Bill Cooper describes the origins of personas in this 2003 essay from the Cooper Journel.

"Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master. Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a “Persona How-to” manual, but a complete “How-to” on personas has yet to be written. I hope someday that one of the very accomplished architects at Cooper will write that book because they have developed the technique to a degree of sophistication well beyond my seminal efforts. I look forward to contributing to it."

This is an article by Steve Calde who will be presenting at the July 2008 Catalyze webcast.

"Personas and other user-modeling techniques are often solely discussed as tools for product definition and design, but they are useful tools in other arenas, as well. Technical writers responsible for creating user documentation can benefit greatly from a well-defined persona set, too.

Using personas to guide your user-documentation creation-process helps you:

• Determine the primary and secondary audiences for your documents
• Prioritize technical writing tasks by giving you a tool for identifying which aspects of the product are most important to your readers
• Write documentation in a way that helps your users achieve their goals, instead of simply cataloguing all of the product's features."

In this blog post, Andy lays out the Skills and Traits necessary to become "employable" as a web designer.

"If you’re a student aspiring toward a career in Web design, I think it would be prudent to reassess your current education or degree plan to ensure that you’re actually employable by the time you leave school. From my observations, the vast majority of students emerging from university, design school, and trade school lack fundamental skills and understanding necessary for the Web design professions (in all forms: experience design, interaction design, marketing design, communication design, information design, etc…)."

In this blog post from Web Guild, Reshma Kumar interviews Luke Wroblewski on web form design:

"Forms are a staple of the online experience. We use them daily for a host of activities from signing in/up, purchasing something, asking a question, to downloading a document. They come in all sizes, layouts, and configurations. Some are better executed than others and ultimately, impact our businesses adversely if their designs and usability are impaired. So, how do we ensure that in creating web forms, we get them right? I am speaking with Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal at Yahoo! and author of a new book "Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks"."

In this blog post from Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp discusses design in the context of publishing and journalism.

"On the web, in the age of Google, design has no margin of error, and there are no stupid users, only inadequate designs."

A keynote by Bill Buxton at Interaction08.

The Design Eco-System or How Can We Design Great Products If We Don't First Design our Environment?

"Great ideas are not enough. In many ways, they are the easy part of design. The hard part is seeing those great ideas through to reality. But the weight of that hard part can be significantly lightened if one has the right tools, the right team, and is working in the right physical and cultural space. While this sounds obvious ? banal even, the reality is that in the technology sector, the eco-system in which much design takes place is not conducive to the task. Designers are generally significantly out-numbered by technical staff. Unless proper attention is paid to details, the resulting physical and cultural eco-system will be determined by those with the larger numbers. The end result pays the price.

This result is not due to any sinister objectives, rather than to human nature. The objective here is to point out the dynamic, what gets lost in the process and provide some thoughts on how to bring about change that benefits all."

Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with the human aspects of technology. His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film-making and music. Buxton's research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. n December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm Buxton Design, where his time was split between working for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students.

This is an article by Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path.

"What happens when people want a company’s product, but are frustrated by the process of trying to get it? Obviously it should be reworked — but doing so can be easier said than done. When we’re asked to redesign a process, we often start by exploring the problem space with in-context research, which generates a large amount of data. That data tends to point teams in the direction of a number of possible solutions. But how should the team decide which direction is the right one? In such cases, I’ve found that Design Criteria — a set of rules a design team can follow — can be a key tool so when a design team creates or reworks a service or product, everything it does supports the user."

Here is a presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Direction Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?

In this closing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design.

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 Robert Hoekman, Jr., is the founder of Miskeeto, a product development and web design consultancy focused on socially-conscious projects that improve the world.

He’s a passionate and outspoken interaction designer, writer, and user-experience evangelist who has written dozens of articles and has worked with Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, Go Daddy Software, and countless others to create superior user experiences for a wide range of audiences. He also gives in-house training sessions and speaks regularly at industry events like Adobe MAX, Flashforward, SxSW, Future of Web Design, and others.

Robert is the author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious, which focuses on seven guiding principles of great web-based software and how to leverage them in any real-world project. Learn more about Robert through his blog at rhjr.net.

From Boxes and Arrows:

"A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term "user experience." The multitude of acitivities that can be labeled with these two words span a vast spectrum of people, skills and situations. If you ask for UX design (UXD), what exactly are you asking for? Similary, if someone tells you they are going to provide you with UXD for an application, website or intranet or extranet, what exactly are you going to get?

Is it just one person who is responsible or is it a team of people who are in charge of UXD? In this story I´ll sketch my ideas of UXD based on my experiences and at the end of this story I will give you my answer.

Let us start at the beginning – UXD starts with experience – experience of the users. And so I will talk about the users first."

Holger is a Senior IA + XP at Argonauten G2 Holger is a Senior IA + XP - Informationarchitect + Experience Planer at ArgonautenG2 in Duesseldorf, a subsidiary of Grey / Grey-Interactive, Germany. For well over ten years he has been working on solutions for websites, intranets, mobile applications and terminal application for reputable international clients. He holds a university degree in architecture and town-planning.

"This time each year, technophiles are asked to part the curtains and peek into the coming year. While last year brought unprecedented growth in RIA adoption — especially by Fortune 500 companies — RIA adoption in 2008 brings a new onslaught of risks, rewards, challenges and opportunities for companies of all sizes."

Anthony discusses the risks and rewards of RIAs.

"Jared Spool literally wrote the book on usability. As one of the industry’s foremost experts, Jared has devoted his career to understanding why things work and helping people learn to solve design problems. He’s been involved in the field for three decades — well before the term “usability” applied to computers.

Jared is founding principal of User Interface Engineering, the world’s largest research, training and consulting firm specializing in Web site and product usability. He recently carved out some time in between discussing the current state of design to analysts and his responsibilities as a faculty member of the Tufts University Gordon Institute to answer some questions for the User Interface Resource Center. "

"We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along," the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, "I'm serious. We don't assume anything works and we don't like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn't. We've found that about 90% of it doesn't work."

This is a case study of how NetFlix designs and re-designs their website every 2 weeks.

From Journal of Design:

"Have you ever been in a design review where instead of talking about the proposed solution you spend half the time revisiting what the user is trying to accomplish in the first place? Keeping the human-centered models of the processes that lie behind your solution fresh in the minds of stakeholders (and designers) can prevent this unwanted rehashing. One way to ensure this is to create a diagram and give it qualities that make it simple enough and memorable enough so that, on a dime, you can whip out a dry-erase pen and sketch it out as a reminder.

I like to call that collection of qualities whiteboardability. It won't work with extremely complex business processes, but for simpler processes or most consumer domains, it works well."

Chris Noessel is a senior consultant at Cooper. His industry experience ranges from owning a small, museum-focused company in Houston to working with Microsoft's futures prototyping group in Seattle. He's a graduate of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

From Journal of Design:

"These days, more and more companies are recognizing that design and innovation are essential to their strategy and bottom line: effective design sells products and services, improves your position in the marketplace, and turns customers into loyal advocates for your brand. If you've gotten your organization to this point, take a moment to enjoy your success! Creating demand for design is no small achievement. Unfortunately, to reap the full benefits of design, you probably still have a lot of work to do on your organization's structure, processes, and culture."

Kim Goodwin is Cooper's VP of Design. She often works with our clients to build their own design capabilities.

Todd Zaki Warfel, President and founder of Messagefirst, discussed Design-Driven Personas at the IA Summit 2008:

"Whether you call them personas, characters, or actors, creating an accurate representative profile of your customers is one of the most useful tools in our user experience war chest. Personas are one of the most common buzz words in our industry, and yet the formula for crafting them seems to be locked away in some safe alongside the recipe for Coca-Cola. Well, that’s about to change. During this presentation we'll focus on methods for collecting and using data to create personas. And more importantly, I'll share some new visualization techniques we've been using that have made our personas even more effective and valuable to the design process.

Additionally, we'll address how and when to actually use personas once you’ve created them, ways to keep them alive throughout the design and development process (as well as after launch), and ways to measure the effectiveness on the product once it has launched."

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