Letters from the Equator

It has been a long time since I’ve done a user interview. Months. I felt so out of touch, and I was desperate to get back into user research.
When I finally succeeded in recruiting a participant a few days ago, I was elated. Okay, so it was someone I met on the London IA Ning [...]

My very first attempt at incorporating a user-centered design approach in my software development project was, in many ways – an important start for me, career-wise. It’s because of that project that I am where I am now – I would certainly not have been accepted into the MSc, which subsequently opened a lot of [...]

Ethnography involves a lot more work than user experience design, because it involves deeper immersion, more personal commitment, a greater willingness to learn from one’s own observational failures, and the ability to work across cultural boundaries.
This is only a small part of what user experience design attempts to accomplish, and depending on how you apply [...]

I just stumbled across Cennydd’s post about ‘blaming the designer’, which somewhat reflects my work experiences in the past year. I too, found the “design hell” comic to be humorous, and admittedly counted it as gospel truth initially. Then I forgot about it and like all designers/developers, went back and dealt with the hard stuff [...]

I’m noticing a trend here regarding user experience people. They’re geeks, no doubt. They enjoy being part of the solution of a system, especially if it leads to something really enjoyable to use. They’re quite intelligent and are fairly multi-talented. They’re also very nice people. I’ve met a lot of UX people in the past [...]

If you’ve ever watched Gary Hustwit’s Helveticaor Objectified, and can relate to the uber-geek sensibility of how design affects the way people live, you should also watch Stewart Brand’s series on “How Buildings Learn”, which incidentally is also a a book of the same name. I’ve even embedded all six episodes below for your convenience.
This [...]

I’ve been expressing fairly skeptical views about user experience in my previous posts, and it’s partly a side-effect of stuff that I’m still sorting through in my own work and beliefs. Having spent many years building software as a developer, I’ve become overly sensitive of how people perceive technology and how it can be manipulated [...]

Everyone’s hyped up about getting a Google Wave invite. I have one and I don’t see what the fuss is about. Yes, I’ve seen the YouTube video, and yes I’ve watched the Developer Preview video too. It looks great and all, but seriously folks – it’s one complicated thing… next to email.
And this is why [...]

I feel really guilty because I’ve been neglecting this blog about interactions, especially when almost everything I do for a living involves designing for interactions.
Instead, I find myself spending more and more time blogging about careers, which in a way doesn’t have anything to do with interaction. Except for one thing – the human condition.
The [...]

I’m currently in a team of 3 people working on a redesign of a website. To me, this feels like my first “real” design project, one where I’ve initiated without any requirements for software implementation. Instead, we began to ask ourselves who are our users, and what exactly are we trying to communicate to them?
User-Centred [...]