UX@UW

Wow, the monthly roundups have been sneaking up on me (and straight past me, actually). Without further ado, here’s what we chatted about in April 2012!

• Jason found this “cool story about UW program that understands the similar motivations of both Honors Students and former prisoners… and leverages these for Learning.”
• On our general theme of innovation and how to do it successfully, Diego shared this Fast Company article about arguing, rather than brainstorming, as a way to encourage creativity and innovation. (Apparently “Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals. Brainstorming can actually be detrimental to good ideas.” Who knew?)
• Again continuing a discussion that’s been simmering for a while, Char has started using LESS in his innovation project. It’s similar to the aforementioned Sass, but when attempting to use Sass, Char found that it required our devs to install a bunch of things on our servers. LESS just requires a JavaScript file, so it’s a lot easier for us to experiment with.
• Why have we not heard of the Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the iSchool? We missed a dub talk from a member of the group, but their projects all look really interesting!
• We are on Twitter!
• Sergei was excited about the Google Project Glass video. Diego found this possibly-more-realistic parody.
• This cool app for finding your library book’s exact location at the University of Oregon is relevant to the team working on our mobile app to find a place to study.
• A Baseline for Front-End Developers describes the skills and techniques that all front-end devs could reasonably be expected to have. Looks like I need to brush up on some things!
• Char went to the Breaking Development conference in Florida! We followed along via #bdconf as well as via his posts in Yarn. He’s got an upcoming post about his experience there, but in the interest of completeness, here are some links he shared on Yarn while he was there:
  • Jason Grigsby’s argument that we need to start designing sites and apps for use on very large screens: TVs. “thinking about TVs helps us understand better whether the solutions we’re building today are actually suitable for tomorrow.” Thanks to Jason Grigsby for correcting our miscommunication/oversimplification of his point.
  • Relatedly, Google’s documentation on designing for the TV.
  • Rachel Hinman was reportedly a great speaker
  • The Metro design language, used in Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, was inspired in part by the new King County Metro bus stop signs.
  • Alaska Air’s mobile site is a “mobile-optimized web” site designed by a local agency, Ubermind.
  • A book we might want to look into: Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions
  • Mobile in Higher Ed, a highly-recommended blog by Dave Olsen
• This article, “Interactive eBook Apps: The Reinvention of Reading and Interactivity,” reminded me of the conversation I tried to recap at the end of last month’s roundup. (The whole topic may also be why I once again pulled The Diamond Age (spoilers!) off my bookshelf the other day. Go read this book, if you haven’t.)
• There’s the Mobile UX Camp that I mentioned the other day. It sold out, but they created a few more tickets — just ten — that will go on sale on Monday the 14th at noon.
• We got the SyncPad app on our shared iPad for remote whiteboarding, which is another ongoing theme/puzzle for us. As always, we’d welcome recommendations on other tools to use for remove collaboration!
• BrowserStack is a service for doing cross-platform, cross-browser testing. It’s a bit out of our price range, but the 30-minute free trial looked pretty slick.
• I got excited about this new album that I hadn’t heard of: Paul Burch and the Waco Brothers, Great Chicago Fire. On the same day I noticed that the awesome Zoë Keating, an avant-garde cellist, was on the marquee at The Neptune for the next week. (I went; it was a great show.)
• The Oatmeal’s State of the Web is always funny and pretty much always NSFW, too. My favorite was about a personal pet peeve about shared links on Facebook (and, yeah, it’s NSFW).
• I thought this post about “speech bubble user flows”, a deliverable or design document combining the persona, the user flow, and the site map or page flow, was interesting.
• 100 Things Every Designer Should Know About People came across my RSS feed. I read some of it online via the library, and I liked how each section had lots of data and studies behind the suggestions, and then ended with some concrete take-aways, like the “Information in the middle of a presentation will be the least likely to be remembered” example from the CoolTools review.
• Jason shared this new opera, The Gurz Zyklus, from local sound artist Trimpin.

We’ve had lots of new ideas coming in these past few months via conferences. What have you been learning about lately?