culturedbits

The Local Maximum

In his latest article on 52 Weeks of UX, Joshua Porter once again nails an important aspect of UX:

One strategy we might employ is to optimize until we reach a point of diminishing returns: design until changes just aren’t having a big effect. Then, stop optimizing and return to other kinds of analysis to figure out the next steps. Conduct interviews. Do user testing. Give surveys, ask questions. Find out the biggest existing pain points instead of focusing on tiny design elements at this stage. Focus at the activity-level. What are people trying to accomplish? What are their higher-level goals? What aren’t people doing that we want them to? What big hurdles keep them from taking the next action? This level of insight will allow you to make those bigger changes.

If you’re a freelance, chances are good that you’re hired at the beginning of a project, or when it’s hopelessly stuck. You rarely get to the place where small change optimization reaches the point of diminishing returns.

The more important it is to keep an eye on it, so chances of innovation aren’t missed.

iPhone OS Service Menu

Chris Clarks excellent idea delivers functionality, which remains discoverable, fits into the existing workflow and solves one of the remaining problems of copy’n’past in the iPhone OS. What’s not to like about it?

Sexy Skills of Data Geeks

In his excellent article on the rise of the Data Scientist, Nathan of Flowing Data writes:

Even if you’re not into visualization, you’re going to need at least a subset of the skills […] if you want to seriously mess with data. Statisticians should know APIs, databases, and how to scrape data; designers should learn to do things programmatically; and computer scientists should know how to analyze and find meaning in data.

There are many more nuggest of insight in his post, and I fully agree with him, that - what he terms - Data Scientists will become increasingly important.

I have lately been talking a lot about “IA for the Layman”, my idea that certain skills will have to become common teaching, so people will be able to cope with the increasing tides of data in their personal life.

But IA may be the wrong term, or rather an oversimplification in this context. As Nathan mentions, Ben Fry covers quite well what skills are actually involved and how they form different aspects. So maybe I shouldn’t call it “IA for the Layman”, but rather “Be Your Personal Data Scientist”.

V Lock

A true treasure of UX improvement for an everyday problem no one addressed in the last few centuries.

Rethinking the Inspector

Very creative rethinking of the traditional palette by Plasq co-founder Keith Lang. Probably not something I can imagine for the Creative Suite, but It sure would be handy for iWorks. Especially since it would create a bridge toward quasimodes in the touch interface version of iWorks (for more on this, see Gestures)

Gestures

Again, a thorough article by Lukas Mathis, this time on complex gestures in touch interfaces.

He points out that once a gesture becomes so complex that it doesn’t resemble any real world action associated with the task anymore, it’s not much better then a CLI.

In the next months and years, defining how complex touch interactions are done will be a major war zone for the Human-Computer-Interface field.

Maybe that’s something Apple sees too and tries to define from the very beginning. Since this is very much about UX, I’m glad Apple is leading the charge here. Still, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds, as we are once again on unknown terrain, not paving cow paths anymore.

The Psychologist’s View of UX Design

Good stuff.