UX Thought Leadership
Presented here are some recent articles by Bob Goodman in leading User Experience, Usability, and Information Architecture journals.
In NextD Journal: "Things You See: Four Views into the Transformation Room "
From a conversation published by NextD Leadership Institute with Peter Jones of
Redesign Research, Eric Reiss of FatDUX, and GK Van Patter of Humantific.
My own consulting work is often downstream from these kinds of business transformation challenges, though increasingly, I find I need to help clients upstream in terms of thinking about how they lead and manage a user experience design process towards what's been called "design from the outside in." I'm an advocate of putting flow, design, prototyping, and user feedback first and the construction and full development process second. That can be a significant shift from the more linear, hierarchical, and siloed ways of going about things.
In Boxes and Arrows: "Change Architecture: Bringing IA To The Business Domain"
As IAs, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change... When seen from a change architecture perspective, the IA's existing toolkit--normally used to discover and capture information, re-categorize content for easier consumption, and visualize ideas for shared understanding and action--naturally supports this expanded business domain. IAs can help companies reap the benefits of positive change by reducing fear of change, creating hope for the future, enhancing adaptivity to change, and architecting applications and processes that enable business success.
In UXMatters: "The Enterprise User Experience: Bridging the IT/Marketing Divide"
User experience is a deliberately broader concept than GUI. It may take some time for it to fully penetrate the product design and development world. But it's the right term to help create an approach to product design and development that incorporates the way people really perceive design, use products, and make decisions. The term user experience communicates the reality that the success of a digital product doesn't end with its technology or the design of its user interface. It must extend all the way to users' perception of that design and their experience of interacting with it.
In the Usability Professionals Association's User Experience Magazine: "Book Review: Exploring The Roots of the PC's Family Tree"
In the early 1970s, personal computing momentum shifted from ARC to Xerox PARC (short for Palo Alto Research Center), considered the birthplace of the user interface and a direct predecessor of the vision that Apple would ultimately bring to market with the Macintosh in 1984. At PARC, Bob Taylor, a Licklider disciple and one of his successors as DARPA's IPTO director, began raiding ARC's top talent. A fortunate collision soon occurred between the ARC crowd and a new PARC recruit, Larry Tesler, whose computer science training and counterculture ideals combined in a pragmatic philosophy of making computing easy even for non-geeks.
>> Read PDF version | >> Read Flash Paper version
In ACM's Interactions Magazine: "Making UX an engaging process for prospective user experience adopters"
I think of UX as an approach to product design and development, in which achieving success goes beyond the realm of the digital product, extending into human psychology and cognition. Design solutions achieve true value when users interact with digital products and enjoy the experience. UX ultimately takes place in the minds of the people using products. The UX approach offers the best toolkit for understanding human perception and behavior and putting that understanding into action. Open the UX toolkit, and you'll find tools for designing models that users can try; observing and talking with users as they interact with these models; optimizing these models based on users' responses to them.
Blog: "UxCulture: User eXperiencing the Networked World"
From A Recent Blog Post: "The Mediumlessness Is The Message:" Not just content types but devices themselves are being consumed and reconfigured by digital technology. A friend recently commented how remarkable it is that today one can take pictures and send text messages with a phone. But perhaps the confusing element there is the word "phone." Substitute the reality -- computer -- and it becomes clear. In other words: we make calls on a portable computer that we happen to call a phone; we take pictures on a portable computer that we happen to call a camera; we print pages and pictures on a computer that we happen to call a printer. And increasingly, we move around in a computer that we happen to call a car.