Where I work we occasionally create personas as a deliverable. The problem is sometimes it’s fabricated, sometimes, it’s based on marketing data, and sometimes it’s based on design research. Personas are a tool like anything else in a UX designer’s toolkit. It may or may not be the right tool for the project but the danger of distributing them without real research is it can derail the project and have the client holding on to archetypes that aren’t real.

Elizabeth Bacon and Steve Calde presented these slides at Catalyze webinar on July 23, 2008. They’re a great summary of why, when, how to use personas.

A very interesting scalable multi-touch product has been created. You basically purchase modules and can stack them to provide more touch/screen space. I think the coolest part was how the product can understand the hand and fingers as a discrete object and track it along the screen. Definitely affords a lot of interesting interaction.

As always Jess and Gene have put together a great lineup for CanUX from Nov 16-18th. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend but if you’re into breathtaking scenery as well as a great intimate workshop/conference experience this is definitely one to consider

Dave Gray, Founder and Chairman of XPLANE.

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Brandon Schauer, Director of Experience Design at Adaptive Path

Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks, writes, trains, and practices experience design as a differentiator for business strategy.

Brandon’s passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. This insight with customers — plus a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods — allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences for the web, desktop, and devices. He’s keynoted, presented, and conducted workshops at such conferences at Business to Buttons, IA Summit, Designertopia, and UIE Web App Summit. Brandon is a co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal, Yahoo! and LukeW Interface Designs.

Luke Wroblewski is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996. In 2008, Luke published Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Luke has also authored a book on Web interface design principles titled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and numerous articles on design methodologies, strategies and applications including those featured in his own online publication: Functioning Form. He is also frequent presenter on topics related to Web startegy and design and a former member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association.

Lisa Anderson, Microsoft Surface.

Lisa C. Anderson is currently the Microsoft Surface User Experience Director. Previous to this role, she held similar positions at Intuit and Autodesk in the Bay Area. In years past, Lisa acted as User Experience Director for several other teams at Microsoft: Windows XP, MSN, Real Time Collaboration. She was also Executive Producer at Corbis for several years, where she produced award-winning, high-end documentaries on CD-ROM (Leonardo da Vinci;  Critical Mass: America’s Race to Create the Atomic Bomb; FDR; The Barnes Collection). Her background and education are in Design, Art History, English Literature, Writing, Editing, Publishing.

Dennis Wixon, Microsoft Surface.

Dennis Wixon directs research at Microsoft Surface. Previously he managed the user research team an Microsoft Games Studios which is recognized throughout the industry as a leader in user research methodology. Prior to Microsoft Dennis was usability manager in the Software Usability Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such as usability engineering and contextual inquiry were developed. He co-edited a book Field Methods Case Book for Software Design with Prof. Judy Ramey of the University of Washington. Dennis holds a PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.

Scott Berkun conducted a survey surrounding the topic of

“why designers and people who work with designers believe designers don’t achieve the results they desire”

His top findings:

The 389 survey respondents self identified as:

The top 15 issues, ranked by average scores were:

More summary and breakdown of the results here

I’ve been really into content aggregators lately. These sites gather information around specific topics and troll the internet to find out what is top of mind and any moment in time. There are many ways to do the feed but here are a couple that do it well:

Lou Rosenfeld’s UX Zeitgeist

Rating the top UX topics, books, people across the blogosphere, amazon, etc

and

perspctv

Following discussion trends for the major party leaders through news, blog mentions, and tweets.

What I would like to see is the evolution of this through dialogue. The artifacts on Flickr have a one to many relationship without discussion. But with conversation around, how a photo was taken, or how to reproduce the results of the photo, it produces that many to many dialogue that creates a rich set of tangents and a more human way way to stitch information together through conversation.

I guess in a way this is an extension to the post I wrote about APML feeds. Except the ambient feeds are around topics of interests instead of people. Still with these types of feeds becoming more prevalent and the future casting of the Aurora concept, feeds associated to people and topics will only become more popularized and embedded within the technology we use.

I created this model the other day to evolve an old model that was based on a waterfall methodology. I’m hoping we will practice this soon. Feel free to poke holes.