InformationWeek previews Windows 7, the successor to Vista, with 24 screenshots from a demo given by Julie Larson Green, Microsoft's vice president for Windows experience. Read more about Windows 7 in the InformationWeek article.
http://www.informationweek.com/galleries/showImage.jhtml?galleryID=268&imageID=1&articleID=211601289
Or maybe we're just comfortable with the mix in of apps and music? No, not me. Artist and Album are certainly just wrong. Don't know how they can make that legacy labeling generic across music/movie/application. Creator instead of artist, perhaps. And just leave album blank for apps and movies. Album doesn't serve a purpose for apps does it? The link doesn't appear to work.
Rosenfeld Media and Smart Experience begin their webinar series. Registration is open now for the 2 opening sessions with Luke Wroblewski and Indi Young.
Crowd Science is a new comer among user research services that allow you to prompt small sets of users to participate in questionnaires while they're browsing your site.
Crowd Science Demographics is a new analytics service that builds detailed reports on the demographics and attitudes of website audiences. By surveying a small number visitors with carefully constructed questionnaires, Crowd Science Demographics is able to build comprehensive audience profiles that give publishers a deep understanding of their audience.
The New York Times teams up with IBM's Many Eyes project to provide word visualizations of data in the Vizlab.
We have notepads back in stock! We're shipping the original 2 wireframe and storyboard notepads, as well as 2 additional notepads with different grids that I'll be posting tonight or tomorrow. Pads are now white vellum. You can place your order for the orginal pads today and new pads by tonight hopefully.
More info at the store.
Results are in of the People's Choice award for the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Award. The Zon Hearing Aid grabbed the prize.
http://peoplesdesignaward.cooperhewitt.org/2008/browse/all/0
VICE, Volvo, The Independent and Yahoo! have teamed up on a project called Creative 30 which aims to find and celebrate thirty of Britain’s most promising young creative people. Check out the video interviews that take a peek into the lives and process of the selected designers.
Dey Alexander Consulting's site includes a lengthy bibiliography of articles, discussions, and links to resources on user interface design patterns.
Chris Fahey discusses the merits of bespoke UI design, referencing the successful design of John King's touch wall which was created for King by Perceptive Pixel. Bespoke design--the practice of designing something specifically for and individual--might be more prevalent in the digital world than most people realize.
The examples provided out in the quotes of software designers and developers point out the most common case where this is happening. Designers who design products by focusing on what they want/need for themselves is common enough. What's being exposed here is probably not profoundly eye opening. What it demonstrates should be obvious to UX people who spend most of their time researching people (users) so they can empathize with them and guess what they desire. If you are your user, there's a good chance you'll be able to design the right thing for you. If you're a good designer, that is.
Designing for yourself means having the luxury to skip the middle man. It means you'll have a better chance of getting the right design. I think Chris' examples point out exactly why user research is valuable--because when you're designing for others it is not easy to get the right design unless you understand who you are designing for.
http://www.graphpaper.com/2008/10-26_designing-for-one-user-bespoke-user-interfaces