2009/10/20

Back from Design by Fire 2009

Just got back from Design by Fire 2009 in Utrecht. It was great fun. The two definitive highlights were Robert Hoekman Jr's talk on Interaction Design Framework and James Box and Cennydd Bowles from Clearleft talk on The Music of Interaction Design.

Robert Hoekman Jr. talked about how how Usability testing doesn't provide reliable results when done with small samples and that Design Patterns only solve micro-problems. His solution is instead focussing on bigger sets of design problems by grouping Design Patterns into bigger proven Interaction Frameworks, e.g. the pagination pattern might be part of the Catalogue Framework. It was quite thought provoking and a good incentive to by his and Jared Spool's book Web anatomy. He backed up his thoughts through the results of Rolf Molich's Comparative Usability Testing

James Box and Cennydd Bowles talked about using music as a metaphor for interaction design and user experience. Music shares many aspects with UX such as it's asynchronous nature and it's social codification. It think the talk was more of an experience than something to be retold. Hopefully someone filmed it.

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