Government Digital Service Design Principles

"The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance right is “Googley” – and will satisfy and delight people all over the world."

It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.

“Monotony” is the quality an interface has when there is only a single way to do something. The name “monotony” sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a good quality. There’s only one “middle C” key on a piano. Super Mario Bros. only has one way to jump: the A button. It doesn’t have a “jump” menu item or a “jump” keyboard shortcut. Lack of monotony complicates an interface, as well as taxing your brain by making you decide which method to use each time you use it.

"Imagine Microsoft Office turned into a video game. One where learning a productivity app is a delight. One where the core loop of gameplay involves using and gaining skills in Word, Excel and PowerPoint."

"Apple's online store certainly played a role in this achievement as retail sales data shows that Mac sales were up 21% year-over-year in the months of October and November. So it's interesting to note that Apple's primary online sales channel (Web-based checkout) was redesigned during this time"

"Our UX Principles: 1. Make the most frequent tasks easy and less frequent tasks achievable. 2. Design for the 80% 3. Privilege the Content Creator 4. Make the default settings smart"

a long sigh to the unnecessary acronym...

lots of new blogs to pillage

"My overall strategy for IA is 3 step process; understanding the problem (note: not merely identifying the problem but really understanding it), find a solution (there may be more than one solution, but there is often only one right solution), and present the solution (a large part of your job as a IA is presenting your work so the client can understand the results)"

good discussion around low- vs. mid- vs. high-fidelity wireframes

"This diagram also begs the question: what is user experience design by itself, those areas that aren’t filled up with other bubbles? I tried to answer some of that in an earlier post, but the short answer is: not much, aside from coordination between the various disciplines, or what used to be called creative direction."

fabulous collection of design pattern articles

"My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications."

"reality is broken... games work better"

more interaction patterns...more!

"Users don’t care whose fault it is that a product works poorly, only that it works poorly. All the disciplines need work together to figure out solutions to product flaws, with visual, interaction, and industrial design blending their strengths togethe

"I bet there's not a decent-sized corporation anywhere that enables process and experience designers to collaborate on 'expectation design' with marketing and communications people."

@ Digital Web Magazine

all IxDA threads with "agile" as a topic. UX vs. agile...fight!

"The interaction museum is a place for designers, practitioners, students and researchers looking for interaction techniques and devices."

some insightful numbers on "web 2.0" use in the "real world".

brilliantly detailed notes on the design of monocle

the demo to end all demos...a.k.a. king of demos...a.k.a. goddemo...

April 17th-18th

at the Pivotal Labs blag

ia/ux software