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Category: Academic Rambling

  • HCI Students’ Questions: Answered (Part 2)

    Let’s take a crack at a few more questions from HCI students. I’m going to give a real thorough answer to one question, and knock out a few more with a simplified response. If you haven’t done so already, check out part 1 of this article. What are professionals & hiring managers looking for in…

  • HCI Students’ Questions: Answered (Part 1)

    This weekend I returned to my design roots and met a ton of Indiana University’s current HCI/d students. I was pleased to be a member of the Alumni panel and was impressed by the questions that the students asked. I was so impressed, in fact, that I think many of the questions they asked are…

  • Aurora, the Future of the Browser, and Agile Envisionment

    As your local Interaction Design opinion one-stop-shop, I feel obliged to weigh in on Aurora, Adaptive Path‘s newest concept series in collaboration with Mozilla Labs. First off, if you haven’t watched the videos they’ve published so far, do that first: Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on…

  • The Elements of Design (Part 1)

    (If you’re reading this from a feed reader, you’ll want to jump to my site so you can see the images.) Today I want to talk about something a bit academic. More of a thinking game than anything else. I chose to start with Graphic Design because, well, it seems a bit more established as…

  • Who’s My City?

    The last few days I’ve been reading Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City? In this book he talks about how populations centers have changed since the rise of the creative class. For the most part, Florida refutes Thomas Friedman’s theories in The World is Flat. Florida believes that where you live still matters, despite today’s advanced…

  • Banana = Design = Innovation = Vision

    Banana = Vision Love it or hate it, Bruce Nussbaum makes some great points in Are Designers the Enemy of Design? I think I buy most of it. Is Design a specialist activity? If it’s done well, generally yes. Is that likely to change? For the most part, I don’t think so. Will ‘the everyman’…

  • NaNoWriMo

    November is NaNoWriMo! (Translation: National Novel Writing Month) Will you be participating? What shall you write about? Will I participate? How hard could 1000 words a day really be?

  • Testing Testing Testing…

    Hey ThoughtWorkers, So at TWU we learned about a ton of different ways to test software: Unit Tests, Functional Testing, GUI Testing, etc. Here’s my question: What’s the point of a tested tool that the user (or perhaps customer, if you prefer) finds difficult to actually use? What about Usability Testing? How about testing to…

  • UCD @ TW: What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

    When I came to ThoughtWorks University a little less than a month ago, I set as my main goal the task of discovering what kinds of User Centered Design practices were occuring at ThoughtWorks, and how I could help progress those tasks. After two blazingly fast weeks of class, I’ve learned a lot, hopefully taught…

  • My Agile Excitement, Part 1: Stories are based on Users

    As noted in my first agile worry, I am often scared that features of a given piece of software will be built based on reasons other than user needs. Yesterday I learned that story cards are, indeed, quite user centered. The format we learned for creating a card is as follows: As a [ person…