Corvus Consulting is now part of Denim & Steel Interactive. We help startups, product managers, marketing agencies & dev teams develop web and iOS products that are humane and business-smart.
Visit Denim & Steel to Learn MoreIt didn’t take long to do the math as Steve Jobs unveiled Ping, the social music recommendation engine baked into iTunes 10. In one deft move, Apple brought itself into the social networking market with a near-instant enrollment of up to 160 million. And did you catch that they also have credit cards and a history of trusted purchasing with those members?
You could almost hear the gasp in Palo Alto.
To make the most of learning to live with a broken arm, I created the J. Walter Weatherman Game in tribute to Arrested Development’s one-armed man of lessons. While couched in humour, I hope to make the most of finding accessibility issues in everyday designs that I never noticed previously and to share workaround tips with others who might find themselves with an arm in a sling or cast someday.
Scoring is as follows:
The goal is to hit 50 points per day. Every day I don’t hit the goal scores -25 points. If the scoring seems generous, I expect that coming up with new innovations will get harder as time goes on.
You can read how this all started with the kickoff blog post.
While riding to the office on Thursday, life added an unexpected to-do to my list. Avoiding a car that suddenly stopped to avoid another car’s u-turn didn’t work out so well, and I spent a couple days in Vancouver General getting patched up.
My dominant right arm will be in a sling for at least six weeks. I’m ambidextrous on the computer, but quickly finding just how many two-handed moments in life I take for granted.
Making way around the house today and thinking of the learning curve I’m in for, Jane McGonigal’s story of recovering from a head injury through an inventive game came to mind. My situation isn’t as serious as what Jane faced; my arm will get better in time, and out of curiosity I see a cool opportunity on hand (yes, it’s a pun).
Here’s the second of two posts focussing on subjects that come up often when I describe what I do, and do differently, in my consulting work. The first discusses the term ‘user’ in both professional labels like User Experience Designer and in software specification in general. Now the topic shifts to describing the nature of experience design.
This spring I offered a coworking desk in our shared office as something of an experiment. I got to spend some time working alongside people I know, and interest had started to filter in from people I didn’t know just as the sub-lease on that desk expired. It was hard to give up that growing seed, so when some extra space came up in the same office this month I grabbed it.
The upshot is that I have more space to work with people I contract to help out on larger jobs, which is happening more often, AND I can offer the coworking desk as a permanent feature.
So if you need a place to hang your hat and set down your laptop for a day, the desk is back and it would be great to see you. More information is available on the coworking desk page.
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of teaching with Haig Armen and a lineup of local design pros in the SFU Publishing Summer Workshops. The course, a four day design intensive, was geared to bring graphic designers and others with careers in publishing into the world of web design.
We structured the four days around creating something concrete rather than just hearing the faculty wax philosophic, and with hypothetical design briefs in hand, the students applied each lecture across the four days and on the final day pitched their concept designs. It was simply incredible to watch the ideas take shape and turn into concepts that I would have loved to work on.
In addition to speaking on research methods, card sorting and sketching, I also presented on usability. There was a real challenge here, as I had 40 minutes or so to speak, but the lessons and methods of usability are too numerous and in-depth to pack into such a small amount of time.
The approach I took was to boil things down to three golden keys, crafted to pair with Kathleen Moynahan’s presentation on usability testing methods. I also included a fourth tip on creating engagement through progressive disclosure and the idea of the Mystery Box, but I won’t go into that to keep that part unique to those who were there.
I could tell you those three keys, but Crissy Campbell at Boxcar Marketing has done a great writeup of them as part of a guide on giving websites an autumn tuneup. Thanks Crissy!
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The annual cycle for Corvus Consulting seems to put me in front of new clients in the summer months. Even after seven years this kind of surprises me: isn’t this when people would take it easy on new work? From that it follows that it’s also the time of year where I find myself explaining what I do.
Two topics come up regularly in these conversations: why I call what I do “experience design” over “user experience design,” and the struggle for a succinct definition of just what experience design is.
The answers seem ripe for not one but two blog posts, and this is the first: why I shy from “user experience” (or user-anything for that matter).
