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In this talk from 2010, the presenter talks about interaction design as a practice beyond just computing technology. He gives examples of interaction design as far back as ancient history, all the way to a humanitarian project underway today. He shows that interaction design’s primary medium is behavior, extending far past the high technology world into…

Ecommerce & the Social Web- Why it matters and what you can do.

The presenter talks about: working as a UX professional in the financial services industry the trading floor work environment and its impact on UX work UX design considerations

Is User Centered Design a buzzword, a technique, or a methodology? Why does “UCD” get so much attention? How has it changed how teams approach web application usability efforts? Is UCD right for you? The presentation consists of the following topics: User Centered Design: Evolving from Dot-Com to Web 2.0 Why UCD? (Development, Business, Design…

Different cultures create different expectations in humans from that culture. This requires designing systems in a way that satisfy different cultures.

While Information Architecture took its name from architecture, it took very little else. This is not surprising, as the early days of the web were about making sites that supported the interaction between people and data. The obvious model back then was a library; a library is a space for humans to receive knowledge. But…

The presenter who work in the UX team at Google is the user research lead for social, and work on things like Buzz and YouTube. He spends a lot of his time doing research with people on how they use social media. He sits down with people, and have them map out their social network…

What is the fastest way to get from a product idea to a rich internet application? By breaking down the communication barriers between designers and developers. This talk takes a quick look at how to build a shared vocabulary and use prototyping to bypass extensive wireframes and development specs.

LearnAR is a new learning tool that brings investigative, interactive and independent learning to life using Augmented Reality. It is a pack of ten curriculum resources for teachers and students to explore by combining the real world with virtual content using a web cam. The resource pack consists of interactive learning activities across English, maths,…

In the world of user experience, learning about your customers is key to making great stuff. But design research reports are dense and boring. Unlock the power of sketching and pen and paper tools to create research outputs that are vibrant, sticky and that reflect personality, human perspective and that move seamlessly into design.

This presentation attempts to inform you on how you can use social networking to build thought leadership.

This presentation goes hand in hand with the book called Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction. It also addresses structuring your application for richness, using standard screen patterns, and selecting the best UI controls.

In this interview, Dr. Geoff Boynton from the University of Washington talks about the neural basis of visual attention. In the first segment, he outlines the changes in our understanding how attention modulates neural processing and some of his own experiments in this area.

Presentation from a half-day workshop on interface design from WebVisions 2007.

On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about. If one looks closely at what the team at Amazon has built,…

A presentation by Bryan Rieger of Yiibu on Modeling the Mobile User Experience.

Three experienced designers share their tried and true tips for making wireframes really work. They talk about how to sketch a wireframe on the fly to demonstrate an idea and how to create a standalone wireframe deliverable; when to show a concept and when to describe nitty-gritty detail; how to make a narrative wireframe and…

At Possible, as the UX lead for the Standard Chartered Global Revamp project, I planned, coordinated and executed user research, information architecture, content strategy and interaction design activities to create a unified information architecture and interaction design strategy and implemented it for Standard Chartered’s country websites across the globe both for desktop and mobile. I…

In this session, Alex Faaborg provides an in-depth look at human perception and cognition, and its implications for interactive and visual design. The human brain is purely treated as an information processing machine, and the audience will be taught its attributes, its advantages, its limitations, and generally how to hack it. While the content will…

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word. They think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special…

Do you know what type of behaviour you or your company want to provoke? And is that aligned with how people actually want to live their lives? Empathy is the key to understanding and changing behavior.

The Asian banker runs the most prestigious awards programme in the industry covering the full spectrum of topics and areas that constitute the financial services. At Possible, I lead the project as UX lead planning, coordinating and executing user research and information architecture, content strategy and interaction design activities to create a unified Information architecture…

I am saddened to say that Bill Moggridge, co-founder of IDEO, designer of the first laptop, author of the book ‘Designing Interactions‘, important role player in promoting the human-centered approach in design passed away last month on September 8, 2012. May his soul rest in peace.

Summary This is a product idea I have submitted on Quirky targeted at runners. Changing the music volume (because of traffic, changing environmental noise) while running is always a hassle. Well, not any more, Runne(a)rphone’s here. Vote here: http://www.quirky.com/ideations/224692 (if you like it, and tell your friends about it too) The Problem This product is…

This is a fantastic presentation on NPR’s COPE concept- create once, publish everywhere. Karen asks the right questions- why are we still letting content authors plan for where their content will live on a web page? Why do we waste time and money creating and recreating content instead of planning for content reuse? As our…

2011 has ended and has been a rather good year for me. I know I have not been writing this year, but work has kept me very occupied, and happy. I left Delhi and moved to Singapore early in the year to join PebbleRoad and have since then had a great time working on a…

You can watch most of the videos from UX 2011 which took place in San Francisco from August 23 to 26, 2011. UX Week 2011 was organised by Adaptive Path. Chris van der Walt & P.J. Onori of HunchWorks on Applying Human-centric Design to Complex Global Problems Mark Trammell & Jesse James Garrett on Creating…

If you need to get your stakeholders thinking about taking their first step (or their next step- from unplanned to get thinking and developing a strategy) in social media, then you will find this video helpful in collecting examples and data points that show how organizations have benefited from social media. Being a video infographic,…

In 1998, ABC’s Nightline news show asked IDEO to create a new shopping cart concept, considering issues such as maneuverability, shopping behavior, child safety, and maintenance cost. The resulting episode demonstrates IDEO’s design process, showing the multidisciplinary team brainstorming, researching, prototyping, and gathering user feedback on a design in order to move all the way…

Alexis talks about some of the notable paradigm shifts that are happening around technology and media and how these affect the user experience; like the web shifting from a paradigm of publishing to communicating, and from people finding content to content finding people. She discusses the implications of these changes in technology and consumer behavior…

I created the UX Bookmark a few years ago to separate the wheat from the chaff, here you will find only the best of articles, from journals, conferences and the web, that will help you evolve to being a more knowledgeable user experience practitioner. From the feedback I have received, I could not be more…

This website of mine features a wonderful collection of quotes I have gathered over the years related to usability, interaction design, typography, etc.- the whole gamut of user experience. It lets you build upon your user experience wisdom through serendipity one quote at a time. UXQuotes

Alan Siegel talks of how tax forms, credit agreements and understanding healthcare legislation can be so difficult to understand. He calls for a simple, sensible redesign, and plain English, to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us. Simple language, as I have written about earlier, is something that needs to be used in…

2010 has been a good year. Besides improving products through usability testing and user research at work, I gave an expert tutorial at The India HCI/ IDID 2010 conference at IIT IDC, Mumbai in March and the book I contributed to, UX Storytellers: Connecting the dots was published in November. Most viewed content From the…

One of the world’s leading experts on choice, Sheena Iyengar talks about fundamental differences in how the idea of choice differs across different countries and cultures. Citing various interesting examples from her research spanning a more than 15 years, she explains the assumptions which inform the American view of choice and how too much choice…

John Underkoffler starts of by talking about how, around twenty five years ago, the Macintosh fundamentally changed the way people thought about computation, computers and how they used them, and that it was such a radical change that the early Macintosh development team had to write an entirely new OS from ground up for it.…

Rob Tanen begins to talk about how user researchers have historically lacked appropriate technology for studying how people use technology and the emergence of a variety of tools that can be applied to data gathering, analysis and sharing. He talks about the need for awareness and guidance in the selection and use of such research…

David Kelley, chairman of IDEO, says product design has become more about the user experience than about hardware. He shows a video of this new, broader approach, including footage from the Prada store in New York. About David Kelly David Kelly is the founder of IDEO. He helped design the first mouse, the Treo and…

Cone Trees is featured at Harry Brignull’s UXURLS along with other credible websites on user experience.

Summary Out of the near 50 posts that were made at Cone Trees in 2009, here is a compilation of what was most popular with you, dear readers. You will also find my list of suggested readings for each section (except for the articles section, where there were only three posts I made in the…

My Axure libraries are included with fabulous others at Axure.com.

My article, ‘Increase Conversions in Long Web Forms by Resolving the Accidental Back Button Activation Issue’, is published by Evolt (a pleasure since articles in the Usability/ IA column selected and published roughly once a year).

My Axure prototype widgets are mentioned in the Axure libraries and widgets compilation at Wireframes Magazine.

My article, ‘How to Find Usability Test Participants’, is featured at BCS CHI group’s Usability News.

My Axure prototype widgets are mentioned at the official Axure Facebook page.

The guy who broke all the rules of traditional typography, gave grunge typography an identity of its own, Raygun art direcrtor, David Carson walks through a gorgeous (and often quite funny) slide deck of his work and found images. About David Carson David Carson’s boundary-breaking typography in the 1990s, in Ray Gun magazine and other…

Cone Trees is featured at the popular minimalist website design gallery Siiimple.

Cone Trees is featured in the preview links section of Graphic Orgasm Ultimate Web Portal (GOUW).

My post, ‘Understanding Accessibility- Videos of users using Assistive Technology’ is included in the WaSP (The Web Standards Project) InterAct Accessibility Resources section.

Don Norman talks about visceral, behavioral, and reflective design. About Don A. Norman Don Norman is the author of the classic The Design of Everyday Things, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things and The Design of Future Things: Author of The Design of Everyday Things. A PhD in Psychology, he is the…

My article, ‘Tips for effective DIY Participant Recruitment for Usability Testing’, is pointed to by Business Week’s Business Exchange.

Cone Trees is featured in the extremely popular (and one of the original website design galleries) Cool Home Pages.

“Sixth Sense” is spearheaded by Pranav Mistry at MIT. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for a profound, data-rich interaction with our environment. Imagine Minority Report. About Pranav Mistry Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. He got his master and bachelor…

Cone Trees is featured in the website gallery section of Ajax Finder.

I had been wondering for a few months by now; why was it that I was able to display random posts in my downloads widget on my local server but not on the live site? I was using <?php query_posts(‘orderby=rand’); ?> to do the job. The downloads widget on my website was supposed to display…

David Merill talks about Siftables which he created along with Jeevan Kalanithi at the MIT Media Lab. As is mentioned at Jeevan and Merill’s Taco Lab Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides…

My presentation, ’15 Tips for Effective Usability Testing in India’, is featured on the front page of SlideShare (which is a pleasure since it’s chosen out of thousands of great presentations out there).

Cone Trees is featured in the website design gallery website Best CSS Designs.

Stephen Palmer, Professor of Psychology & Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, reports results from three projects that investigate people’s aesthetic responses to spatial and color composition. The results show that ‘aesthetic science’, a new and exciting topic within cognitive science, can help us increase our understanding on the nature of our appreciation of the…

Summary To prevent the cursor from flickering during recording, open Camtasia Recorder, go to Tools > Options and deselect the ‘Capture layered windows’ checkbox.

More choice doesn’t necessarily mean better options or greater satisfaction. In fact, Barry Schwartz would like to suggest the opposite. Schwartz, an American psychologist talks about the abundance of choice in modern society, and why less choice is better than more and choice paralysis. The Paradox of Choice is a phenomenon extensively researched by experts…

Cone Trees is featured at the website design gallery website CSS Bag.

There is no better way to understand the problems faced by specially abled users if you need to code website front end keeping accessibility in mind. Being passionate about web accessibility, I ended up as the creator and owner of the global accessibility distribution list (and the wiki node on accessibility) at Sapient besides having…

Cone Trees is featured in the user submitted section of the popular design gallery Konigi.

Cone Trees is featured at the popular website design gallery website Design Snack.

Anand Agarawala, interface designer, software developer and inventor, presented BumpTop in mid 2007 at TED. BumpTop is a user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3-D extreme, transforming file navigation into a freewheeling playground of crumpled documents and clipping-covered “walls”. It was created as Anand Agarawala’s Masters Thesis at the University…

Cone Trees is featured at the website design gallery CSS Season.

Solution Summary: Simply deselect the ‘‘Current page only’ check box in the Export dialog window to export all pages of your Fireworks built click-through prototype.

Summary Emitting light via internal LED lights, this lightweight helium filled orb responds to human touch – changing colour as it is punched, tapped, slapped or squeezed. Zygote at Building Interactive Playgrounds, Florence, Italy Zygote At SIGCHI Vancouver Zygote at Sensation White ’08, Amsterdam (As put by Tangible Interaction- the creators of Zygote) Zygote is…

(length: 23 minutes) Moderated by Bruno Giussani, this talk by Jan Chipchase where he details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions. He identified these trends through extensive field work he and his team are conducting around the world. Jan’s work shows how the digital devices are creating new practices…

Cone Trees is now featured along with other fabulous websites on user interface design at AllTop’s User Interface category.

Cone Trees is now featured in the user interface section along with other user experience authorities of the Guy Kawasaki’s popular AllTop.

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind (Length: 24 minutes) Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples. V.S. Ramachandran is the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San…

Opera used MAMA— their ‘Metadata Analysis and Mining Application’ to trawl the web and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates. For example, it found out that only 4.13% of all sites on the World Wide Web are web standards…

I think this diagram very well describes the other disciplines interaction design overlaps with.

Here are three free books on interaction design that you don’t have to pay a penny for to read (you can purchase the print versions of two of the books listed below if you like).

The above image and video display the new Philips ‘Green Cuisine’ concept. What is the Philips Green Cuisine Concept about? It’s a table that has a sink in it and an under-table composter that produces soil tablets to grow fresh herbs into the mini garden (which is also built into the table). You can cook…

You can watch all the presentations videos from User Research Friday which took place in San Fran on November 7, 2008. Thanks bolt petersfor sharing almost all of the presentations with everybody. Aviva Rosenstein, Ph.D: “Real Ethnography vs. Fake Ethnography” (This video is 30 minutes long) Steve Portigal: “Design and Research: Ships in the Night?”…

The above image is one of the 60 hand drawings that are part of Luke Chandresinghe’s proposal for a patent office to be built on a site in East London. They were originally part of his diploma project titled the ‘The Institute of Ideas’ at the Bartlett school of Architecture. The awe inspiring Sri Lankan…

Apala Lahiri Chavan is Vice President,Asia for HFI and manages offices in India, China, and Singapore, and a Contextual Innovation lab in Bangalore. She is an award-winning designer (International Audi Design Award) and has led teams spanning design, development, testing, and deployment of software products. In addition, she is ACM SIGCHI’s Vice Chair for local…

Cone Trees is featured at the Indian website design gallery RGB Garden.

Cone Trees is featured at the website design gallery One CSS.

Cone Trees is featured at the digital art magazines and web design gallery QNT.

Cone Trees is featured at the Indian website design gallery Web Upvan.

Cone Trees is featured at the website design gallery CSS Design.