November 8 saw this year's worldwide No. 1 usability event – the World Usability Day, conceived by the international Usability Professionals Association (UPA) and carried out in 23 countries by local UPA chapters or other interested parties. I took part in the event in Hamburg, Germany, which attracted over 300 people from industry, administration, and academia. My invited talk on Google User Experience was the final element of this great and well organized event and was very well-received by the approximately 150 people in the audience. Exciting!

In his article, "Design Vs. Design Thinking", Business Week's Bruce Nussbaum offers some great insight into the current struggle between business schools, design schools, designers and business people around who actually defines "design thinking" and what "design thinking" actually is supposed to mean:

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Check it out – use this fun test to see which part of your brain is dominant. Amazing!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22535838-5012895,00.html

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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.
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Beautiful article on how to stay motivated in the creative field:

Whether your chosen medium is pictures or language, food or formulas, everyone has the capacity to be creative in their work. But we can often lose our motivation to create, making it difficult to stay focused and excited on a project. So how does one keep their creative well from drying up?

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I've just returned from my trip to the HCII 2007 conference in Beijing, China – a huge event with some 2,300 participants, ten sub-conferences ranging from ergonomics in the workplace to augmented cognition, and literally a hundred paper sessions. Three days of tutorials preceded the actual conference and offered beginners and participants with intermediate knowledge lots of first-hand insights into topics such as Social Network Analysis, Fieldwork for Designers, and Task Analysis, all of which I attended (unfortunately, some tutorials, I heard, have been quite disappointing though – which is tough considering the cost and that you cannot switch tutorials if you find it not to meet your expectations).

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While the industry and quite a number of customers are waiting for the iPhone to finally be released (Apple official release date: June 29), c|net has gone through all the publicly known features and created a nice summary of what we are to expect from Apple's latest gadget based on the commercial.

Get it while it's hot: Jim Kalbach's book "Designing Web Navigation" (O'Reilley) has just been released. In Jim's own words (from his new blog, Experiencing Information):

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Now that everyone's waiting for the iPhone and its innovative user interface – have you seen Microsoft's product / vision video on "Surface"? It's well worthwhile … The system has been announced for public availability at the end of the year.

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