Last Thursday I attended the monthly SwissCHI meeting. That evening's topic was "Prototyping of Rich Internet Applications" – Andreas Binggeli, Marc Blume and Yuan-Yuan Sun presented their Master's thesis (from their MASHCID studies). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, paper prototypes compared really well to more elaborate prototypes done in Axure RP Pro or realized using Ajax-y [...]

On March 26, 09, the monthly SwissCHI event focused on "Interaction Design Patters in the real world". A panel of six experts plus an advocatus diaboli came together to exchange opinions and experiences on design patterns, but it quickly became clear that they weren't talking about the same thing at all: They were arguing on [...]

There's a great slide show by Jan Miksovsky on dialogs and how the users perceive them … inspiring!http://www.slideshare.net/blider/designing-around-dialogs

This is a summary of my experiences with different tools for and approaches to prototyping. Prototyping is, eventually, a central area of work for interaction designers, information architects and people with other roles in the software development process.

For my German usability blog, I interviewed Marcel Becker, Technical Manager International Portal & Products at AOL LLC, on the challenges of Internationalization ("I18N") and Localization ("L10N") of centrally built products. Marcel says,

You will have heard of enterprise software systems, most probably you’ll have used one or the other system yourself. They usually have a bad reputation – difficult to handle, cumbersome, sometimes of little relevance for the task at hand. Basically, most of these issues are usability-related. A typical after-work conversation may go:

Design Frameworks in UI Design have come some way. Starting out as conventions amongst designers, then platform standards or standards across a number of platforms, to a written-down and agreed-upon set of guidelines, we have arrived at pattern libraries. Just recently Yahoo! released their UI pattern library to the public, allowing designers to profit from [...]

Recently our Hamburg User Experience Roundtable took place at the offices of the local market research and usability evaluation institute, SirValUse. Our hosts were happy to give an impressive and well-founded talk on one of the techniques they’re using – eye tracking (you can download the slides here – sorry, they are in German). As [...]

I've recently come across an article I wrote back in October 2003 for SAP Design Guild. The text deals with the xApps design approach we were following then; driving product definition and design through rapid prototyping. In the article I describe the process we were using – quite successfully, I'm proud to say. From the [...]