[BEEP]

Links for 2009-07-08 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-09T00:00:00-07:00

Service Design Tools | Communication methods supporting design processes
collection of tools for selection of service design activities.

Links for 2009-07-06 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

247 web usability guidelines
"Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice."

Links for 2009-07-04 [del.icio.us]

2009-07-05T00:00:00-07:00

50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing Magazine
"We collected over 50 useful and practical tools and resources that will help you to improve your writing skills. You will find copywriting blogs, dictionaries, references, teaching classes, articles, tools as well as related articles from other blogs."

Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Customer Experience Boosts Revenue « Customer Experience Matters
"The bottom line: Customer experience is a great investment."
Four Things To Ask for When Hiring a User Experience Firm or Consultant : Online Marketing for Marketers
"1. Ask for the process 2. Ask for case studies 3. Ask for reference clients 4. Ask for results"
UI Pattern Documentation Review - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
"Producing a common pattern library, however, implies that the patterns presented are at the very least, consistently documented and most probably presented in the same single classification system. Currently though, patterns are classified and documented in various manners across publishers with no clear standard evident."
Personas | Agile 2009
interesting way to segment conference visitors, using personas

Links for 2009-06-26 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2009-06-24 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-25T00:00:00-07:00

The best optical illusion I have seen all year « Richard Wiseman’s Blog
"The illustration below appears to show green and blue spirals…..But in fact the apparent green and blue are exactly the same colour!"

Links for 2009-06-23 [del.icio.us]

2009-06-24T00:00:00-07:00

25+ Useful Infographics for Web Designers | Webdesigner Depot
Percussa AudioCubes
"AudioCubes are a modular live performance instrument that let you shape sound, create music and perform live through hands-on interaction with wireless intelligent objects."

"UX Deliverables in Practice" presentation published

2009-05-21T21:40:00.004+02:00

Update (June 22, 2009): An audio file is now available for public download on the IA Konferenz website.
(Combining the audio with the slides on Slideshare turns out to be impossible due to a combination of my high tempo and Slideshare's limitations for transitions, sorry)

On May 17 2009, I delivered my invited presentation "UX Deliverables in Practice" at the IA Konferenz 2009 in Hamburg, Germany. A first (slightly modified) version is now available.

Given that my session was scheduled right after the lunch break on the last day, I had told the organizers that I would try to make it a bit of a show. Of course the real content -- a brief overview of theories of UX plus a wider look at some of the deliverables outside of the standard research-design-evaluation triad (which I summarized using a quiz) -- was there too. I think the format worked pretty well: despite my crazy 155-slides-in-45-minutes schedule, I finished ahead of time and had room for a brief Q&A session.

UX Deliverables in Practice

View more presentations from Peter Boersma.

The presentation is structured as follows:

intro: Peters in IA
intro: UX Theory =/= UX Practice
UX Theory: models
UX Theory: defintions
UX Practice: more than research-design-evaluation
UX Practice: Business & Strategy
UX Practice: Quiz "What Deliverable Is This?"
UX Practice: Business & Manage
UX Practice =/= UX Theory
closing: I Want You To...
closing: More Elements of User Experience

I have made some small modifications (mostly removing animations) to allow for a more static review of the slides. I have also included some notes (I didn't prepare speaker notes in advance, but these reflect what I said or, in hindsight, think I wanted to say). In time, I hope to be able to add audio and synchronize it with the slides.
For now, this version of the presentation is available on Slideshare: UX Deliverables in Practice. I'd love to hear what you think of it and will try answer any questions.

Oh, and yes, I had a lot of fun at the IA Konferenz and encourage you to also have a look at the other presentations, gathered by the organizers.

Presenting (more than) UX deliverables at German IA Konferenz

2009-02-25T21:12:00.005+01:00

I am proud to be part of the third German IA conference as an invited speaker. In line with the conference's theme ("IA in Business and Practice") I will be talking about User Experience deliverables in practice.

The presentation will build partly on my talk at the Adobe User Group meeting last year (see the video in Dutch or slides in English). But instead of focusing on the core UX design deliverables as I did there, I plan to also talk the audience through project management-related artifacts as well as evaluation activities. Because only in theory is the UX practice all about design deliverables...

Other international presenters include Peter van Dijck (author of Information Architecture for Designers) and the keynote speaker Lou Rosenfeld (author of the IA bible Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)!

To stay up to date on the IA Konferenz, which will take place on May 16 and 17 in Hamburg, follow the news. I hope to see some of you there!

UX Matters breaks record for mentioning 'T-shaped people'

2009-02-11T09:38:00.003+01:00

UX matters.com, one of the better online magazines on user experience (UX), just published the article Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? In it, the author (Pabini Gabriel-Petit) mentions the idea of T-shaped people. Quite often. Really often. But it's good!

This article was interesting to me since I often have to refer to my own T-model for user experience professionals T-model: Big IA is now UX (and the addition of business IA). This is another article that explains the idea behind it.

Some quotes from the article:

Organizations should not require designers who have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience to legitimately call themselves UX designers to specialize so narrowly. The best designers are unique individuals who bring diverse talents to their work—they’re T-shaped people

In my view, deep domain knowledge, while essential in a product manager, is not the primary criterion that should form the basis of a UX hiring decision. It’s usually a valuable asset, but there are also some positives that come from hiring T-shaped people who have experience outside your domain.

My dream team would consist of both specialists and T-shaped individuals with knowledge and skills that are both broad and deep.

and my favourite:

T-shaped people enjoy sharing their knowledge—with their peers in UX, with UX team members in other specialties, with people in other disciplines on multidisciplinary product teams, and with business leaders. They’re effective mentors and evangelists of user experience.

Amen!

Now go and read the article!

I am no longer an IAI Board member...

2009-01-15T01:19:00.004+01:00

On December 17, 2008, I wrote a message to the IA Institute Board of Directors saying I wanted to resign from my position as Director for Local Groups.

The official IAI announcement will say "Because of personal and professional reasons, our fellow board member Peter Boersma has decided to resign his position on the IAI board." Here's some explanation around that phrase:

Recently I have found that my work life, family life and hobbies (which include organizing and speaking at professional events in our industry, but that is my problem ;-)) are (again) taking too much time and energy. I need to do less stuff...

One of the things I decided I needed to do less is worry about the IAI in a dedicated manner. For the last couple of years I have done that (worry and dedicate time) but, although I will always have a personal opinion on how the Institute is doing and what could be done better, recently I have found that I don't get enough energy out of it to continue. Combined with new responsibilities at work (the process freak in me is thrilled to be allowed to document Info.nl's design process!) and at home (I'm "sort of"(*) getting married to my girlfriend!), this has made me decide to stop worrying and resign.

I will definitely miss elements from the weekly conference calls with the Board and staff, late on Wednesday evenings; the first couple of minutes, where we exchange how we're doing personally, were usually hilarious (hi Russ! hi Andrew!) and the proud feelings I got when discussing the state of the field with fellow practitioners were wonderful! But I will also enjoy the extra hours, looking at wedding rings (?) and honeymoon locations (?) in the first half of the year, and watching the kids sleep (?) and going to bed early (and dream?) later this year. Those things give me energy.

Already I feel better now, thank you :-) And the IAI Board is taking measures to make sure Local IA Groups are on somebody's mind. I will also continue worrying about at least one local group; the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour series will continue in 2009. And I plan to continue being an internationally active IA...
But no longer as a member of the IAI Board.

There you have it. For questions about any of this this, email me.

(*) "sort of"? Yes, it's a long story but we are picking the things we enjoy from getting married without actually getting married. We will celebrate our love with friends later this year.

A sad day for Information Design...

2008-11-30T22:07:00.003+01:00

As a subscriber to the Info-Design mailinglist I received this sad message from moderator Karel van der Waarde:

Dear list,

This morning, I received a message from Piet Westendorp's partner that Piet passed away on November 19th.

His achievements in Information Design and many related areas are substantial. To pick just three out of his long lists of publications and presentations:
co-author of 'Open Here. The art of instructional design' (1999)
editor of Information Design Journal (2000-2004)
guest editor of a Visible language issue on 'Visual metaphors in user instructions' (2007)
However, just mentioning a few publications does not do justice to his influence on education, research and practice. His involvement in the Technical Universities of Delft and Eindhoven (the Netherlands), his publications in a variety of research areas, and his continuous involvement in commercial practice made him a true all-round professional.

Piet Westendorp has been a remarkable person. I'll miss his clarity of thinking and his direct aproach, but even more, I'll miss his inspirational enthusiasm and curiosity.

Kind regards,
Karel.
waarde@glo.be

The field of information design has just lost a leader. It is a sad day.

Design Documentation presentation at Adobe User Group

2008-11-28T11:53:00.006+01:00

Last Wednesday I gave a talk about Design Documentation at Meeting #9 of the Dutch Adobe User Group.

Update (December 8, 2008): The video is available! Here is the link to the video. I had to reload and fast-forward a couple of times, and the organisers say something went wrong with the encoding and a better version will be available soon, but for now it gives a very good impression of my presentation. You can switch between me, the slides and several steps in-between. Please note that the slides are in English, the presentation is in Dutch...

In this presentation I combined material from my IA Summit poster with examples from my 3-day Interaction Design training (Dutch only) and mixed in a good portion of Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. The mix was tasty, if I may say so myself...

The presentation is available on Slideshare (who selected it as a features presentation for their homepage, thanks Slideshare!) for online viewing, or right here as a PDF (5MB) for off-line viewing, and I believe the video will become available from the Adobe User Group website.

And: thanks to Paul Reinierse from De Monsters for his 115-character review on Twitter!

3 days left to submit posters for IA Summit

2008-11-27T11:57:00.002+01:00

This is a reminder for those considering attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis next spring: This Sunday, November 30, is the deadline for submitting poster proposals!

Submitting a poster proposal is a light-weight way to have a more active role during the conference. I can imagine that having an accepted proposal makes it easier to get funding for the trip.

Last year, I deeply enjoyed preparing my By The Book poster and sharing the story of Info.nl's SNS Bank project (Dutch only) by showing all of the deliverables that are featured in Dan Brown's Communicating Design. Dan even dropped by for the photo opportunity.

Traditionally, the poster program is the most inclusive part of the program, which means many proposals get accepted. This is your chance to tell the global IA community about your ideas, your project, your models, your work environment.

Interested? Read all about submitting a poster proposal. I hope to see you in Memphis!

Wassup'08

2008-10-26T21:38:00.002+01:00

Remember the Budweiser "Wassup" campaign? Well, the guys are back, and this time they're serious:

http://www.wassup08.com/

"Looking back on the last 8 years since Whassup?! debuted, Charles realized how much our country has changed and seized on the opportunity to reunite the whole cast for a searing film on our current condition with the hope that it reminds people the importance of voting and more specifically, the importance of choosing Obama, a candidate who is a clean break from the policies that got our country in this condition in the first place."

So there are IAs in France!

2008-10-21T22:17:00.005+02:00

Update (October 24): More details about the French IA meeting:

Goals : Find new friends, drink a glass, discuss, have fun and create an IA/UCD community in Paris.
Date: Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008
Time: from 7PM
Place: Barlotti, Lounge Bar (upstairs), 35 Place du Marché Saint-Honoré , 75001 Paris (Phone: 01.44.86.97.97)
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/5qwonv

TWO SPECIAL GUESTS: Christina Wodtke and Melissa Weaver
(end of update)

Finally a sign of Information Architecture (IA) life in France! It's been a running joke in European IA circles that there were no IAs in France, since they didn't show up at European (or international) IA events.

Of course this was usually followed by the more likely causes that the French probably had a good internal network of IAs who traditionally published in French and didn't connect to the outside world a lot and that they used a different acronym for the field that didn't show up in searches.

Now I have proof that there are French IAs and that they are connecting with the outside world:

The French country ambassador for Euro IA, Sylvie Daumal, just announced that she is hosting her first IA meeting in Paris on November 2nd, with special guest star Christina Wodtke!

So, if you're in France early November, make sure you contact Sylvie and don't miss this opportunity! Allez les bleus!

September 26-27: EuroIA in Amsterdam

2008-09-01T23:57:00.005+02:00

I spent last weekend in Copenhagen, attending a workshop on a prospective European IA network. The results will be presented at Euro IA 2008, and that is just one reason to register for and attend that conference.

Euro IA 2008 will be held in my hometown Amsterdam, a great honor for the Dutch IA community. The location is great: the old Jugendstil and Art Deco Tuschinski movie theatre, previsouly the location of The Web And Beyond 2006.

I encourage all Dutch UX practitioners to have a look at the program; it is (and always has been) interesting even if Information Architecture is not your main practice.
Take a look at some of the session titles: they spark your interest, don't they? (a full list can be found on the program page of the conference website):

Building Social Web Experience
Concept Design Tools for Information Architecture
E-service – what we can learn from the customer-service gurus
Extending the gaming experience to conventional UIs
How do you re-design a business critical web application with billions of unique products?
Integrating web analysis in the user experience design process
Taking social networks global: design patterns & tips
"Why information architects are needed in the kitchen" – Better content management through information architecture

and, finally, the panel with the results of my weekend in Copenhagen:

Roadmap for a Stronger IA/UX Network in Europe

And if that doesn't do the trick, remember that the aim of the organizing committee is to make it a social event as much as a learning event: there will be plenty of time to network, socialize and gossip. I hope to see you there!

Less than 2 months until IDEA 2008...

2008-08-13T22:37:00.002+02:00

I consider it my duty, as Director of the Information Architecture Institute, to inform you about our upcoming conference: IDEA 2008. It will happen on October 7-8 in Chicago and it will be great.

IDEA stands for "Information: Design, Experience and Access" and, as the vision statement says, "it addresses issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where "cyberspace" is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes."

The current list of speakers is already impressive (including David Armano, Jason Fried, Andrew Hinton, plus people from MAYA and IDEO) and I happen to know that one more speaker will be added to the program that will make it even better...

I encourage you to check the IDEA website right now and check back in the next few days for that extra speaker if you're not entirely convinced.

You read my t-shirt...

2008-05-14T20:20:00.002+02:00

Thank you ThinkGeek for making my ~~t-shirt~~ day!

The Web And Beyond: Mobility places going fast!

2008-05-06T08:02:00.002+02:00

Tonight we will have another meeting with the organizing committee of The Web And Beyond: Mobility the Chi-Netherlands conference for which I am the Program Chair. One of the items on the agenda is an update on the number of registered attendees and whether we should take action to increase that. I think that last bit will not be necessary: places are going fast!

If I am not mistaken, we have already sold 325 out of the 450 seats! Historical data predicts that we will see 2 or 3 more spikes with registrations before the cut-off date for payments (May 16).

This means that if you planned to attend the conference, you may want to register right now (or, if you are Dutch: hier registreren).

The Web And Beyond: Mobility early bird deadline is Sunday

2008-04-24T23:24:00.003+02:00

This is just a short notice to inform you that if you have been thinking about registering for The Web And Beyond: Mobility, the early bird registration deadline is this Sunday, April 27.

For members of Chi Nederland, BelCHI, ACM SIGCHI, BNO, the prices are:

Regular price: €110 (after 27 april: €140)
Students and PhD candidates: €40 (after 27 april: €50)

For non-members, the prices are:

Regular price: €140 (after 27 april: €170)
Students and PhD candiodates: €55 (after 27 april: €65)

Given the fact that this is a full-day, 3-track program with 4 international keynote speakers (Ben Cerveny, Jyri Engestrom, Adam Greenfield and Christian Lindholm) plus presentations by TomTom, Philips and The Netherlands' most mobile bank, Rabobank, this is exceptional value for money!
Registration is available on the website, both in Dutch and English (at the bottom of the page). I suggest you register now and thank me later, alright?

Keynotes for The Web And Beyond: Mobility

2008-03-30T20:51:00.003+02:00

The Call for Participation for The Web And Beyond: Mobility was closed last month. Since then the Program Committee has been reviewing the submissions which included companies like Philips and TomTom as well as German, Danish and, of course, Dutch companies and universities.

We are close to publishing the program which will include tracks on mobile applications, maps & location based systems, social profiles & rich presence and ambient intelligence & everyware.

Those tracks also match nicely, and not unintentionally of course, to our four international keynote speakers. I am happy to announce them here:

Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware, will present ideas from his upcoming book in "The City Is Here For You To Use".
Christian Lindholm, ex-Yahoo!Mobile and ex-Nokia, will predict the future in "The New Mobility: Visions of mobile in the years to come".
Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku (now owned by Google), will talk about clusters in the social graph (I think) in "Nodal Points".
finally, Ben Cerveny, ex-frogdesigm, ex-Silicon Graphics, ex-Flickr and now advisor at Stamen and Director of the Playground Foundation, will talk about "Models of Urban Dynamics".

More about them and (soon) about the program, will be published on the conference website (also in English)

New Little IA: Emiel Boersma

2008-03-14T13:11:00.003+01:00

Like his older brother Kasper, my second son took his time before he decided it was time to add one to the world's population but: On Friday, March 7, around 10 in the evening, Emiel Oscar Boersma was born!

Shortly after the home-birth he and his mother had to be taken to hospital: Emiel was underweight and cold, Marijke had lost quite some blood. Emiel was placed in a small, heated bed, Marijke had a tube placed in her arm with some clear, salty fluid dripping in.

Thirty-six hours later, we welcomed them back in our house and they've been going strong ever since. Emiel is growing fast and Marijke has been spotted cycling outside!

The first pictures are up on Flickr, tagged with "emiel". I am sure many more will follow.

Become a Leader!

2008-02-13T22:09:00.004+01:00

At the upcoming IA Summit, the IAI Institute will once again sponsor a pre-conference workshop. The theme this year is "Becoming a Leader".

The intro of the workshop's description says it all:

Information Architecture is maturing as a profession, and IAs are increasingly being called on to leadership positions within their organizations. This seminar will be a daylong workshop that will explore the relationship between Information Architecture and Leadership.

The workshop will consist of four sessions:

The Courage to Lead, by Christopher Fahey
Teams that lead, by Margaret Hanley
Strategy Matters, by Harry Max
The Users That Use You, by Karen McGrane and Josh Rubin

Assuming I make it to Miami (I am supposed to have a newborn baby by then!) I plan to attend the workshop and hope to see you there!
(P.S.: I also have a poster at the Summit!)

That's not me!

2008-01-28T21:44:00.000+01:00

Recently, a company called Frisia (a credit supplier) started airing commercials where a character has my name. Several people pointed me to the commercial. And, purely for the record: that is not me!
Yes, I work for financial institutions (the word "bank" appears five times on Info.nl's portfolio page and there's a couple more names from that industry) but I do not appear in their commercials (yet :-))!

The Web And Beyond: Mobility - Call for Participation

2008-01-23T23:43:00.000+01:00

As I promised last November, I will post relevant updates about the The Web And Beyond: Mobility conference for which I am the Program Chair. Today's update is a shout-out to you to participate in the conference.

Earlier this month we published the Call for Participation (also available in Dutch). Here's an abstract:

Themes for the conference include (but are not limited to):

Mobile applications
Maps and location based services
Rich presence and social profiles
Ambient intelligence and everyware.

We are interested in submissions that deal with user needs in these areas and the associated design/technology solutions, as well as their impact on (interaction) design, business, education, and our society as well as individuals.
The following formats will be considered: Talks/Presentations, Panels, Posters, Mini-workshops, and Product Demos/Interactive Prototypes.

I hope you will consider submitting a proposal. If you're not sure if you should, feel free to contact me.

IA Institute in Fortune Magazine

2008-01-22T23:33:00.001+01:00

Update (Jan 25, 2008): The advertisement section is now available as a PDF on the IA Institute website.

Today is a good day for Information Architects. The American edition of Fortune Magazine for this month includes a small section on Information Architecture.

The IA Institute's board (more specifically: our President Eric Reiss) helped edit the content and find advertisers to complete the section.
At the moment the IA Institute website points to the Fortune magazine website where you may want to order a reprint of the issue if you're not a subscriber.

One of the best careers for 2008: User Experience Specialist

2007-12-27T20:30:00.000+01:00

On the IxDA mailinglist, Chris Dame pointed the subscribers to a US News article on the best careers for 2008 which featured "Usability/User Experience Specialist" on the list of best careers!

The article is a bit heavy on the usability engineer side and a little light on the user experience side but to the general audience that this article was written for, it's a good description of what a lot of people in our field do.

The day in the life" sidebar got some push-back from the IxDA subscribers because it managed to leave out the design part of our job entirely (unless you consider "make recommendations for changes" a description of design activities). I mostly agree but must also say I liked the tone of the section very much. How do you feel about this description of a requirements gathering session: "While you make suggestions and raise questions, for the most part you're a listener. You leave the room with a list of musts, maybes, and questions about the prospective product."? And the last sentence is a realistic description of how I usually feel after a project: "The final product ends up incorporating only some of what you had hoped for, but you still feel a sense of pride for having helped ensure that the [product] will be more effective and pleasurable to use."

I will work to keep this job on the list of best careers in 2009!

Jakob loves IA (a bit late)

2007-11-26T20:50:00.000+01:00

Jakob Nielsen just published his latest Alertbox, this week on Intranet Information Architecture. I feel he is slightly behind the curve of IA's big wave, but he says some interesting things nevertheless.

Why do I say he's behind the curve? Well, IA is a bit 2005, 2006-ish. These days it's all about interaction design and especially user experience. Of course, I may be wrong, and in fact, there is some evidence that IA is still on the rise. The recent UPA Salary Survey results show (although I can't find them; maybe it was the-list-that-shall-not-be-named where this was discussed?) that IAs make the most money of all the professions in the UX field. Then again, our own IAI Salary Survey (results to be posted soon) indicated that in 2007 less people called themselves Information Architect than in 2006 (30% vs. 50%) but that may also be a sign of the distribution of IA responsibilities over more people. Ugh, now I'm confused.
This all may sound strange coming from someone who just got elected to the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute, I realize that. Let's say I am trying hard to bring back those fine IA days...

And why is Jakob's article still interesting?
Well, because:

where he says "Given a little training in the most important IA principles [..] teams can certainly achieve great IA results without full-time, dedicated information architects" he copies my idea of Guerilla IA which nicely completes the circle, because I stole that term from him.
like I proposed at EuroIA this year, he combines processes with patterns in his research, if I go by the sentence "We initiated an effort to document intranet IA processes and the resulting designs".
he takes Information Architecture serious, and doesn't call it 99% bad.

So, if Jakob loves IA, I love Jakob!

Help end world hunger

2007-11-20T23:35:00.000+01:00

Increase your (English) vocabulary in this game-for-the-good-cause.

For each word you get right, FreeRice.com donates 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. I played until I reached 1000 grains of rice and tried to keep my vocabulary level at 30. I want to know how you did! (thanks Mark Hurst)

And if you have a blog, consider adding a message like this too...

"Hello World" from The Web And Beyond: Mobility

2007-11-12T13:11:00.001+01:00

I just got of the phone with the committee-chair of next year's Chi-Netherlands conference "The Web And Beyond: Mobility" (for which I am the Program Chair) and he mentioned that our initial website is live!

For now it's still a bare bone structure in need of more content and some tweaks, but it feels good to see something!

In the months until May 22nd 2008 I will try to post updates on the progress we are making as a team.

Number 47 in Top 100 UCD blogs

2007-10-16T10:03:00.000+02:00

I was informed by the maintainer of the Top 100 User-Centered Blogs that I am on the list: check out number 47! (Oh, I guess you are doing that now...)

I must confess I have a vague feeling the Top 100 is part of a series of compilations aimed at generating traffic to Virtualhosting.com, but it still feels good!

Picture by dogfaceboy, selected from the 47 obsession pool