The User Experience world is filled with many disciplines: information architecture, user researcher, interaction design, copywriting, and visual design — to name just a few. Each of these disciplines have a rich history, a deep knowledge base, and an extensive tool set. Each takes a lifetime to master.
While the successful team needs all of these [...]

From a user experience professional perspective, the current economy has a weird convergence happening:

Because of the economic downturn (due to the rising fuel costs and mortgage market crisis), some companies are laying off and some are disappearing outright.
Because executives understand the competitive value of creating great experiences, user experience professionals are in great demand.

This convergence [...]

We’ve got a unique and exciting UIE Virtual Seminar coming up in September:
Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Time: 1pm ET / Noon CT / 11am MT / 10am PT
When looking over someone else’s design, how do you ensure you’re delivering valuable insights that bring new perspectives to the table?
The best critique [...]

Innovation has become such a buzzword, it’s nearly meaningless. But that doesn’t mean innovation itself is dead. In this week’s show, we sat down with Scott Berkun, the dynamic speaker and author of “The Myths of Innovation.“

 

 SpoolCast: Creating a Culture of Innovation with Scott Berkun [30:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the corporate boardroom, Innovation has moved beyond the fad stage and has now become an enterprise mandate. Problem is, ordering your institution to innovate is akin to a gym teacher ordering the class to meditate. (“OK CLASS, TODAY WE’RE GOING TO MEDITATE. BEGIN. ONE. TWO. MEDITATE. THREE. FOUR. MEDITATE. SPOOL! YOU’RE NOT MEDITATING!” Is [...]

A few years back, Blockbuster, the video rental business, launched an amazing new service. Customers could select movies from the company’s web site, which Blockbuster would mail to their home. The customers could take as long as they wanted to watch the videos, returning the DVDs any time without late fees, all for a recurring [...]

Flickr, the online photosharing web site, changed everything for web applications. Flickr was one of the first instances where developers combined elements of Flash and AJAX in a seamless form, along with the HTML page.
What many people don’t know is that Flickr wasn’t originally a site for sharing photos. It was originally conceived as an [...]

In this podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Sean Kane. Sean helped build one of the world’s most successful web applications as the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. Last year, Sean left Netflix to co-found Get Listed, a start-up that is going to revolutionize the job search business.

Moving from a mature organization that understands the role of experience design to a brand-new start-up environment without any of the same infrastructure or support can be a real challenge. A challenge that is not unlike the challenge that many UX practitioners face when trying to bootstrap their user experience efforts in a growing organization.

 

 SpoolCast- Starting a Web Experience from Scratch with Sean Kane [32:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it lead to some very interesting discussion, both at the conference and on blogs and discussion lists everywhere.
I’ve posted the slides above and have synched [...]

Almost every company has to struggle with the balance between customer needs and internal business objectives. In this episode the crew examines the recent situation at Facebook. While trying to please both users and build a business model, the fast moving organization has stepped on many toes.

 

 SpoolCast Crew Episode 7 - The Book of Face [01:18:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download