David McCandless, award winning designer, writer, and author, speaks at TED on his passion for exploring data and creating meaningful visualizations that convey information in the form of a story. With a plethora of examples from his latest book, Information Is Beautiful, the talk is both facinating and inspiring. In one example he displays the carbon output from the Icelandic volcano that grounded thousands of flights over Europe in 2010. By comparing the carbon output that those flights would have produced themselves, the eruption was the first carbon-neutral volcanic event the world has seen. David posts his visualizations on his website and it is worth diving in to take a look.

James Archer, Managing Director at Forty (a design and marketing consultancy), posted a great webcast explaining how people make purchasing decisions and gives some very practical advice for designing websites seeking new users and customers. Potential customers fall into four different categories (called Decision Modes): spontaneous, competitive, humanistic, and methodical. The categorization depends on two scales. The first, fast or slow, and the second, logical or emotional. By taking into account the information each of these consumer types look for, you can ensure success in communicating the value proposition and convert more customers.

Don Norman, one of the fathers of user experience (now 75 years old), gives an excellent talk at Business of Software 2009 on the ten rules for successful products. Throughout the talk, Don stresses the importance of creating positive experiences with many anecdotes and provides many tips along the way. For example, make sure to have a strong beginning and strong ending to an experience, because that is what people remember. By placing the undesirable or painful parts in the middle, even if that requires creating a false beginning or ending, people will come away with a more positive memory of the experience. And it is that memory that they will share with others and remember long after the actual experience.

The 10 Rules:
1. It is all about the experience
2. Design systems
3. Everything is a service
4. Everything is a product
5. Don’t be too logical
6. Memory is more important than actuality
7. Complexity is okay
8. Design for the real world
9. Design for people
10. It is all about the experience

Genius of Design, a TV series appearing on BBC2 in the UK, focuses on all thing industrial design. Episode 1 of the five part series focuses on the evolution of industrial design throughout history and the move from craftsmanship to industrialization and consumerism. Guest appearances include Ford’s global head of design J Mays, and legendary designer Dieter Rams.

If you look at the customer… go into the customer’s home as an example, and you will see who they are. See that same customer driving around in their car, and that is who they want to be.
- J Mays, Global Head of Design at Ford

Jesse James Garrett, president of Adaptive Path, speaks at UX Week 2009 on The State of User Experience. The field of User Experience has changed much over the years and Jesse does a good job at both finding insights into the past, such as its then narrow scope, as well as projecting forward with the incorporation of emotion. The talk is excellent for those practicing in the field and is one of the better talks out there discussing the current field of user experience as a whole.

Microsoft Research presents its case for the inclusion of pen input along side of touch input on Tablet PCs and other touch-enabled computers. While Microsoft and Apple have taken opposing views on the need for pen input on computing devices, there are indeed good arguments on both sides. Unfortunately the more obvious and useful cases for pen input, such as sketching, are slightly less academic, making researchers strive to come up with more novel uses. In any case, several intriguing use-cases are presented and perhaps they will inspire more practical applications down the road. It seemed like only yesterday when every multi-touch computer simply demonstrated rotating and zooming photos.

Mark Baskinger, an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses the importance of Interaction Designers learning to draw better in order to better communicate ideas. With Interaction Designers coming from many different backgrounds to the relatively new field, it is rare that they have been classically trained in sketching like their counterparts in Industrial Design. Mark also talks about the advancement of Interaction Design as a discipline and how through confidence in purpose, Interaction Designers can build report in the business world.

In an effort to re-imagine the out of the box experience and make it easier for older people to understand new technologies, this collaborative group has indeed created a couple imaginative solutions. The first solution being a book with cut outs where the physical components rest while instructions surround the components. The user is then guided through the setup process until finally it is ready to use. Another idea was to include cards, which when tapped on the device, provide instructions for a given task. Lastly, a map was designed which allows users to familiarize themselves with the menu system without diving into layers and layers of menus. This project was a collaboration between Clara Gaggero, Adrian Westaway, Samsung Design Europe, and the Helen Hamlyn Center.

Smart Design, an award winning design firm, has a new tool in their bag of research tricks and is showing it off in this new video. The idea entails having users spend 15 minutes writing a breakup letter with a given product. By doing so, users expose their emotions buried beneath the surface and enable the designers to understand the emotional connection between people and the products.

Alan Siegel, a branding expert and a leading authority on business communication, stresses the importance of clear, concise, and simple language for use in government documents and literature directed at consumers. Armed with a research lab that specializes in measuring the comprehensibility of documentation, Alan has taken it upon himself to redesign several documents including tax forms, credit agreements, and healthcare legislation. He is a true savior and inspiration for anyone fed up with unintelligible legalese pervasive in today’s culture.