Why would you care about creating a “UX culture” in the workplace? And what does that even mean?

If you are a fan of definitions, here’s one for “UX culture”:
The awareness of the team members/company employees of the importance of UX and it’s role in the work process.

Now why is that a thing?

From what I have seen here at Infragistics, the benefits of having built UX culture amongst…

From the people, for the people. Аnd for fun. 

It’s what UX Camp Berlin is about - the UBER and Airbnb of conferences. In other words, it’s one of the best events I had the privilege to attend this year.

What is UXcamp Berlin?

UXcamp Berlin is an intense, two-day event, born from the desire to share knowledge and party at the same time. It’s а place where you can meet, learn from or just have fun with 500…

On the 7th - 9th of June, I was lucky enough to have been invited to speak at UX Scotland in Endinburgh. UX Scotland is the annual hands-on, practical UX and design conference for the UX, Service Design and Digital Communities in Scotland and the north of England. Held at Our Dynamic Earth, more than 200 attendees were given the opportunity to learn from peers and industry leaders, improve their skills and make professional…

Parallels between familiar architectural conventions and the practice of user experience.

The Deadly Serious Series.

A few weeks ago I was offering an “expert” opinion as a classically trained architect and a User Experience newbie. I stated that in the field of UX one is less likely to affect people’s health and well-being compared to architecture. UX tends to focus on digital rather than physical experiences…

I recently experienced a major failure in an interesting attempt at self-service automation – self-serve beer taps at a Milwaukee Brewers game. If self-serve beer would work anywhere, you’d think it would work in the beer capital of America - Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

If the system worked, self-serve beer taps would require fewer beer vendors, saving the concession company money. It could reduce time waiting…

Space exploration is humanity's ultimate design challenge. To start, some fundamental laws of physics must be overcome in order to escape Earth's gravitational pull. Then, a life sustaining environment must be created in the inhospitable vacuum of space. This seemingly impossible goal was achieved during the space race of the 50's and 60's, but rockets designed for sustainable space exploration have only recently seen…

The past Saturday, 14 May 2016, Infragistics held its first XLR8 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria and judging by its success there will be many more to follow. JavaScript, Angular and Mobile dev skills were all accelerated by the leading minds in the field and as a bonus we also had a separate track for accelerating developers’ soft skills and design knowledge as well.

The day started with a beautiful morning and…

Gearing up even better to deliver a talk that lasts even longer

Last month I set out on a quest to share my observations on what makes a conference talk stick in the memories of the audience. I outlined the importance of a confident beginning and end, striving to make your points…

Sometimes I’m amazed when very simple usability problems are overlooked in an otherwise good design. Google Maps is a great mapping app, with one major exception – turning off the audio directions. As you read this, you might at first think, “Big deal! That’s not that hard to figure out.” But remember that this is an app that people use while driving. So it needs to be extremely easy to turn on or off the audio directions…

Show and tell for designers based in Sofia

In the world of design, dribbble is the go to place for sharing your own design concepts and ideas and a treasure island for designers wanting to browse, comment or get inspired by shots (screenshots of the works of others). I believe that this vivid online community is…

Members of the Infragistics design community have been invited to speak at the 3rd annual Testing UY conference on April 26-27 in Montevideo, Uruguay. 

Martín Loskin, UX Architect, Claudia Badell, Senior Quality Engineer and Diego Rivero, Helena Muñoz, Joanna Arnaiz, Santiago Aguiar and Patricia Duarte, Indigo Design & Development Team, will be conducting a 4 hour workshop, Testing the User Experie…

Infragistics’ 4th annual user experience, UXify, took place this past Saturday, 9 April 2016 at our global headquarters in Cranbury, NJ. It was a fantastic event filled with presentations from thought leaders with unique perspectives on UX, design, and the process that underlies the creation of useful, beautiful experiences.

If you were able to join us, please accept my thanks. If the cold and rain (and in nearby…

Gearing up to deliver a talk that lasts 

Who hasn’t been to a conference at least once in their lifetime? At the end of the day we usually reflect on the speakers and their performance. Some speakers did well, others not so and yet there are the few, who seem to have been way out…

Keming

This is Important

Let me start with some namedropping, to prove the importance of the subject. Apple just changed the kerning of the word “click“ on the El Capitan website (and tens of articles were published instantly on the topic), because the ‘c’ and ‘l’ were almost stuck together, forming a lovely ‘d’. And no marketing or PR department wants to deal with the consequences.…

Essential to the process of creating and developing engaging interfaces for our users are thoughtful animations. In conjunction with wireframe testing and validation, we also need to be considering the overall design language and aesthetics. There are so many things to consider. As designers we want clean typography for the content, a beautiful color palette, expressive yet immediately understandable iconography but this…

I recently waited for a flight in Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal C. Expecting the typical travelling experience of delayed departures and time wasted waiting at the gate, I was surprised to find that the poorly rated airport had implemented a massive upgrade to their customer experience by installing iPads at every seat in the terminal.

This upgrade, courtesy of the innovative company OTG, drastically…

UXify US is an annual half day conference about designing great digital experiences.

This year’s fourth annual user experience conference, UXify, brings together the community of academics, practitioners, technologists, and business leaders for a conversation about Migrating from Desktop to Web and Mobile.

Thought leaders from across the East coast will be discussing applied design, UX, content strategy and development…

Wireframing and Deadpool

You know wireframes. The white-gray-black series of doodles of your website, mobile app, rich app - that make the process proper, eliminate logical flaws and ultimately save project time.

Cool. Except, sometimes they don’t.

Wireframes, even the interactive ones, don’t make much sense to someone who hasn’t dealt with wireframes before, or doesn’t have the time, ability or desire to understand…

What happens when your brain is trying to process conflicting streams of information? Let’s find out.

Read this list of colors to yourself:

Red

Green

Blue

Purple

Black

Brown

Yellow

Red

Blue

Pink

Orange

Piece of cake right? You are only concentrating on doing a single task and an easy one at that. Let’s try this a different way; say the names of the colors that you see here:

That wasn’t too difficult either…

On 19 November, 2015 I spoke at the Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation (ISTA) conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. My presentation, “Design, Usability and Complex Systems”, centered on the notion that people (developers, business owners, the general public) believe that software is somehow “special” and exempt from the notion that everything should be well-designed.

The Role of UX

This, of course, couldn’t…

This past year was one of transition for the user experience professionals at Infragistics. From product-based groups, we became a single, user experience team at the end of 2014. I think we can now agree that it was an excellent decision. Not only did Infragistics (and our clients) get a more unified vision of “design” but we all made a bunch of new friends and colleagues…and got better at our jobs.…

My colleague, Tobias Komischke, wrote a blog post a few years ago assessing the design of the Dyson Airblade hand dryer. His assessment was that it performed very well at drying hands, but the designers didn’t consider what would happen to the water that blew off people’s hands onto the floor. The designers put all of the emphasis on the primary purpose – to effectively dry hands. They didn’t design to the last detail…

On 19 November, 2015 I was invited to represent Infragistics at the Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation (ISTA) conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. I got to share the stage with some excellent local and international speakers, including Infragistics’ own Lucia Amado, who presented a workshop titled, “Visual Design for Non-Designers”.

My presentation, “Design, Usability and Complex Sy…

On October 23-24, 2015 I’ve been invited to speak at the User Centered Design (UCD) conference held annually in London. This is a more interesting conference than most (to me) because the talks center around the disruptive and transformative power of design rather than the usual UX presentation topics.

My talk, entitled Making Data Useful: Design, UX and Innovation, focuses on how the design process can be applied…

One of the first things that comes to mind when you hear the term “user experience” is a whiteboard littered with wireframe sketches. The design of mobile applications and websites has become the face of the user experience industry, but not all of the content we consume can be found on a screen. The rising popularity of audio content in the form of podcasts and audiobooks allows us to think about the user’s experience…