learning resources | Andrew Mackie

Visualization resources

Thursday, 07 May 2009 11:33

Websites:

Visual complexity and Information Aesthetics - examples of interesting visualizations
The work of Jonathan Harris - examples of visualization to allow new ways to access information
Logic+Emotion - David Armano's blog with excellent examples of visual communication
Presentation Zen for communicating professionally (and visually)

Talks:

These TED talks, notably Hans Rosling showing the capabilities of GapMinder
Jonathan Harris at Pop!Tech, showing a number of his projects

Tools:

XMind - advanced mind mapping, offering a variety of map types
Graphviz - 'a way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and networks'
Gapminder - for displaying and making sense of large data sets
The Mind Map Blog
The Mind Mapping Software Blog

Books:

Edward Tufte - a number of books on the principles and techniques of visualization
Back of the napkin - on 'solving problems and selling ideas with pictures'
Sketching user experiences - an excellent tome on design with a focus on sketching to explore ideas.
Drawing with the right side of the brain - a DIY course to enhance your drawing skills

Conferences / Community

VizThink

Consultants / Creators:

XPLANE - the visual thinking company
Jonathan Jarvis - interaction and media designer with work including The Crisis of Credit Visualized

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User Experience Design

Tuesday, 10 February 2009 10:16

A modest investment in user experience (UX) design can deliver products and services that your customers love to use and recommend to others. Here are some excellent learning resources on the topic:

Adaptive Path

Consulting firm Adaptive Path runs a number of excellent UX events each year and publishes all of them on its podcast, along with a number of interviews with stakeholders from their client base. The MX talks are generally for management and UX talks for designers but there's good crossover - I usually recommend that people start with MX Conference 2007 talks and then follow their interests.

Podcast feeds: via Feedburner or Subscribe on iTunes
Other AP resources: Blog Events Website

IDEO

Give IDEO a 'product, service or environment' challenge and they'll create an empathic design for you. They're generous with their methods and are prolific writers & speakers.

TED talks: Design is in the details Human-centred design Creativity & play
Process: IDEO Method Cards Article search
Other IDEO resources: Blog (RSS feed) Website

Boxes and Arrows

B&A run a journal for the information architecture community which contains good UX and usability design information, often recast from other sources. They also provide a useful entry point to a wide range of other user experience resources if you're looking for more.

Podcast: Subscribe on iTunes
Other B&A resources: website blog feed

ClearLeft

ClearLeft are UK-based web site accessibility and user experience design consulting firm who run the dConstruct conference.

Podcasts (subscribe on iTunes): dConstruct 2008 dConstruct 2007 dConstruct 2006
Other CL resources: website

Information & Design

This small Australian usability consultancy produces the UXpod podcast on which I've found some useful talks.

Podcast feed: Subscribe on iTunes
Other I&D resources: website

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Failure and success (as Honda sees it)

Tuesday, 27 January 2009 12:24

As found on Scott Berkun's site, here's a short video from Honda on how they use failure to succeed. It's an ad for Honda, of course, but it's worth 8 minutes of your time.