Author: mpullen

Lean UX Design + Product Management + Development = 1 team Externalize! Goal-driven & outcome-focused Repeatable & routinized FLOW: think -> make -> check Focus on solving the right problem Generate many options & decide quickly what to pursue Recognize hypotheses & validate them Research with users is the best source of information & inspiration… Continue reading The 9 Principles of Lean User Experience

Zeldman is teaching a class “Selling Design” and has made an online reading list. http://www.zeldman.com/2012/01/11/selling-design-an-online-reading-list/ Demystifying Design – by Jeff Gothelf – A List Apart Design Criticism and the Creative Process – by Cassie McDaniel – A List Apart Personality in Design – by Aarron Walter – A List Apart Design Professionalism – by Andy… Continue reading Communication is a key skill as a designer

Curate forums for me I would like to have a spider go out and collect the references from multiple forums and put them in one place. I want to search this aggregate site not the individual rambling. Tell Mr Spider to go to sites X, Y and Z. Look for any topic on “UI patterns”… Continue reading Curate forums for me

Do Innovation Consultants Kill Innovation? ” Are companies more innovative than ever before? Judging from the vast number of Fortune 500 companies professing their commitment to innovation, the answer is yes. But we sense that the more a company talks, thinks, and strategizes about innovation, the less real, big innovation it produces.” -Jens Martin Skibsted… Continue reading Innovation in Big Companies

“We are ruined by our own biases. When making decisions, we see what we want, ignore probabilities, and minimize risks that uproot our hopes. What’s worse, “we are often confident even when we are wrong,” by Daniel Kahneman “How analytics harvested from massive databases will begin to inform our day-to-day business decisions. Call it Big… Continue reading Using Big Data to make better decisions

Your online portfolio http://carbonmade.com/ Your portfolio on an ipad http://www.xtrafolio.com/ So many portfolio tools are for images or graphics. I am looking for something that covers all of interaction and visual design so I can show click throughs and design interactions as well as graphics.

I thought this an interesting opposite of an Agile “Done.” Agile is focused on an engineering methodology of done. Below is a start up methodology of done. They are very different. I know this spectrum is very wide, but this is a good example of why each team has to define its operational rules and… Continue reading Done Manifesto

This fastcompany article is an interesting writeup of the expectations of users today. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665491/what-the-jawbone-ups-failures-tell-you-about-ui-design This is a review of a product (a wristband and smartphone app that track your wellness) that has spots of brilliance interrupted by transitions of annoyance. Follow his progression: · The wristband itself is superbly designed o track how much you’re… Continue reading User Expectations

Disruptive innovation Start with simple and affordable then change the definition. http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595

Just finished talking about “innovation” and what enterprise software companies mean by it. While the thoughts are still in my head I will write them down. It is not that this is rocket science but it seems to be missed in the discussions of doing design in a company. Is what you are working on… Continue reading Making or Saving Money

Many companies are lost when it comes to the buzzword “innovation.” This article hits on some problems I have encountered in other companies. People grasp for something to get their “innovation” then feel like it just doesn’t work. These ideas may work but what people need to do is learn the process by doing it… Continue reading 3 Barriers to Innovation

FACT: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency. Take the online color challenge, based on the official FM100 Hue Test by X-Rite. http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77&Lang=en I did this as quick as I could and got a 3. 0 is perfect. I am glad that I still… Continue reading Color Challenge

Now, let me tell you I am not a person that believes that you need to be honest 100% of the time. Sometimes you have to tell yourself what you want to hear to get through the day. However, after 17 years of working this is starting to drive me batty. Why is it that… Continue reading Intellectual Honesty

What an awesome way to learn about kearning and to put yourself to the test. Does someone do this for laying out forms? I could use that for teaching developers. http://type.method.ac/

How many times have I worked through a design got the team to agree on it and when it comes back it looks nothing alike? Design a form, design a screen, and layout the controls and the text. Make sure that the things that are grouped are what the user is looking for. Draw attention… Continue reading Developers: Just can’t see it

technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible products that work, beautifully, without fuss and with great style in simplicity NOT with ever longer lists of features and technical specifications “And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms… Continue reading Building a product. Features first?

What is the point of the UI Design review? to provide more information to ever increase the fidelity of the design with the understanding of the target workflows and users to communicate to the team to get buy-in from the team to critique design choices to challenge constraints What else happens in practice? an opportunity… Continue reading UI design reviews

This is brilliant design. A canvas containing cement allows the creation of a semipermanent structure in 24 hrs. The tent can be blown up and then soaked with water. After it dries the tent’s outer surface is cement and therefore durable. http://hunch.com/item/hn_3700624/

Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan This is a philosophical article on design and where design thinking belongs today. I was introduced to a few ideas and concepts that I had not encountered before. Most of the article is too “ivory tower” for me but I still woke up this morning thinking about… Continue reading Wicked Problems in Design Thinking

Here is the difference between good design and poor design from the visual standpoint. Stanford gives the information like this: http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php A designer designed them like this: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663552/infographic-of-the-day-the-inequality-of-america?partner=homepage_newsletter See attached for big version.

Helen Walters explains what design thinking is and why it is useful. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663480/helen-walters-design-thinking-buzzwords?partner=homepage_newsletter

“T-shaped is highly desired, but not sufficient. In staffing up teams, interview and test for I-shapedness. I don’t care how good someone is either at the pragmatic or abstract level, there is someone out there who is equally good and who has strength at both ends. Find that person.” – Bill Buxton http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jul2009/id20090713_332802.htm

I would love to create a design fair like the science fair. “An alarming study released last year found that American kids’ scores on tests measuring creativity have been steadily declining since 1990. The drop has serious implications for our nation’s competitiveness. A 1999 Department of Labor report outlining skills needed in the 21st-century workplace… Continue reading Teaching teens design

I thought this was pretty cool research that FastCompany review in an article. “Here’s one way you might use it: You’re on your usual early-morning jog. Your mp3 player is set to “shuffle.” A song comes up that you’ve heard one too many times. Instead of having to stop your run, take out your player,… Continue reading Alternate Input Device: Tapping Your Body

CIO Article: Politics in IT: Separate Operators From Performers How do you work with an operator?