Sean Patrick John Paul George Ringo Doran

A nice little article in UX Magazine that lists five sketching secrets of the world’s most famous polymath, Leonard Da Vinci. It’s written by Brian Sullivan, the founder of the Big Design Events - an ongoing collection of conferences that focus on strategy, user experience, and code development. Here’s a brief rundown of what’s covered in the article:

1. Sketch Your Ideas Out 4-5 Times
2. Use Annotations in Your Sketches
3. Collaborate With Others When You Sketch
4. Engage Your Imagination
5. Look For New Combinations

For the full article, visit the UX Magazine.

kazumissimi:

Understanding customer needs

Frequently finding ourselves considering exactly why we’re bothering to create new things, my good friend Seb and I have made an attempt to understand and classify customer needs a little more clearly. The aim is to use this as a guide for identifying the needs states of users/customers we’re targeting.

It includes analysis of:

1. The development of basic needs, via education and experience into sophisticated needs
2. The types of needs which drive our decision-making, e.g. value, psychological, performance.
3. The need states we often find ourselves in, e.g. immediate, latent, nascent, induced, etc.

We haven’t based this on anything scientific – and there may well be plenty of holes to pick – but it’s a tool we think is going to useful in our ongoing product development and customer experience work.

Another great snippet of an article by Justin Parry from his website, Those Pesky Users.

Photo Credit: Cygnis

After wondering about how Facebook Connect has actually changed the game by allowing any website to have the users decide to log in with their Facebook account rather than make a whole new username/password, I figured to do some snooping around, and found a nice article detailing some statistics.

After the launch of Facebook Connect back in 2008, many of the websites have used this tool to generate a user-friendly environment for the sign-up feature and also to make the web site more personal. Websites can generate more users using Facebook Connect, as most of the times users avoid filling out the information as the process has become tedious. If we take a look at the Facebook Connect history, we might have a better idea of how much powerful tool it is, according to Facebook itself: Websites using Facebook connect have seen an enormous growth in registration varying for 30% to 200%. The other point disclosed for websites which are using Facebook Connect is that they saw an increase in page views of approximately 15% to 100%.

For the rest of the article, read it on Cygnis’ Website.

Ever since finals week I’ve been up to mischief, mayhem, and just being a generally productive member of society - everywhere except the digital realm. I could tell stories of my adventures, but I think a list would make it faster for you ultra-consumptive beasts and your unending appetite for “content.”

So, here we go:
During this past month I have…

• Seen an unprofessional driver behind the wheel of a race car
• Tapped into my inner-Canadian and cut multiple trees into pancakes
• Tapped into my inner-Native American and cried about sawing small forests down
• Watched every episode of The Office while acing all four of my exams
• Helped with a surprise party - Head of the Streamers Committee
• Watched a fifty-six year old man be a beast
• Watched a fifty-six year old man be a creeper
• Peeled wallpaper for twelve hours
• Called 9-1-1 on a runaway horse and buggy
• Looked death in the face, and it looks like a misfired firework
• Gotten poison ivy - it’s like glitter, it never really goes away
• Gotten bit by so many horse-flies I have shell shock when it comes to the sound of an insect buzzing by
• Visited a place I disliked, and left disliking it even more
• Painted a room
• Gave underwater horseback rides

And more cool things that just don’t flow with the rest of this list.

Back when we were kids, ball pits at Chuckie E. Cheese were one of those amazing things that you always wished you had in your house. Well, imagine if someone decided to crank up the craziness level ten notches and make one of the greatest gravity defying rainbow colored shape shifting entity that this side of the galaxy has ever seen!

Source: http://whitesharktank.blogspot.com/2009/05/things-found-in-chuck-e-cheese-ball-pit.html

The only thing they didn’t get in that pie chart were microchips and some crazy engineering to create an electromagnet that attracted the chip filled balls up to the ceiling.

Yeah. This is intense.

Description from the Vimeo page:

“Happy” was the theme we were given by the organizers for this year’s F5 Re:Play Fest ( f5fest.com ), held in April in NYC, to create this edition’s pieces, probably the hardest thing to convey in any artistic expression. After a good deal of introspection, and teaming up with awesome motion graphics artist Gerardo del Hierro, we decided that happy wasn’t happy for Physalia unless pliers, microchips and a bit of soldering were involved, and with this idea we resolved to create the happiest machine Physalia has built to date.

Credits:

Direction: Physalia ( physaliastudio.com ) & Gerardo del Hierro ( grrddh.com )
Music: Fernando Dominguez.
Link to download the song here!! physaliastudio.com/​F5_abductivity.rar

One part crazy German. Check.
Two parts interesting. Check. Check.
Then a liberal amount of doubt that this piano will be remotely close to listenable. Check. 

This isn’t a banana in my pants, and I’m not excited to see you..

I present to you Volker Bertelmann, or as he’s known - Hauschka and his prepared piano. If you don’t know what a prepared piano is, you soon will. If you want to skip the history lesson and just see this German do his thing, then jump down to the bottom to the Vimeo player. For those that want to see some other stuff, stick it out up here, because there’s another guy I have to talk about: John Cage.

This is John Cage screwing a piano. Honestly.

If you know anything about John Cage, then you know a little something about prepared pianos, and that this guy was a pioneer of experimental everything. I can list all the stuff he’s done, but Wikipedia has done such a good job it would break my heart to NOT use that as an excuse to not write it all. I have finals to study for!

After the jump - videos galore!

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