Breaking The Design Cycle: Get Creative To Be Creative

“A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion”

Co-creation through generative design thinking

Co-creation is not just the next new thing in marketing. It is an alternative way of seeing and being in the world.

10 Things a Web Designer Should Consider

While this is an old debate and it is clear that we won’t get very far with it, I want to make some statements regarding the things a web designer should consider in order to improve present skills.

The Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Design

After a bit of digging I’ve been able to uncover some more about Geoff Mulgan’s critique of social design.

The Evolution of the Apple Mouse [PICS]

Apple’s product design is legendary in the industry for innovation, inspiration and imagination, but it’s often the more glamorous products such as the MacBooks, iPhones and iPods that get all the attention.

A Motive For Bad Design

Browse around some content sites on the web—magazines, blogs, news sites—and you’ll quickly notice a lot of bad design…

Storytelling in UXD: It’s Not Just for Content, Kids – Part I

A perspective on storytelling in User Experience Design.

Storytelling in UXD: It’s Not Just for Content, Kids – Part II

A perspective on storytelling in User Experience Design.

Using Power Structure and Gestalt for Visual Hierarchy

Hierarchy in web design is centrally about influencing a user to understand and embrace the principal goals of a website and interact with the material in the ideal order to facilitate a smooth and pleasant experience with the website.

Revealing Design Treasures From The Amazon

Presentation showcasing design tips about Amazon.com

Memory Inception: Three Keys To Creating A Great User Experience For Your Product

Ever read a great book? What do you remember about it? Maybe a few dramatic moments, some wild story twists, and most definitely the ending.

Decoupling Usability and Visuals

Design is often seen as a subjective and creative pursuit. I tend to agree, but feel that the more subjective and detached you are from specific strategic goals, the more problems will arise. If there’s any ambiguity regarding how something should be used and how visuals are incorporated to your advantage, you should expect a lot of waste.

Responsive Web Design

Recently, an emergent discipline called “responsive architecture” has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them.

How Can Futures Thinking Amplify Design Thinking?

The business world has been quick to try and implement design thinking in hopes of stimulating sweeping organization change and innovation, only to abandon it and return to old practices when it doesn’t “work.” Is design thinking nothing more than a poorly defined gimmick, or are people just missing the big picture?

Firefox Panorama: Tab Candy Evolved

I am happy to announce that Tab Candy is coming to Firefox 4. Starting today, Tab Candy will be called Firefox Panorama and be available as a feature in Firefox betas. Head to the Firefox 4 feature list, or watch the video below, to learn how to organize your tabs into groups and reclaim your browsing experience from clutter and information overload.

The making of Undercover UX Design

After 200 pages, 50,000 words and over 1000 hours, we’re done. Undercover User Experience Design is now available for pre-order from Amazon UK and Amazon US. It’ll hit the shelves from 17 September on.

Design for the Mind

Is it merely an opinion, or is there something more to it? Breaking design down seems like such an abstract thing.

A Design Is Only As Deep As It Is Usable

In this article, I hope to provide a clear demarcation between what is perceived by most to be beautiful in Web design and what is truly beautiful, along with some guiding principles to help designers today create websites whose beauty is not superficial, but rather improves and enhances the user experience.

How To Improve Design Usability: Minimizing Errors Part II

When designing websites and other applications are there ways we can guide users to make correct choices, help them interact with our systems, and generally make our systems more usable? A variety of strategies exist to improve our interface designs and today we’ll talk about 2 of them.

How To Minimize Errors And Create More Usable Websites: Part I

Errors happen. It’s inevitable that any system will fail at times. Often failures are attributed to human error. Most, though are really due to design errors. As designers what can we do to minimize errors and their effects on our sites and in our applications?

Aza Raskin – Designing in the Open

iPad Application Design

I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications.

Don Norman on 3 ways good design makes you happy