Bad Usability Calendar 2008
The 2008 edition of the Bad Usability Calendar is out and available for download. Go get it.
ixd archives
We’re looking for designers to help create the websites and applications of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Qualifications:
- Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with a current temple recommend.
- 5+ years of experience in user research and designing public facing websites. Internationalization and localization experience is preferred.
- An Online Portfolio that demonstrates an ability to think strategically, superior visual designs, and strong interaction design skills
Preferred Skills:
- Creative problem solving skills, think conceptually and craft elegant solutions
- Excellent knowledge and abilities in user experience methods, best practices, design principles, problem-framing skills
- Ability to play a major role in defining and developing the user experience for the Church’s products
- Ability to carry the design vision through to completion in an agile development environment
- Branding, marketing or content strategy experience
- Ability to transfer user insights into quality user experiences
- Ability to work with a team of content producers, including writers, audio/visual specialists, and product managers
- Experience with mockups (HTML/CSS)
- Exceptional experience in UI/Interaction, design principles and iconography
- Strong knowledge of technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, Ajax, XML, mobile
Examples of our websites:
Apply
Please apply online at https://careers.ldschurch.org/ for job ID#60463 (contract) or job ID# 60457 (full time). Note: an LDS Account is required to view jobs.
Please direct questions to [email protected]
“Interaction Design (IxD) is a reverse blanket term that describes how people apply many theories in psychology and physiology, including Heuristics, Cybernetics, Ergonomics, Planning Theory, and even more disparate fields dealing with Audio and Visual design.Read in a discussion at interactiondesigners.com. The members are discussing the difference between Interface Design and Interaction Design.
To reduce that. Interface Design is about where buttons appear on a page, and what those buttons look like. IxD is whether or not that page needs to exist at all.
Or
Interface Design will tell you how best to ask a user for his address, IxD will tell you to harvest it from somewhere that you already have it stored.
Or
Interface Designers design interfaces, IxDs design ways to avoid them.”
Building the UX Dreamteam. An insightful article about the members or skills a user experience team should have to be successful in delivering winning results.
The IXD snowflake.
I won’t post any more of these (OK—maybe just one more that I have in mind), but I thought this one was cool, given our Interaction Design group’s moniker.
The Crew
There are now 24 Interaction Designers working for the Church. Twenty four! Our group meeting yesterday was one of the rare times where everyone was there so we took this impromptu picture:
From left to right: Tim Zheng, Randy Hall, Aaron Cannon, Sam Grigg, Matt Miller, Todd Erickson, Ted Boren, Rob Foster, Pete Lasko, Tadd Giles (“Is that a lady shirt?”) Ben Willis, Derek Caswell, John Dilworth, Cameron Moll, Rob Thomas, Ray Davis, Paul Vaughn, Jason Lynes, Gilbert Lee, Kaleb Tracy (really short), Brian Sweeting, Chris Mayfield, Aaron Barker, Clifton Labrum (really short).
We’ve had a lot of new designers lately so let me introduce them here: Kaleb Tracy started at the beginning of the year. He hails from Michigan. He was a film student at BYU and is friends with Napoleon Dynamite and Jared Hess. It’s true. “I love technology…” Ray Davis was a consultant for us for about six months and we recently hired him full-time. He has some great stories of entrepreneurship that you need to hear someday. Pete Lasko started two months ago from a company here in Utah. We met him in one of our Tech Talks. He said he’s gonna bike to work from Heber sometime soon and still be on time for work. Did you hear that Jason? On time! Clifton Labrum started about a month ago from a company here in Salt Lake as well. Clifton is just always ready to spring to whatever. Super nice guy. Oh, and he blogs. (Clifton, are you ever going to forgive me about that first interview?) Sam Grigg started a couple of weeks ago. He is a recent grad of University of Utah. He said he has Barry Manilow in his iTunes. Did I remember that right?
Three new interns also started in the last two weeks. Aaron Cannon is studying Actuarial Sciences at the University of Iowa. He moved his family from Iowa to have his internship over here! He has been blind since birth and is here to kick our butt on accessibility of our web sites and web applications. He also said he wants a 30” monitor. Woot! Derek Caswell is studying at BYU and is here for the summer. He is our suspender guy :) Tim Zheng is a native of Hong Kong, China and is also studying at BYU. I’m definitely glad I have a co-Asian in the group. It’s like Rush Hour. He’s Jackie Chan and I’m Chris Tucker.
We also have two new hires who are coming in the next few weeks. Rick Moore from Salt Lake and Albert Candari who is moving from Hawaii! We can’t wait!
There are also a few freelancers that we work with on some of our projects. We hope someday they will join our team as well. They’re awesome.
To finish off, some additional information about our group:
- Eight people have been hired from out of state
- Two are really short (Kaleb and Clifton)
- Ten have blogs
- The group has about 63 kids total. 63!
- Five are studying (with two in graduate school)
- Two have worked at Microsoft
- Two are triathlon athletes
- One works out every single day
- One has a voice 20 octaves lower (is that even possible?)
- Half live north of Salt Lake, the other half live south, and another half live in Heber
- Most quoted movie by the group: Nacho “Get that corn outta my face!” Libre (Last year was Zoolander)
So anyweys…we are continually hiring Interaction Designers (associate, mid-level, and senior). If you think you got the chops, apply for our team and come join the fun. Peace out.
The Q1 2007 issue of GUUUI points out some of the most common pitfalls of prototyping and how to avoid them in The dark side of prototyping
Some of the points mentioned are:
- Make sure that the design reflected by the prototype is realizable within the project constraints
- Keep fidelity at a minimum throughout the design phase
- Involve colleagues in the design process
No Ideas But In Things is a library of controls, animations, layouts, and displays that might be a source of inspiration for interaction designers. Bookmark this one.
Four Principles of Interaction Design
More good info from Jeff Veen. Four Principles of Interaction Design:
- Discoverability – Make finding stuff easy.
- Recoverability – Actions should be without cost.
- Context – Sense of time, space and meaning.
- Feedback – How the system responds.
I like his take on these aspects of interaction design.
Luke Wroblewski, in his latest column at uxmatters.com, Refining Data Tables, takes a look at several interface design solutions that enable users to find their way through large tables of data.
“Users often need to add, edit, delete, search for, and browse through lists of people, places, or things within Web applications. As a result, the design of tables plays a crucial role in such an application’s overall usefulness and usability. But just like the design of forms, there’s more than one way to design tabular data.”