design" panel at CMU
UX quotable: Karl Fast
See the original tweet, and the interesting conversation that follows it, here.