Kaleidocycle - Nour Diab Yunes

The Backtalk of Self-Generated Sketches – Gabriela Goldschmidt

"The inventive process" is an iterative process of jotting down ideas in the form of language or graphic drawings and of modifying them, reevaluating them, editing them, and so on, to transform or perfect an initial concept or solution.

“calm technology” (Weiser & Brown, 1996)

According the Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1996), "peripheral information" extends the notion of "affordances" to describe action enabling technologies that are reachable, yet on the periphery of perception and therefore encalming.

“Defining Goals and Concerns” and “Deciding Who Should Be Participants” – Joseph Dumas & Janice Redish

Before you begin testing it is important to set your primary evaluation goals and concerns. Once those have been defined, it will be possible to plan a usability test accordingly. Dumas & Redish raise the following processes: making choices among goals and concerns; moving from general concerns to specific ones; and understanding sources of goals and concerns.

Nova Spivak on Human-Machine Symbiosis and the Intelligence System

How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests – Jeffrey Rubin & Dana Chisnell

Testing has two main objectives: on the marketing level, it aims at improving sales; on a user-centered level, it aims at minimizing user frustrations and maximizing a product's usability. As the authors point out, testing goals inform the design of a product; those work in terms of the usefulness or relevance, learnability, efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction factors.

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. – Steve Krug

Steve Krug explains how we can create better Websites if we just stop wasting time on useless debates within teams and engage in 'usability testing' early on in the development process. His book provides the antidote.

He distinguishes between designers and developers in what they consider to be a 'good' website design. Designers prefer pleasant layouts, whereas developers enjoy a good amount of features. This is also compared to the duality between commercial culture and craft culture. Which is a question of aesthetics versus usability. Ideally, we would want to have both.