Karen Bachmann's Blog (9)

Experience Themes: How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products by Cindy Chastain shares



"... a method drawn from storytelling that can help us build a better story about our product, unify teams, inspire design concepts and get us closer to evoking the pleasure, emotion and meaning of the experience we intend to… Continue

Kevin Bury, Principle UX Designer at LinkedIn, blogs about LinkedIn's new design and explains that it is based on user research and refined by usability testing. (Thanks, Alex, for posting the link through Twitter.)

Has anyone been using or creating web slices, a feature in IE8 (Microsoft's description of the feature)? When I first learned about web slices earlier this year, I was intrigued. Web slices seemed to allow users to turn their Favorites bar into essentially a customized portal, creating a new form of user experience with existing content. However, I haven't heard much about implementations or… Continue

Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity shares examples of how limitations have inspired creativity and innovative designs in a variety of products. Each example gives details showing how both aesthetics and usability improved in response to the challenges the design teams faced. Fun and thought-provoking.

One of the UX email newsletters I receive included a link to Instant Eyedropper. The product website describes this Windows software as "a free software tool for webmasters that will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the HTML color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click."



I haven't used it yet, but given my reliance on the eyedropper tool when tweaking images and the frustrations I've… Continue

The story about how US Airways pilot, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger, successfully executed an emergency landing in the Hudson River and personally ensured that all passengers were safely evacuated is remarkable for many reasons and undoubtedly front-page news throughout the country and a top news story throughout the world.



The… Continue

The online games I play have both released major updates. These exciting and long-anticipated events have been tracked regularly by game reviewers and fans alike. I've been reading for weeks before and since the releases about these expansions in forums, release notes, reviews, and developer diaries.



Developer diaries are particularly interesting artifacts. A developer diary discusses the motivation, goals, and/or design thinking that went into a particular aspect of product design.… Continue

In keeping with the Transportation theme for World Usability Day 2008, check out the New York Times article, The Road to Clarity by Joshua Yaffa. This article chronicles the creation of a new font, Clearview, now being adopted for US highway signs. Proving increased legibility and researching the actual improved usability was a key part of the design process. Further details about the research, as well as a… Continue

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