The WebVisions conference was held May 20-22 in Portland, Oregon. Three days of “mind-melding on what’s new in the digital world.”
Speaker: Molly E. Holzschlag.
Molly is a Web Standards, Accessiblity, and CSS guru. She’s worked for Microsoft’s IE division and now works for Opera.com and has written a ton of great books on standards, CSS, etc.. (more…)
Speaker: Jared Spool
From the program:
“In this presentation, Jared will share these “fast-food budget” techniques, showing you cost and time effective methods for extracting the core benefits of any user experience design process. You’ll learn simple ways to gather information about your users, the tasks they are doing with your designs, and how well the designs meet their needs. In turn, you can use this information as you continue to make changes, thereby making each new release that much more delightful.”
Jared was a great speaker. He was funny, insightful and definitely lived up to the buzz surrounding his keynote. The presentation wasn’t so much about exact techniques or technology, but about how the best teams create great design. (more…)
Just wrapped up a workshop on Mental Models with Indi Young. Here’s a excerpt from the program:
“Those in the field of cognitive research have been describing and defining mental models for several decades. Mental models are the most effective way to align design strategy with your users’ behavior, and to approach your design from the understanding of the end user. Mental models are representations of people’s behavior, philosophies, and emotion around how they accomplish something, regardless of which tools they use.”
After going through the workshop, I can’t say I’m a mental models expert, but I can say it made me think differently as far as evaluating users’ behavior. As great as I think Indi was during this workshop, she had to cut out a lot of information due to the time constraints. We had 3 different group exercises, the first being a (more…)
There’s no doubt that Obama used the Internet as a key tool to his victory. I was listening to NPR this morning, and heard: “Barack Obama didn’t just use the Internet as an ATM, but as a medium of choice to communicate to the world”.
I’d like to start the conversation and a collection. What did you experience during Obama’s campaign that pushed the medium and rocked the vote? Did you download the Obama iPhone App? Did you give online to his campaign? Did you use his web site to find your polling station?
Here’s some insight from the BBC a few months ago:
Interesting article I read in Fast Company on rewiring the creative mind and how neuroscience is shedding new light on creativity and ideas. Biologically, our minds are conditioned for repetitive thinking. It sometime takes an unplanned event or occurrence to break us of this, especially when our minds are looking for a new idea. With the economy how it is today, some could say sticking with what works and what we know as ideas makes sense, but really what our economy needs now is fresh ideas, some new thinking. Anyway, read the article if you’d like, but I encourage folks to do stuff outside their normal routine and be spontaneous; it may spark some ideas.
The Weblog of the Swanson Russell interactive team. Standing at the intersection of technology & design, content & media, strategy and creative, inspiration & conversation. Rooted in nebraska soil. Stretching to all corners of the web.