In this presentation from the UPA 2008 Conference, Katrina Alcom from Hot Studio talks about hiring, firing, inspiring and motivation for UX Teams.

You can also get some background info on the presentation from Katrina's blog post.

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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.

A presentation on "Enhancing User Experience By Employing Collective Intelligence"

From Boxes and Arrows, March 2008

"In Part I of We Tried to Warn You, three themes were developed:

1. Organizations as wicked problems
2. The differences of failure leverage in small versus large organizations, and
3. The description of failure points

These should be considered exploratory elements of organizational architecture, from a communications information architecture perspective. While the organizational studies literature has much to offer about organizational learning mechanisms, we find very little about failure from the perspective of product management, management processes, or organizational communications."

 From  Ferry den Dopper in Slideshare.net - "My notes from a workshop on Interaction Design & Psychology I attended in 2002"

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In this webcast from Human Factors recorded in November 2007, Phil Goddard and Susan Weinschenk explain how HFI's evolving set of user experience metrics can help you:

• quantify best practices in design at a site, sub-site or page level
• prioritize your usability resources across a range of projects
• get valuable feedback quickly, in "design time"
• track and benchmark user experience over time
• learn how you score against your competitors
• synthesize your various user data streams into an integrated UX dashboard

Cincinnati IIBA meeting, Tuesday, June 19,2007

Topic: Overview of tools and techniques from the user experience community that can be applied by Business Analysts to improve the quality of their requirements.

Speaker: Challis Hodge, VP of User Experience at Bridge Worldwide here in Cincinnati. Challis is incredibly knowledgeable and an engaging speaker.

In this essay at UXMatters (Published: September 24, 2007), Paul Sherman examines a new method for measuring user experience.

"The user experience field has been trying to move beyond mere usability and utility for years. So far, no one seems to have developed easy-to-implement, non-retrospective, valid, and reliable measures for gauging users’ emotional reactions to a system, application, or Web site.

In this column, I’ll introduce you to a promising method that just might solve this problem. While this method has not yet been subjected to rigorous peer review or experimental testing, it offers an intriguing solution and is endlessly fascinating to me. And it just might prove to be the kind of powerful technique we’ve been looking for to illuminate users’ emotional reactions to our designs."

This report is based on usability research with 38 teenagers, who varied by age (13-17) and by country of origin (mainly United States, but some tests conducted in Australia to ensure international scope of the study).

We tested the way teenagers use real sites designed for teens, the teens' areas of mainsteam websites, and mainstream sites that didn't have dedicated areas for teens. The report contains 61 design guidelines that will make websites more suited for teenagers and easier for them to use.

There is a fee to download the 131-page report in PDF format.

If you rely too much on color differences, you may be not conveying the information as well as you thought.  Color blindness is the inability to perceive differences between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. According to the medical studies, eight to ten percent of male population suffers from some kind of color blindness (figure for female population is much lower).

Peter Morville is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of information architecture. 

In this Google Tech Talk, Peter explores the future present in mobile devices, search algorithms, ontologies, folksonomies, findable objects, digital librarianship, and the long tail of the sociosemantic web. Peter challenges us to think differently about the power of search - and findability - to redefine our sources of authority and inspiration in an increasingly digitized and networked information environment.

From Google Video (originally found on www.uxnet.org).  

This is a new article from UX Matters about interaction design. 

Here is Kevin's description of the article - "This article is not meant to be prescriptive, but reflective. Questioning is an integral part of design. It is the essence of the beginner’s mind—an important quality of a designer. Design is all around us. We see it in the products we use, the cars we drive, and the homes we live in. As interaction designers, we can borrow from other disciplines, but we should also be reflective and wander down our own paths.".

Richard Anderson wiill be leading an "interactive session" at CHI 2007 entitled, "Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?"

Here is the abstract of the presentation:

Professionals working to move user experience (UX) into a position of corporate influence are impeded by conflicting recommendations, including those regarding the roles of documenting and evangelizing UX work, ownership of UX, organizational positioning, calculating return on investment, and conducting "ethnographic" research. In this interactive session, a group of senior UX management personnel who have moved UX into positions of rapidly increasing influence in their varied places of work debate their different perspectives and approaches to help resolve conflicting recommendations and generate some new and improved guidance.