I recently watched a video of a pianist performing John Cage's 4'33”. It is quite an inspiring performance, especially when we consider the pianist's use of silence and how this also has relevance for usability moderated tests. In the video, we see the pianist first sit at the piano, then, he places a score on the stand, sets a stopwatch, and...
In this "Interview", we hear from Toni Moura, an experienced professional in the field of UX design and the IBM Federal Garage Lead and Sr. UX Architect, Designer, Speaker, Mentor, Coach, and 10 Voices of Design to follow on Linkedin. Toni has been working in the field for over 20 years and has valuable insights to share on the motivations and...
What happens when users have no prior experience with the product or tool we are designing for? How can we help them build a mental model of how it works and make informed predictions about what will happen when they interact with it? One approach to this problem is to draw on psychological and cognitive theories of learning and problem-solving. In...
“The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast,… the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding. Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.” Rem Koolhaas My passion for architecture led me to an interview with Rem Koolhaas in which he made the...
The problem rarely announces itself as cultural. It appears as a misunderstanding that no one can quite locate. The interface is clear. The copy is translated. The flow passes usability checks. And yet, users hesitate, disengage, or behave in ways the team did not anticipate. In post-mortems, the explanation is often vague. “Different markets behave differently.” “They understood the words, but not...
In the field of art, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Antonio Canova, and Medardo Rosso are renowned for their contributions as sculptors; however, their work also can have relevance as UX inspiration. This article will explore the ways in which the techniques and approaches of these three sculptors have connections to principles of UX design, and how their work can inspire and inform...
As a UX designer, I was inspired by the ideas presented in Italo Calvino’s book “Six Memos for the Next Millennium” and wanted to explore how they could be applied to the field of user experience design. Using the insights and knowledge of OpenAI Chat GPT, I have written this article to delve into the ways in which Calvino’s concepts...