Nathan Philpot. Design is honest.

Website redesign. Graphic design, HTML, CSS, PHP (nothing to get excited about).

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ShopComposition by superheroes.

Checkout by Sofa.

I was refered to this talk by my brother, who said he went out and bought a pocket knife for his two kids after hearing it.

The principles mentioned in the talk can be applied at any age in just about any situation.

Website redesign. Graphic design, HTML, CSS, PHP (nothing to get excited about).

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I drew up this diagram of my thoughts and experiences, so far, of the skills of a good Ix Designer.

Business Analyst The Business Analyst and or the Requirements Analyst might (not always the case) not have the mind set to be thinking about or know how to improve the end-user’s experience.

Graphic Designer When I say graphic design, I mean typography, making an interface readable, visual rhythm, branding and then making it look good and feel right.

Front-End Development The ability to create prototypes is important as an Ix Designer. The closer you can come to the real thing the better. Also, part of usability and accessibility is in the actual markup.

This diagram is not meant to show all the skills necessary to make up a good Ix Designer, but what is helpful skills to have in addition to the core usability knowledge he or she will possess. Depending on the organization you are in, some or all of these roles may be played by the Ix Designer.

Download PDF of the diagram.

I have always liked crows.

An excellent article on mental models and how it relates to usability, by Mary Jo Davidson, Laura Dove, and Julie Weltz at Depaul University, Cognative Psychology 404, on November 15, 1999.

A few articles I found on the design process. The first one here, the second here, which actually quotes the first.

Products get worked on in parallel by all departments at once—design, hardware, software—in endless rounds of interdisciplinary design reviews. Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”—Article by Lev Grossman

The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible…The idea of there being these two separate things has to be forced away from our thinking. They are one team, which produce one product.—Jack Shedd

As the latter article states, this is very difficult as the size of the project or number of people involved in the project grows. But as we all see, from the products produced by Apple, it is worth it.

Big Contrarian by Jack Shedd.