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It’s been a long process, longer than any of us wanted, but it’s going to be worth it and we’re getting really close now.

A new user experience design for the Xuropa Application is close…I can hardly wait!

In looking for a cool graphic for this post I came across a blog post by Magnus Revang who captured his process in his User Experience Wheel.  As well as being very cool eye-candy, it really does capture well the various aspects of what goes into designing and building a solid user experience.  It’s not just pretty pictures.

A huge shout-out has to go to some of my favorite Xuropeans.  These are people that took time out of their incredibly busy days and sat with us to discuss their experience.  They showed us how they use the application, and what they’d like to see in future releases.  Gary Dare,  Harry Gries, Tom Hackett, Achim Nohl (and team!), Susan Peterson, and Michael Sanie.  We’re very lucky to have such passionate people involved with the project that share the Xuropa vision.

We weren’t able to include all of the feedback (there was so much - so many great ideas!), but you’ll see we knocked off some pretty big items.  As we get closer to the push onto production I’ll try to post some sneak peaks.  Stay tuned…

Posted under Xuropa

I was captivated this morning by a wonderful presentation made by Alex Morrison of CogApp.  The panel presentation was made at bTween, 2008 and succinctly provides a fascinating way to start to think about user centric design of software products.

Of particular interest is the quote from Guy Kawasaki - that every piece of software should be “D.I.C.E.” - Deep, Indulgent, Complete, and Elegant.  (He first talked about this concept in the early ’90’s).  If we think about this in the context of Facebook, it immediately makes a lot of sense.  When we start to think about Twitter though, we could hardly say that it is “complete” or “Deep” from a functionality perspective….but layer on top of that the content and interactions of the users and it truly is “complete” and very deep.  Is there a topic that is not announced or discussed using short bursts of 140 characters or less?

This is User-Centric Design - not just designing from the user’s perspective, but including user behavior and data at the core of the functionality of the product.

Posted under industry