Only the UPA can succeed in combining user experience, social change and sausage rolls in a way that means you take away from the evening much more than you came with.

I say the UPA, but, of course, I mean the UK chapter of the UPA. The event was really a micro-conference – a smaller, UK-slanted, speaker event that mirrored the theme of the larger, worldwide speaker event taking place in Atlanta later this year (which, incidentally, Elsa and Dan will be speaking at). This is a good thing. Because the UK UPA folks put on a good event, thank you very much.

The purchase of Tweetdeck by Twitter is not really a surprise. While there’s any number of Twitter clients out there vacuuming up the Twitter API, only a couple of them are likely to stick around any longer than a floating whale – and one of those will be Tweetdeck.

In a previous life, I redesigned the product finding experience for sun.com, which was pretty much just a good implementation of faceted search. I’d love to be able to show you what that looked like, but unfortunately, these days, the Sun product line is mostly an html spreadsheet in a modal overlay on the Oracle acquisitions web site.

I did write about it at the time, with reference to the importance of sorting out the data architecture if you have any hope of manipulating that data in a way that enables a simple, usable interface.

Scroll forward a few years, and I’m directed to another implementation of faceted search on the patientslikeme web site (via Jan Srutek, via Jared Spool), which takes an inordinate amount of data, provides some interesting methods for interrogating that data and, in my case, rather quickly diminishes your will to live when you actually find some’ patients like me’.

When I uploaded my slides from the recent IA Summit in Denver to SlideShare, I had particular problems with uploading the speaker notes, which, still now, are not available. I’m a great believer in using simple slides as a visual enhancement to a spoken narrative, and so when those slides are posted on their own, there can be some strange interpretations.

In particular, I have one slide in that presentation which simply says ‘Expose Yourself’. On its own, it could be read as something of a mid-life crisis admission in a magistrate’s court, but in my defence (pun intended), it’s actually part of a series of slides that try to explain the benefits of opening the black box of design, to encourage collaboration with clients and stakeholders to maximise brain power and increase efficiency.

Back in January, I put in a speculative submission to the 2011 IA summit organisers to talk about the value of thinking time in experience design, including a preposterous proposition for prediction and protection of that pensive period.

I was kind of using it as a way to determine how to submit next time, after they rejected me. However, they accepted my submission (hopeless jokes included), which kicked off a chain of events, culminating in my Saturday morning session: “I’m not just making this up: The value of thinking time in experience design”.

I recently attended the crowdsourcing event for the UK Usability Professionals Association at Sapient’s offices where we had some excellent discussions about the past, present and future of the UK chapter of the UPA.

Jeff Gothelf, Director of UX at TheLadders.com, has a great proposition for what he is calling ‘Lean UX’, which reminds us what’s great about user experience design and how, potentially, we’ve over-specified it.

His central proposition is that it’s about time we got back to looking at experiences, rather than deliverables. Deliverables help us build commodities and describe solutions and actually, they can be pretty handy to work backwards from when we’re selling into a client.

There is often a temptation to dive into information architecture (IA) design based solely on acquired knowledge and a well-articulated business objective. It’s quite possible to produce meaningful taxonomies and content structures in this way, especially for discrete, closely scoped projects. However, some of the most effective structures evolve when iterative analysis of research findings and discussion outputs start to surface emerging themes.

Original post by former Foolproofer Patrick Goffin

Interesting article from Elisa del Galdo from Flow explaining how, by applying the principles of persuasive design, you can design compelling user interactions.

Read the full article published by UX magazine: Persuasion in design

We use Axure. We use other things too, but for rapid development of interfaces, from low-fidelity wireframes, through to complex interactive prototypes, we like using Axure. And we like using Axure, because, frankly, it makes things much easier for us. Having tried various flavours of development tools, dabbled in the dark arts of interface development environments (IDEs) and even considered those drag-and-drop applications that sound great, we come back to Axure, because it’s easy to learn, simple to use, but still produces output that looks professional, clean and clients rather like the look of.