I travel a lot, so I end up spending more time on travel booking sites than I’d like. When you’re planning for a trip there’s just so much on your mind. You’ve got to figure out your schedule, who’s going to pick you up at the airport, what the weather’s going to be like, and you have to make plans with people at your destination. All of these things have some bearing on the flight you need to book. If you’re like me, you wait until the last minute to book your flight because it’s just such a hassle to figure it all out. It’s a lot of stress. When I go to book a flight, I just want to find one that is going to inflict the least amount of pain.
Aarron Walter
Online Travel Booking Sucks. Hipmunk to the Rescue
The UX Sketchbook in Action at Future of Web Design
I ran a day long workshop at Future of Web Design called “Interface Design Bootcamp“. In the workshop we learned how to conceptualize an app to connect people at an event like the Future of Web Design Conference using design personas and sketchboards. Ryan Carson sat in on my workshop and wrote a nice post on Think Vitamin about the sketchboarding process.
The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.
I snapped a few pics from the conference to document the fun we were having with the new sketchbooks. You can view all of the workshop photos on Flickr.
On UXMag.com: The Expanding Role of User Experience Design
I’ve noticed a trend happening not only in my day to day work as a user experience designer, but throughout our industry. UX work requires a great deal of diplomacy, and a mastery of the languages spoken in many sub-disciplines of web design and business teams. UX designers are becoming translators, and diplomats as well as designers.
I’ve written a short article on UXMag.com about this issue. An excerpt follows:
As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.
UX Sketchbook: Faster, Smarter Interface Design
InVision: A New Way to Prototype
I’m a big fan of prototyping over wireframing because there’s just so much of an interface you can miss if you don’t actually use it as you design it. I typically use simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for higher fidelity prototypes, and for lower fidelity stuff I use Keynote.
InVision offers a clever new way to create prototypes quickly. Design individual screens in your favorite app like Photoshop or Omnigraffle, then upload the entire batch to InVision to add hot spots to create functional workflows. It’s simple, and really fast to use.
Links and Resources From An Event Apart Talk “Idea to Interface”
Links and resource came fast and furious in my talk at An Event Apart Boston. To make your life easier, I’ve assembled all of the resources I mentioned into a handy little list. Feel free to share this with your colleagues.
A Darwinian Theory of Beauty
Denis Dutton at TED exposes the connections between our biology and a common sense of beauty.
Antonio Damasio on the Relationship Between Emotion and Decision Making
Though we like to think of ourselves as masters of logic, making each decision in life through careful reasoning, the brute reality is that emotion is at the heart of every decision we make. Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has studied the behavior of people who have sustained brain injuries that impact emotion. In his interview with New York Times writer David Brooks, Damasio describes the devastating effects such injuries have on day-to-day life.
