What's Behind Online Design?

PRICE
Get access to all Mediabistro on Demand videos for only $19 per month ($15 for ).

SYNOPSIS
Do you know how people perceive, understand, and use your product? Google does, and they are the gold standard of user experience design. They've mastered the process of measuring and improving your interaction with their site.

In this Mediabistro Circus panel, experts and visionaries in design and technology take you into their labs to show you how they get results. They explain the principles of design as they apply to new media, and how the interaction of new media and design is changing both. And they explain what slugs and teddy bears have to do with expanding your notions of the frontiers of design for the web and beyond.

DURATION/TIME
8 videos
1 hour, 32 minutes total running time

Jon Wiley, Google User Experience Design
What is user experience and why is it important? Wiley's definition of user experience is "Designing for encountering, adopting, learning, and using a software product." Google's number one principle is "Focus on the user and all else will follow." He describes how Google assesses user experience.

Jon Wiley (continued)
A behind-the-scenes look at Google's usability lab and tests and a closer look at three of Google's ten design principles: fast, profitable, and personable.

Shiv Singh, Enterprise Solutions Practice, Avenue A | Razorfish
What are the best ways to engage an audience? What are your readers' expectations? If online content is free, how do you make money online?

Singh argues that in the past few years there have been five major changes that affect user experience design:

1. The loss of the destination: users don't start at homepages.
2. Designing for user vs. users: it's not me in isolation but me as part of my community/network and how we influence each other.
3. The big idea: what makes a website unique is more about little ideas being part of a bigger thing.

4. Globalization: think globally, act locally, and panic internally.
5. Disciplined fragmentation: smaller groups of people building applications in a shorter amount of time.

Regine Debatty, we-make-money-not-art.com
For Debatty, the definition of a new media artist is changing. Artists and designers are engaging with technology. For example, Toshio Iwai asked "What happens when you combine a microscope, a tape recorder, a synthesizer, and an NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)?" Out of that question came the Electroplankton game for the Nintendo DS platform.

Regine Debatty (continued)
A consideration of outmoded ideas. Takashi Murakami mixes art and design and blurs the line between the museum and the store. Some romantic ideas are outdated, like artists can't make money, or each art work is unique, or art belongs in museums. Critical design is a movement in the U.K. that situates design in the everyday. Design is not always useful.

Tjeerd Hoek, Frog Design
Tool design, like architecture, should be useful, usable, and desirable. It’s about hardware, software, and content coming together. We have to pay more attention to parts that we didn’t pay attention to before in the design process. We have to think about whom are we building for and how can they use it.