A recent article in the New York Times discusses Ford’s plummeting fall in user rankings this year, focusing the blame on their new touch screen interface. According to the article, J.D.Power, the auto industry arbiter, dropped Ford’s ranking from 5th to 23rd, and subsidiary Lincoln’s ranking from 8th to 17th place.
J.D.Power acknowledges that both Ford and Lincoln’s fit and finish are excellent. It was the “annoying” behavior of their driver-facing interactive systems that caused their ratings to plummet. Other reviewers concur, as Consumer Reports yanked their “Recommended” rating from Ford’s new 2011 Edge model.
… Digital solutions are so much cheaper and more flexible than mechanical ones that they will eventually come to dominate the entire company. Companies who can master the challenge of software’s unique nature, and particularly of how humans interact with it, will thrive. Ford is learning the opposite lesson.
Will Ford learn that software isn’t manufactured?
Here are top paying jobs for Information Architecture, Usability, and UX practitioners plus reasons to explore each for your user experience design career - and bank your account. (Salary figures based on Indeed.com and GlassDoor.com data)
- User experience strategist: $67,000 to $135,000
- Usability analyst: $81,000 on an average
- User interface designer: $84,000 to $155,000
- Interaction designer: $91,000 on an average
- Interaction designer: $91,000 on an average
- Information architect: $104,000 on an average
High paying jobs in User Experience design
Design thinking, as a concept, has been slowly evolving and coalescing over the past decade. One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be. More concretely, Tim Brown of IDEO has written that design thinking is “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”
A person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation. The design-thinking organization applies the designer’s most crucial tool to the problems of business. That tool is abductive reasoning.
What is Design Thinking Anyway?
The intranet manager is one of the most important people in an intranet design project. Many times the effort that goes into such a project is on the same level as that of a major organizational change initiative. It is therefore important that the manager is thoroughly prepared for the journey. If you are managing your first redesign project or are new to intranets or just love intranets then we have the resource to get you started: Manager’s guidebook to intranet design projects.
This 64-page guidebook takes you through eight stages of a typical intranet design project. Each stage has many activities that go under it. The activities described and insights included are those gathered over the years by PebbleRoad.
Manager’s guidebook on intranet redesign projects
Disclosure: I work for the company that released the ebook. Of course, it’s included here because it I think it deserves to be here.
(From Communications of the ACM (CACM), 1989)
Designers striving for user interface consistency can resemble Supreme Court justices trying to define pornography: each of us feels we know it when we see it, but people often disagree and a precise definition remains elusive. A close examination suggests that consistency is an unreliable guide and that designers would often do better to focus on users’ work environments.
The Case Against User Interface Consistency (PDF, 1.3 mb)
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The Nokia User Experience resource focuses on the mobile user experience and consists of the following three sections:
- Design process
- Tips and tools that will help you apply user centered design to your mobile service.
- User Experience
- Learn what makes good mobile user experience with real-life examples.
- Design Library
- If you know exactly what platform you’re developing for and want to leap into the details of UI creation, then use this online library to access style guides, regional design guides and other guidelines.
The Nokia User Experience & Design Resource
Models of the process of design are relatively common. Each describes a sequence of steps required to design something—or at least the steps that designers report or recommend taking. Models of the process of design are common because designers often need to explain what they do (or want to do) so that clients, colleagues, and students can understand.
Less common are models of the domain of design—models describing the scope or nature of practice, research, or teaching. Such models may be useful for locating individual processes, projects, or approaches and comparing them to others. Such models also help clients, colleagues, and students understand alternatives and agree on where they are (or want to be) within a space of possibilities.
Typically models of a domain are of three types:
- Timelines
- Lists of events from the domain’s history
- Links between events suggesting influences
- Taxonomies
- Lists of sub-domains
- Trees branching into categories and sub-categories and so on
- Spaces
- Venn diagrams indicating overlapping categories
- Matrices defining the dimensions of a space of possibilities or area of potential
The Space of Design
IDEO Labs is a place where we IDEO show bits of what they are working on, talk about prototyping, and share their excitement over the tools that help them create.
IDEO Labs
So you think you are an interaction designer? Not if you cannot answer all the following questions quickly and with authority.
If you’re not an interaction designer, but you know one—or you are thinking of hiring one—slip them just the questions, and see how well they do. Bruce Tognazzini used variations of this quiz for years during the interview process to good effect.
These questions and answers assume that you have total control over all screen real estate, the OS, etc. Just pretend you are chief designer for Microsoft or Apple…
A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
If you are a graphic designer or an interaction designer and have ever been tasked with creating a style guide or UI guidelines document (both are different and I’ve had the pleasure to work on both of them creating templates and the actual documents for brands and products), this list should help you out as a consolidated list of references. This list is going to be constantly updated (and will ultimately be a monster list, it’s quite modest for now) of publicly accessible style guides and UI guideline documents on the web. If you find any links not working or would like to suggest one that is not on the list, feel free to comment and let me know.
- 3M
- ABB Brand Identity
- ACDSee Brand Style Guide
- Air Products Identity Standards
- Ameritech Graphical User Interface Standards and Design Guidelines (This one is from the Internet Archive)
- AMAIA Residence Brand Manual (PDF, 816 kb)
- Android User Interface Guidelines
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines
- Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines
- Barbican Brand Guidelines for Print / Web / and Plasmas
- BBC Future Media Standards & Guidelines
- BBC Global Experience Language (GEL)
- Belfast Zoo Brand guidelines
- Blackberry and RIM wireless handheld UI Developers Guide (PDF, 1.3 mb)
- BlackBerry Branding Guidelines (PDF, 300 kb)
- Brick brand guidelines
- Cargill Identity Style Guide
- Cambridge University Brand Manual
- Cunard Brand Guidelines
- ELMER 2– User Interface Guidelines for Government Web Forms (PDF, 1.2 mb)
- Easy Group Brand Manual (PDF, 2 mb)
- Eclipse User Interface Guidelines
- Federal Identity Program (Canada)
- GOOD Technology Brand Identity Guide
- Gnome Human Interface Guidelines
- Heineken Brand Manual
- iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
- Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
- KDE User Interface Guidelines
- Kew’s Brand Guidelines (PDF, 5 mb)
- Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines
- Microsoft Surface User Experience Guidelines
- MITRE- Guidelines for designing user interface software
- NASA’s webstyle guide
- Novozymes’ brand guide
- The New School Visual Identity Manual (PDF, 6.5 mb)
- The New School Web Style Guide
- Nokia Design and User Experience Library
- Oracle Technology Network Guidelines
- Palm User Interface & Human Interface Guidelines
- RSA brand standards
- SAP Interaction Design Guide for Internet Application Components
- SAP Design Guild
- SAP User Interface guidelines
- Silicon Graphics Indigo Magic User Interface Guidelines
- Skype Brand Identity Guidelines
- Spelman College Visual Identity Guidelines (PDF, 1.3 mb)
- Reuters Brand Center
- Taligent Human Interface Guidelines
- University of Northern Colorado Identity Style Guide (PDF, 2.3 mb)
- WebEx brand style guide
- Web Style Guide 2nd edition
- Windows User Experience
- Windows User Experience Guidelines
- Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
- Windows XP Visual Guidelines (There’s a download section to the right to download WindowsXP DesignGuidelines)
- Yale Web Style Guide
- Yale’s Visual Identity