I recently ran across the fantastic short film “Design the New Business” which you can watch online. It talks about the trials and tribulations designers and business people go through when they work together in new ways to solve challenging problems facing businesses today (sounds familiar?). In particular, I really appreciate the fact that it [...]
I was recently listening to a talk by Simon Sinek about how great leaders inspire everyone to take action. His premise is pretty simple yet very powerful, and can be better understood by looking at his “Golder Circle” and its three layers: The core “why” (the cause), the middle “how” (the value proposition) and the [...]
I was recently watching a presentation from Dan Ariely regarding the nature of human decision making and how we all are “predictably irrational”. The example I found most interesting and relevant was a little experiment he ran based on an ad for the Economist magazine and the various subscription choices it offered. Here’s the setup; [...]
The role of “experience” designers and “user interface” designers has been much harder to justify than other designer disciplines such as graphic design or industrial design. For that reason, I find it interesting that the topic of value added by designers has been coming up more and more often, particularly when customers are pretty adamant [...]
Error recovery strategies and the verbiage around them has always been a hot topic of debate. We’ve all heard the classical “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you.” and “I’m sorry I didn’t understand you.” messages that are normally implemented as global prefixes to further attempts to help users get back on track. Some other designers [...]
As you know, I enjoy looking at other fields that might have design elements that could be leveraged in a speech and multimodal world. My latest discovery was the film “Objectified” by Gary Hustwit. Even though the documentary is centered around the topic of Industrial Design and the process by which well known products are [...]
During any Requirement’s Gathering process, one of the hardest yet most critical steps involves finding out the features that will be offered to the users. Figuring out the final set normally involves talking to agents, listening to the different business units, looking at statistics, etc. Furthermore, if the customer is migrating from an existing system [...]
Oh yeah, it’s that time of the year again. If you’re planning to attend this year’s SpeechTEK in New York, please stop by and say hi. Also, you can now look at the final version of the program. In particular, I would like to invite you to the following sessions: Introduction to Voice User Interface [...]
Someone recently brought to my attention the fantastic keynote presentation by Bill Buxton (the author of Sketching User Experiences) from this year’s Mix 09 event. The concepts and ideas mentioned by Bill — particularly the notion of ROE or Return On Experience — resonated so much with me, that I think his vision should help [...]
I was recently reading an article about the future of wireframes in the context of user interface design documentation. Wireframes have been used mostly for visual elements and became a critical building block in the early days of the web. But since I like drawing analogies between other UI fields and the VUI field, there [...]
