Yammering at work is not a waste of time, concludes The Economist. What is a waste of time, though, is calculating how much time is being wasted on social networks. And with that, we bring you a list of ten things we yammered over the past week or so in a post whose title rhymes with Les Miserables.
We were fascinated about all things iPad, of course:
It’s as if Yelp, Twitter, and Facebook “got together” and somehow had a baby – and they named it Foursquare. In our ever increasing hyper sharing of status updates society, Foursquare has been said by some to be the breakout hit of 2010.
The premise is simple (and, admittedly, a bit addicting): As you’re out and about, go to Foursquare on pretty much any mobile device to “check-in” as you arrive at your destination. Once checked-in, you can find out things like: Continue reading »
For a media planning project, we needed to find a simple way to illustrate how people in a particular segment engage with different media. After some experimentation, we came up with this “media wheel” chart that summarizes 216 data points from a media spreadsheet. It shows (zoom in) where — at work, at home, in a restaurant, or in the car — people are when they read newspapers, watch TV, or listen to the radio throughout a typical day. Lighter hues correspond to higher levels of activity.
Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer helps elaborate on this presentation “Tap is the New Click” at the 2009 IIT Design Conference. The book provides guidance on designing touch screens and motion-sensitive controllers, because these interfaces must be approached differently then keyboard-based applications.
In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton advocates that sketching should become part of the design process early on.
Last Thursday, Hill Holliday hosted the “User Experience Techniques: Inspiring Users to Identify What They Didn’t Know They Needed” event organized by the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (and tweeted in real-time).
Last week, Bill Gribbons, the director of Bentley University’s grad program in Human Factors in Information Design, gave a talk about the future of the user experience [UX] field. The way he sees it, we are going to put a strong focus on quantitative results in order to compliment the value we find through qualitative research.
