Boxes and Arrows Podcast

Topics discussed include: Prioritization and project tracking, How to gain insight into career development paths within a user experience team, Finding out about performance management, and Discovering how to tailor your own management style. Margaret and Graham also tackled other tough issues during their session, such as: Building a culture of constructive feedback, Developing leadership within a team, Effectively managing team dynamics, Evangelizing user experience practices, and Managing stakeholders

Whether as the interaction designers for NPR’s StoryCorps, or as the co-leaad designer for the National September 11th Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center, Local Projects is creating new paradigms for interaction by tackling physical space. Jake talks with me about how the interaction design process bends, accelerates and sometimes completely falls apart, when applied to the global community.

We discuss his past experiences as a nuclear engineer, time spent in the US Navy, as well as working at some of the leading design firms in the world such as frog and IDEO before arriving at Adaptive Path. My heart-felt thanks to Michael and the entire team at Adaptive Path for allowing Boxes and Arrows to share these conversations with the global community.

The video game industry produces an enormous volume of highly innovative user interface experiences, but this rich source of creative thinking is largely unseen by communities dedicated to conventional software or Web design. Vanguards' John Ferrara argues that as gaming becomes a ubiquitous activity among a vast worldwide customer base, its direction and conventions will become not merely relevant to HCI design, but indeed impossible to ignore.

In this presentation, Aaron Martlage explores techniques for leveraging the varied skill sets of those in the UX design field to provide service design in a complex environment. Aaron argues that experts must balance the social dynamics between different personas; capture and sift vast amounts of data in an attempt to distill pertinent information; and visualize their findings with precision to ensure that the experience is improved.

It appears that taxonomies are becoming more important to the work we do as metadata and ontologies extend their reach further into user experience. Dave Cooksey demonstrates the virtues of thinking of taxonomy in terms of the user experience, ways of talking about taxonomies that communicate it's value, and how to craft a user-centric taxonomy by examining several e-commerce redesign case studies.

In this presentation entitled, "Hotel Yeoville" South Africa's Jason Hobbs talks about how ethnographic research methods and an empathetic approach to users can form the basis for information architecture solutions that attempt to directly address and improve the lives of people in developing countries.

Peter Stahl and Josh Damon Williams show how to evaluate consistency of your site's "feel". Using a recent audit of the interaction design of a major web site as an example they discuss how to collect and catalog the variety of interactions users encounter.

Michael Magoolaghan describes one IA's volunteer efforts to revitalize a small public library's website and bring a user-centered focus to its building renovation efforts through working with blueprints, photos and architectural renderings and others within and outside of the library.

UX Management often feels like a mystic art. It can entail moving people and processes within an organization without the enchantment of an official mandate. This presentation by Dan Willis deconstructs an illustrated fable about an intrepid creature who introduces user goals to a development process that would have otherwise been dominated by royal business owners and technological black magic.