This post is not about iphones-Mostly
December 2, 2010 1:05 PM   Subscribe

UX Week 2010 videos are here! Hello, everybody. I have just a couple minutes and I want to share with you a very simple idea, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately that is based on a quote that is often attributed to Pablo Picasso. He said at one point that good artists copy but great artists steal, and I’ve always wondered what really he meant by that. Jeffrey Veen, co-founder of Typekit gives us 5 Minutes on Imitation in Design.

The irony here is that Picasso very likely, even if he did say this, which is questionable, but he probably stole it from something that was published a decade earlier by T.S. Eliot, who said, “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal,” and he went on to say, “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that which is torn.” Utterly different.
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There are a lot of analogies, as you could imagine, to what we’re all talking about here today, and Alexa pointed out that this is kind of what happened with the iPhone. Apple really kind of came up with something unique and innovative, something that changed the game a little bit, and the reality was that a lot of other manufacturers and companies looked at that and literally just copied what they saw, hoping that the success would come to them; that if they just mimicked the behavior that they saw on a device that seemed very popular, that they, too, would be able to reap the benefits. Is this a bad thing?




An interview with Peter Merholz, President and Co-founder of Adaptive Path.
User experience design is, at its core, a philosophy that products and services should be designed so that they are pleasurable and easy for people to use. While that might seem an obvious design approach, it’s actually not the way many designers historically thought about making things. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1990s that an industry came together around this particular approach to design.



A YouTube Playlist of some videos to help illustrate the development of Computer Interfaces

UX Week 2010 – Mark Coleran

For many years, Fantasy user interfaces (FUI) in film and television have drawn both acclaim and ridicule in equal measure. Credited with pushing boundaries about what is possible and dumbing down and misrepresenting a complex field of work and setting false expectations in the eyes of users. What is the truth?

GUI/FUI/Mark Coleran, Previously (Metatag).

This was the 2010 uxweek line-up, and this is the 2008, and 2009 speaker list

Facebook specific discussion here, Adam Mosseri on UX at Facebook.
At Facebook, analytics play a critical role in informing design decisions, but internally there’s a wariness of the idea of design by numbers. In this talk we’ll hear about three primary ways Facebook uses quantitative data. (be sure to check out the fine talk by Temple Grandin)

Steve Gundrum, president and CEO of Mattson, exposes the secret ingredient for designing new foods and beverages (and does a cool jelly-bean taste test). Click here to download the PDF transcript of Steve's talk.
So, if you didn't read the short synopsis about my presentation, I'm going to reveal to all of you actually something that people, that all of you know already, but I'm going to show you how it applies to food and beverage and it's truly the secret ingredient for designing new foods and beverages. It's really the secret ingredient for success and I'm going to lead you down that path here pretty quickly. The best way to think about this is if you were to start up a new food or beverage company, how would you design those products to ensure that you maximize profits, maximize excitement, maximize buzz, maximize the fun around it? Maybe at your lunch today two or three of you will get together and come up with a new food and beverage idea and you can actually build it right off of what we're going to be talking about today. And the way you would do it is to leverage what we call the profit pyramid. Now, when we think about a pyramid as it relates to the food industry, I'm sure all of you have seen this. There were hundreds of thousands of hours of government work that went into creating the food pyramid. And it did a really good job of changing the reference point of consumers from eating originally four square meals a day to a whole new way to think about food and beverage. And this is certainly one pyramid that applies to the food industry and especially consumers in making the right choices nutritionally and all that.
Basically, an interactive kiosk is a computer terminal that is configured to perform specific tasks that involve the retrieval and recording of information electronically. One of the advantages of an interactive kiosk is that it allows the individual to connect with a database that can allow for the processing of a transaction or exchange of some sort.
An interactive kiosk may appear in several different forms, from a single unit that is encased in a small enclosed area, like an old time phone booth. In other situations, the kiosk may be found on the exterior of a building. In still other situations, the interactive kiosk may be found in banks of multiple computer stations that are found in waiting areas.

Rural Internet Kiosk Documentary Part 1, 2
Interactive kiosk for tourist information center with NextWindow touch screen
Wine Kiosks Planned for Pa. Supermarkets
User-Unfriendly Information Kiosk Interactive Map
This is a touchscreen kiosk program for the Texarkana Museum System

Jen Fitzpatrick is an Engineering Director at Google. She currently manages Google's user experience team, which is responsible for the user interface design and usability analysis of Google's many products.
A founding member of Google's UI team, Jen has also led the UI design, testing and implementation of numerous features and changes to the Google.com site. In the past, Jen has also served as Engineering Director for Google Adwords and Google's Internal Systems engineering group. Jen joined Google in June 1999 as a software engineer.
HMV to introduce Interactive Kiosks with Digital Downloads
Winners of the 2006 KioskCom Excellence Awards announced
2010 Kioskcom notables/winners; Waste Management's Greenopolis Recycling Kiosk, submitted by Nanonation, took the Best of Show prize scoring the highest of all the winning entries.
posted by infinite intimation (10 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Also important; EDIBLE/USABLE The Usability of Cooking & Eating.
posted by infinite intimation at 1:08 PM on December 2, 2010


Oh wow, can see the rest of my week shot to hell going through all of these videos...
posted by Old'n'Busted at 2:01 PM on December 2, 2010


The problem with this is that some ux persona is going to look into all of this and expect a lazy ux imitator like myself to be able to speak to it. This will cut into my pr0n time.
posted by jsavimbi at 2:10 PM on December 2, 2010


Duh T.S. Eliot said the stealing thing (in his essay on Philip Massinger): 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.'
posted by Mocata at 2:21 PM on December 2, 2010


Aaaand... I am a twat for not reading the first para after the jump.
posted by Mocata at 2:22 PM on December 2, 2010


Super glad you finally posted this infinite intimation!
posted by azarbayejani at 2:26 PM on December 2, 2010


Outstanding!
posted by Artw at 2:27 PM on December 2, 2010


That "cargo cult" analogy is pretty tortured. And maybe stolen from MeFite #1? Who did not torture the analogy.

The point of that first talk seems to be "don't just copy something it's not the same" which isn't much of a point. YEAH THAT'S RIGHT I'M SAYING "MEH" ON THE INTERNET WHATYOO GONNA DO ABOUT IT.


My new favorite UX aphorism is from this Time piece on Napster, BitTorrent, Gnutella, and DVD John:

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:43 AM on December 3, 2010


*gets nostalgic for soma*
posted by The Lady is a designer at 5:30 AM on December 3, 2010


wemayfreeze; you never need to excuse an instance of saying 'meh' on the internet!

That is the very point of it all, isn't it; only by learning what makes us 'Meh' can we actually determine what makes us stand (or sit) up and go 'Woah, na das cool/important/new/informative!'
#1's usage there is interesting, thank you for sharing that link.
posted by infinite intimation at 1:05 PM on December 4, 2010


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