Where does your design team work?
Over at the IxDA discussion board, Rob Nero from Northwestern Mutual posted a question about creating a space to help design teams collaborate:
What unique items to keep in your room to promote problem solving and creativity?
Dan Peknik, a designer for NASA Ames and San Jose State University, replied with some [...]

Buxton suggested ideation is a different process than evaluation. In ideation, the goal is to come up with many different ideas, using each idea to suggest others. In evaluation, the goal is to narrow down the choices of ideas, honing in on the best idea. He suggested today’s usability process is evaluation, while ui design is ideation, an idea I agree with.

The transcript for SpoolCast #2: Facebook Becomes Anti-Social is now available.

Social networking not going away soon. And more importantly, there will be increasing demand for designers who have experience with this. The recent Facebook controversy shows us what happens when we design social networking functionality poorly. And how we design, introduce, and maintain social network systems is unlike any of the other design problems we currently regularly face.

UIEtips 9/12/06: Agile Development Processes: An Interview with Jeff Patton

Two revolutions, one in the way software is developed and one in the way user experiences are designed, are finally colliding. What does that mean for our development organizations? Jeff Patton helps us find out.

Our early research findings suggest that fewer than 15% of the organizations we’ve studied have the economic conditions that could support user experience specialists. These organizations have enough workload to keep a usability professional just doing research, day in and day out, or an information architect just working on IA issues, etc. This means the other 85% of the organizations should be looking for people with a broader set of skills. They should look for people who understand the different disciplines and can move between them quickly.

UI11 Speaker, Luke Wroblewski, has written another excellent essay, this time on The Process of Defining the Problem

What our research shows is creating a product or service does not require information architects, usability professionals, or interaction designers. There’s plenty of examples of excellent products and services that never had the attention of any of these professionals.

However, our research also shows that successfully creating a product or service does seem to require people who understand something about information architecture, usability practice, and interaction design. We have yet to find a single example of a team who has created a great user experience who lacked a fundamental understanding of these areas.

Once advertising become accountable (and it will become accountable), people will realize it’s not worth investing in. Where will that money shift? Customer experience is my prediction.

Boxes and Arrows and nForm User Experience are sponsoring a webcast version of my IA Summit presentation: We Are Not Alone: IA’s Role in the Optimal Design Team. It’s free, but almost filled.