Monthly Archives: January 2016

UIE Article: Deconstructing the Poor Design of a Well-Intentioned Microinteraction

In this week’s article I talk about how to evaluate microinteractions. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Session timeouts are commonplace, an artifact of how poorly our digital world integrates with our real world. If our laptops could accurately tell that someone else has sat in front of it, we could better protect our users […]

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This Coat Doubles As A Shelter For Syrian Refugees

RCA students have developed an affordable, all-in-one coat, tent, and sleeping bag to help deal with Syria’s humanitarian crisis.

The European Union has a refugee crisis on its hands. As upwards of half a million displaced Syrians flee to Europe to escape the horrors of war, they often find themselves sleeping in the open, with neither clothing nor shelter to shield them from the elements.

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Creatives: Why You Should Always Have a Side Project

Anybody who works or spends time in a corporate culture is sure to read about, hear about, or even sometimes experience "corporate burnout." Burnout is a feeling of despair, a conviction that what you are working on – and how you are spending the precious hours of your

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Connecting Your Tools with the User Experience

January 27, 2016

I grew up in a family of builders. My father is still in the construction business, and my mother is a practicing designer. We tore old walls down, built new walls, and shaped our environment. I started applying those skills after buying my first home — a 105-year-old federal style row house in Washington, D.C. that was barely standing. After 543 days, 212 tools, three trips to the doctor, thousands of feet of lumber and drywall, and miles of wire and pipe, we had a new home.

I had begun to fall in love with my tools. The power they wielded, the simple sophistication of a lathe, the force of a circular saw — what could I build next? What could I make?

Experiences don’t happen in digital, they happen because of it

Therein lies the problem. Once I had renovated the house, I no longer had a problem to solve, so I looked to my tools for the inspiration. The relentless drive I had the previous two years had dwindled, and…read more
By Shanon Marks

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Algorithms and the (Incomplete) Stories They Tell Us

January 25, 2016

“The value [of products and services] will increasingly come from being great at reading the tea leaves in the data.” – Randy Komisar, Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers

The unspoken pact that we have with machines is that their algorithms will be able to “read the tea leaves” in our data. Algorithms will be able to tell us a story about ourselves in a new way, or help us simplify our lives by being more informed.

Take, for instance, the motion sensor in the Fitbit. It listens to our movements, and its algorithms tell us a detailed story of our exercise and sleep – both quantity and quality – and where we need to improve.

Yet in spite of the ever-increasing sophistication of algorithms and machine learning, the stories that machines tell us don’t always make us more aware of our behavior, keep us better informed about ourselves, or help us make better choices.

There are three ways algorithms under-deliver on the value they…read more
By Jason Goodhand

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Anticipatory Design: When Choice is Removed From Decision Making

Have you ever thought about how the web would look like if we could anticipate user needs? The idea to personalize user experience and serve different content to different people based on their interests has lately appeared in the discussions about web design. The new approach is called

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