Responsive UI, Wearables & What’s Next for Interaction Design According to Motorola Mobility

Last week I was lucky enough to attend another great Chicago IxDA event hosted and presented by Motorola Mobility. Jim Palmer (Director of UX), Jeff DeVries (Experience Design Lead) and Nathan Fortin (Design Director) spoke for about an hour on responsive user interfaces, wearables and what’s next for interaction design in the years ahead.

Over the last year, Motorola has introduced a number of interesting handsets that successfully combine innovative industrial design and interaction design. With one recent smart phone, meta data suggested that the team’s approach to swipes, taps, voice commands and other means of interaction basically designed away the power button!

Even more interesting—and the Internet is abuzz this week with news of it—is Motorola’s venture into Android-powered watches. (Apple also has something up, or near, its sleeve as it were.)

Parallels Between Advertising Copywriting '94 & User Experience Design '14

When I first got into advertising, there were established programs for “creatives” at the collegiate level: Northwestern, Michigan State, Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Adcenter to name just a few.

At the same time, there were a number of upstarts that were hyper-specific to advertising copywriting and art direction: BrainCo in Minneapolis, Miami Ad School, Portfolio Center in Atlanta. Even Chicago had AdEd (where I was able to take courses with the amazing Kevin Lynch and Dave Lowe).

The Value of UX Certification

UX Matters posted an interesting article last month about the value of UX certification. This is a popular topic among user experience designers, with some veterans expressing disdain and many newbies expressing skeptical interest.

Designing Office Furnishings for Place

With NeoCon finishing up in Chicago this week (and attendees crowding me out of my Starbucks with their super-tight pants), I am reminded of a terrific talk I attended at last year’s Midwest UX in Grand Rapids.

It was a panel introduced by Mutually Human’s Samuel Bowles, moderated by Christina Wodtke and featuring Chris Hoyt from Herman Miller, Jeff Reuschel from Haworth and Ritu Bajaj from Steelcase. Each design lead brought their favorite chair to sit in for 45 minutes or so and discussed the meaning of “place” in their design efforts. Coincidentally, the theme of NeoCon 2014 was Place Matters.

Samuel Bowles introducing Christina Wodtke, Jeff Reuschel, Chris Hoyt & Ritu Bajaj.

Whoops, Your UX Is Showing

Back in my days as an advertising copywriter, one of the rote insults—and we had a bunch—was “Whoops, your strategy is showing.” It was generally reserved for an ad deemed too obvious in its creative execution.

I was reminded of this recently after coming across three different, highly transactional sites that  trumpeted changes to either interface or interaction design based on user research.