Tag Archives: UX

Friday Links: Google Zeitgeist 2011

• Today’s the last day to Give Toys for Tots and remember the Bucklin Boys.
• Google Zeitgeist 2011 (aka The Year of Rebecca Black).
• 10 documentaries tailor-made for nerds.
• What A List Apart readers learned about the web in 2011.
• You know you want it, StarWars Nutcracker.
• Gifts for your Design Snob Best Friend.
• The messy art of UX sketching.
• Anatomy of an advertising emergency.
• An open letter to writers of open letters.
• The woman behind the iconic “Let’s get Mikey” ad for Life cereal has died. So has the co-creator of Captain America. Also, Christopher Hitchens.
• Okay, now that you’re sufficiently bummed out, here’s a penguin fetching a newspaper.

Intro to User Research Recap

Intro to User Research – A Nerdery Interactive Primer

User Experience (UX) design cannot be accomplished without proper context and empathy for those who’ll interact with an app or website. Our next webinar is about how our UX team applies user research as part of our scientific approach to develop better interactive experiences tailored specifically for their intended audiences.

Nerdery UX gurus Zack N and Mike J will discuss how knowledge is power when it comes to understanding user needs, goals motivations and frustrations. We’ll cover:

• research methods: contextual inquiry/contextual observation; usability testing; surveys; card sorting; stakeholder/user interviews; site-search and web analytics
• where user research fits into the interactive design process (hint: beginning; during; after; ongoing…)
• the difference between user research and marketing research (other than we don’t do the latter)
• science!

Intern Insights – Ideal vs. Real

- John Thompson is a User Experience intern

Interactive Primer: Embedded UX

You know our Nerdery webinars are free and geared toward helping our partners and clients use our nerdy powers as an extension of their own, right? Well they are! This is why you should join us on Tuesday, April 12 at 10:15 a.m. or Thursday, April 14 at 3:15 p.m. to learn about how our Embedded UX process makes for smooth development.

The Nerdery’s process of embedding our UX team among our developers empowers our clients and programmers to begin web, mobile and tablet projects with a well-realized end in mind.

During the webinars our UX team will discuss and take questions on how we unify design and development through thoughtful use of user-centered design and information architecture. Our UX team helps agency partners and clients define stakeholders’ objectives and audience needs – and can present actionable intelligence our programmers are uniquely prepared to implement. They take inventory of content and give it organization structure and hierarchy, and create user interface specifications within wireframes – these stripped-down representations of an app’s interface call out functionality to be implemented by programmers.

By embedding UX with programmers, our UX pros shape the development process from an all-important end-user’s perspective.

RSVP for one of the free sessions today!

Friday Links: How do you pronounce GIF?

• Remnants of a disappearing UX (make sure you enlarge the photo).
• We can all agree that the little Darth Vader Volkswagen commercial is adorable, right?
• How do you pronounce GIF?
• Pew internet report examines the adoption of gadgetry by generation.
• If you haven’t had time to look at Google Art Project, find some. It’s pretty cool. Speaking of the ol’G, Bing’s been stealing their search results.
• They guy who released the Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel “What is the Internet?” video was allegedly fired.
• If you watch the Angry Birds commercial during the Superbowl you’ll get a code to unlock a secret level.
• Which StarWars occupation is right for you?
• Don’t forget to register for the Flash Defenders Agency Primer!

Friday Links: User Interfaces designed to trick people & more

• The Gamer’s Alphabet, a book for the baby geek in your life.
• Turn your Nikes into Wii controllers.
• A portrait of Darth Vader made using dialog from the movies.
• If Superheroes were hipsters.
• The most powerful colors in the world: COLOURLovers takes a look at the color palettes of 100 top brands on the web.
• How many agency websites appear on a mobile device. Oops.
• NES Bed.
• Build-a-Bear StarWars.

P.S. There’s still time to RSVP for The Nerdery’s charity Wine Tasting event and to donate a buck or two to fight cancer and win an iPad.

Pour one out for Sheldon Dorf, founder of Comic-Con

Today’s New York Times features the obituary of Sheldon Dorf who died on November 3rd at the age of 76.

Dorf is the man responsible for founding Comic-Con which started as a small gathering of comicbook nerds in 1970 and has blossomed into a a phenomenon that attracts over 126,000 attendees. For many nerds, attending Comic-Con is a religious pilgrimage.

There’s a Shel Dorf Tribute site filled memories of Dorf and offers a great glimpse into the history of comicbooks and how one man influenced an industry.

RIP Mr. Dorf, you changed pop culture and that’s an amazing feat for any human.

P.S. Totally unrelated, but worth a mention. Today is World Usability Day. Make sure to give your favorite UX designer a hug.

In case you missed it, a whole lotta links that I haven’t had time to post on Fridays

The Nerdery has been busy, busy, crazy busy lately. So busy, in fact that we’ve had actual content on Fridays instead of the weekly link dump. Now comes a busy meeting Monday, and a perfect time to get rid of these great stories that have been burning a whole in my virtual pocket.

• MinnPost – Here's a niche business: designing fonts:"There's this greater design community with all the ad agencies and design firms downtown, and the natural byproduct are the specialists," Diesel said. "We do look over each others' shoulders, and that's a very unique thing to do."
• News from the Herd: What's all this "branding" stuff about?: “This presentation by Marty Neumeier of San Francisco brand firm Neutron pretty much says it all in 20 minutes. It gives a definition and then provides a blueprint so that you too, by slide 120 or so (don’t worry, it’s one of these one word per slide numbers), will be the market leader in your category!”


• Man Vs Machine: Robot Programmed to Love Traps Woman in Lab, Hugs Her Repeatedly: “The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.”


• Registration Open for MN.swf Camp 2009 | blackcj.com
• Finance and Commerce: Ad Agencies, clients catch stimulus fever: “Or so it would seem, given that two Twin Cities marketing firms are already attempting to win new clients by offering their own “stimulus packages.”
• Scanwiches: Don't look at this if you are even remotely hungry. It will only make things worse.
• 10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazine: “Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?”
• What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? – Stack Overflow:
  
  // Dear maintainer:
  //
  // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
  // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
  // please increment the following counter as a warning
  // to the next guy:
  //
  // total_hours_wasted_here = 16
• StepUp Communications | Stuff Graphic Designer’s Like: “6. Black clothes (maybe a cool dark grey at most)”
• 8 Tips to Design a Charity Website | Webdesigner Depot
• 50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know | Mac|Life: “Like a champion cyclist knows bike parts,a car buff knows model years, and a sports fan knows win-loss records, all Mac geeks worth the title must know these things.”


• From Outcast to Awesome: 17 Famous Nerds Who Paved the Way: “>In a different age, the label Nerd induced visions of tapered, high-water jeans, thick-framed glasses, and preppy, ill-patterned shirts. Oh, the horror! Now, check out the East Village on a typical weekend and what are the most stylish gents donning? Why, tapered jeans, thick-framed glasses, and button-down shirts! My, my, my, how things have changed!”


• USATODAY.com – Psychologists now know what makes people happy: The happiest people surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses next door, lose themselves in daily activities and, most important, forgive easily.
• Robots – The Big Picture – Boston.com: “Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future. (32 photos total)”
• 10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning | Geekdad from Wired.com
• The Cult of Done Manifesto: “Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.”
• 10 Must-Have iPhone Apps for the Adman
• Gaywads, Dorkwads Sign Historic Wad Accord | The Onion – America's Finest News Source: "Now is the time for us to set aside our differences and join together in opposition of our common enemy–the mean, popular kids who have mercilessly inflicted locker-room wedgies upon us since time immemorial."
• Roger Ebert's Journal: Hunt not the snark but the snarker: “What concerns me is that snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, non-conformity and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line.”
• Five Myths about Content Strategy: “Yes, page flows and imagery play a huge part in shaping the online user experience. Without clear navigation and a pleasing page layout, a user's experience could hardly be considered positive. But many site owners fail to see that content plays an equally important role to structure and design in this regard. As Julie Hayden tells us in her piece on A List Apart, language is the ultimate user interface. The tone of a site and the consistency of voice can make or break a user's impression. Language is a very flexible and adaptable tool that should be used to your advantage on your website.”
• Featured Workspace: Land of the Colorful Cubes:”The size of their cube farm is modest, but the personality of it is enormous. Employees at The Balcom Agency would appear to have nearly free reign in customizing their work space. In the work spaces below you'll see everything from vivid color selections to personalized bookcases to curtains and couches and everything in between.”
• 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
• 8 Visual Case Studies of Fun Marketing Materials!
• Death Star, Star Wars, Death Star, Storm Trooper: “It sucks to be a storm trooper with a heart. The Dark Side hasn't been the same since that day.”
• If social media experts aren’t experts only the charlatans will be “experts.”This is a great, great discussion about Social Media Experts, the scourge of Twitter, and how actual experts can take back the word from the charlatans.
• Agency vs freelancer

Friday Links: Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party

• Business Card Etiquette In Japan – Boing Boing
• Fallon Planning: 6 Ways to Play Twitter – Winning Strategies for Brands On Twitter
• TV Shows That Cover Up Apple Logo on Mac Laptops and Desktop Computers
• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine
• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know – The Book [97 Things] : Near-Time
• How (Not) to Write like a Designer: 5 Tricks You Didn't Learn in Studio – Core77
• Opinion: Field of Widget Dreams: “There's a phenomenon whereby normally intelligent people at both digital and traditional agencies decide that people will embrace their new widget or app simply because they've built it. It's as if the Internet were a giant cornfield in Iowa and the mere presence of yet another branded widget or app is enough to get thousands of people clicking.”
• BrandFreak: '30 Rock' loves brands so much, it no longer wants their money: “Tina Fey actually says McDonald's didn't pay for the placement. But the Emmy-winning show generally revels in its over-the-top approach to brand integration. Fey has spouted a mini-infomercial for Verizon in the past, turning directly to the camera to ask "Can we have our money now?" after the pitch.”
• Fallon Planning: "Good Enuff" Production Values and the Death of Commercial Craftsmanship“"Good Enuff" isn't just for users, it enables us marketers to shoot more ideas fast(er), cheap(er) instead of rolling all our energies into a single overly produced "perfect" idea that just may fail. So fail fast(er). And fail cheap(er).
• Star Wars: Death Star Disco, Dark Side Inferno: “Who likes to party? The Dark Side likes to party.”
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX: Part 2
• 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers – Learn-gasm
• Giulia Santopadre | Graphic Design | Nerd Glasses
• Does snark cast a shadow over online conversation?: The Social Path
• Connecting the Dots: Will Social Media Analytics Create a New Media Paparazzi?
• 6 Tips for a Great Flex UX
• Design: Create a Color Palette from a Single Image
• R/GA: Digital Agency of the Year 2008: “In a year when even digital agencies began to feel the pinch of a declining economy, R/GA plowed ahead, adding Hewlett-Packard, Mars and HBO as clients, and growing revenue by 20 percent to $126 million. As others scaled back, the Interpublic Group shop beefed up its London outpost to account for 10 percent of total revenue and opened in San Francisco in a bid to grab digital talent.For its financial performance and its continued success in proving the power of brand platforms rooted in utility, R/GA is Adweek's Digital Agency of the Year for 2008 — its fourth such honor in the past eight years.”
• The Advertising Age Timeline