Reticles, Controllers and Buttons: Common Interactions in VR

Virtual reality has stubbornly withstood decades of technological limitation and continual market failure to finally reach the threshold of public adoption. It has the honor of predating the first GUI, has successfully captured the public’s imagination and has undergone several iterations of consumer products. With the technology inside our smart phones giving us the opportunity to dive in to VR and experience its potential as […]

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Meet Antoinette Colaizzi, A Champion for the User

As a UX Researcher and Strategist, Antoinette Colaizzi has over 20 years in the field leading design and research efforts for Web-based, mobile, and desktop applications.  She is currently a managing consultant at IBM Watson Health and an IBM Design Thinking practitioner.  We spoke recently about her career journey from systems engineer through the early days of “usability”,

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Putting the Reader First: A Conversation with Dante Meick

I recently sat down with Dante Meick, lead designer at Atlantic Re: think, the creative marketing department of Atlantic Media, publisher of The Atlantic magazine. As technology evolved, Dante learned the UX tools that would allow him to optimize digital experiences and other mobile products that give their users the best possible interaction with content.

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IoT device and UX designer: Importance of understanding hardware for UX designers

    In 2016 IoT(Internet of Things) is not an unfamiliar term: Amazon Echo TV commercial airs on prime time. You can find Nest Protect (smoke alarm) easily at an end aisle of Home Depot. Even if there will be some challenges for IoT to be more mature, as smartphones prevailed our lives in a flash,

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The Insider’s Look: How Autism Friendly Spaces May have Influence in Usability Testing

http://autismfriendlyspaces.org As I have mentioned in the past, I was part of a special organization called Autism Friendly Spaces.  This organization specialized in helping certain organizations cater to people who are on the Autistic Spectrum.  The tools at their disposal include task managers, rooms designated for quiet time, toys to help those who need something

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Applying a 5-Second Test to Project Alexandria

Various usability testing methods exist for a variety of different insight- and data-gathering needs. Selecting a method should be tailored to the specific research needs of any particular individual or team, and dependant upon the current stage of their project. I decided to focus specifically on 5-second tests and one tool in particular, from UsabilityHub.com.

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Design Critique: MTA Bus Time (iPhone App)

Introduction Early last week, urban planning think tank TransitCenter tweeted a data visualization that presented a befuddling statistic: despite NYC’s growing population and record subway ridership, MTA public bus ridership has plummeted nearly 16% since 2002. TransitCenter’s research indicates that this remarkable decrease in ridership is a symptom of the “declining quality of bus service,”

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Design Critique: Amagansett Free Library (Desktop & Mobile)

Figure 1. Amagansett Free Library homepage. Click to expand.   The desktop site for the Amagansett Free Library, as well at its mobile counterpart, inform users of the services, resources and events available to them as patrons of the library. Issue 1: Lack of a navigation bar across all pages leads to poor discoverability As

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Design Critique: NYPL’s SimplyE App

             The New York Public Library (along with most libraries) has wrestled with the challenge of providing an intuitive process for lending e-books. To bridge this wide gulf of execution, they recently released SimplyE, a mobile app that aims to drastically minimize the steps needed to fulfill the goal of accessing e-books from the near 300,000

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