IxDA Library

Traditionally, creating and maintaining a pattern library has been a daunting task requiring extensive resources and, sometimes, dedicated full-time employees. At Salesforce.com our first attempt at producing a comprehensive library was bogged down by a waterfall-based creation and review process that yielded only two patterns in a six-month period. At this rate we would never approach completion.

As websites have transitioned from a series of hyperlinked static pages to rich, interactive applications, the traditional means of documenting their structure and behavior has struggled to keep pace. Site maps fail to capture the detailed interactions on and across pages, use cases fail to show the relationship between activities, and data flow diagrams ignore the nuances of presentation and user choice.

For an industry steeped in high technology and accustomed to sophisticated digital tools, this session is decidedly “lo-fi.” The speaker will review practical drawing and sketchbook techniques that can serve as a cornerstone to the interaction design process. The concept of ‘drawing as problem solving’ will be introduced through case studies and real-world interaction design that demonstrate the efficiencies to be gained through the use of these techniques. The acceleration of rapid-development and rapid-prototyping situations through improved sketchbook will also be reviewed. From basic “do’s and don'ts” to “lessons from the masters,” attendees will learn how to leverage their visual thinking into the creative and development process to greater effect.

Building an accurate, one-off prototype of any product or car may seem like a vast undertaking that consumes too much time. But as with Industrial and Automotive Design, it's really the best way to work. Digital Concept Cars -- a prototype that is fully functional save being hooked up into the engine -- allow design and engineering teams the means to make critical product decisions that no other process can replace. Andrei will walk you through the creation of a digital concept car, showing you what tools and technologies to use, what pitfalls to avoid, how to adjust project schedules to properly accommodate for creating them, and how to get buy-in from executives and product managers.

VisualComplexity.com (VC) is a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. With over 600 projects, the goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

This talk will leverage the existing pool of knowledge from VC to convey a current portrait of network visualization. It will illustrate some of its current trends and representation methods, and explore the reasons behind the recent outburst. It will highlight some seminal executions and finalize with the exaltation of interactivity as the key measure of cognition in Information Visualization, by presenting a series of interaction design principles for exploring complex networks.

The progress of any creative discipline changes significantly with the quality of the tools available. As the diversity of user interfaces multiplies in the shift away from personal desktop computing, yesterday's tools and concepts are insufficient to serve the designers of tomorrow's interfaces. My research in human-computer interaction focuses on the earliest stages in UI creation - activities that take a novel idea and transform it into a concrete, interactive artifact that can be experienced, tested, and compared against other ideas. In this talk I will give an overview of different prototyping tools I have built with collaborators to address two research questions: How can tools enable a wider range of designers to create functional prototypes of ubiquitous computing interfaces? And how can design tools support the larger process of learning from these prototypes?