Ideas & Issues

What’s going on in the world that informs the practice of designing information experiences? Posts in this category tackle new, exciting, controversial, or otherwise noteworthy ideas or issues and discuss their relevance to the field.

Legal Implications of Accessible Design: Accessibility is Usability

Law, ever lagging behind the realities of our everyday lives, still has relatively little to say about the internet. It was only in 2003 that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice began addressing “best practices” for the design of accessible government websites – thirteen years after the passage of the Americans with …

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Back Pocket Apps

One morning last week my phone was dead, so on my commute to work I looked around at the other people on the bus, and everyone else was buried in their cell phones. Every now and then an idealist pops up, haranguing this and moaning for the good ole days when people actually talked face …

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Usability in DAM Systems

This semester, I am enrolled in Pratt’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) class, and decided to compare my usability understanding with the DAM system development process. I first read three different articles that each approached the DAM usability topic differently. Monahan’s “DAM Good? Yes, It Can Be! – How to Make Users Love Your Digital Asset …

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Slippy UX

Like many people, I spend a lot of time interacting with screens and being interrupted by various devices. I can’t remember the last time I went an hour without checking my phone, and I spend more time staring at pixels than looking at people. In this part of the world, we are never not connected, …

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The Design Behind a Design Museum

The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopened in December 2014 after a three- year renovation, which Sebastian Chan prefers to call a “reboot”.  Chan, the Director of Digital and Emerging Technologies at the museum, recently discussed how the museum reconceptualized the way in which they communicated their collection to the public, as well as how they …

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