If you’re an interaction designer, it’s likely that wireframing takes up a good portion of your day. Having tools that you enjoy using and help you get the job done are essential. Talking to colleagues at various IxDA events and at a recent Agile UX meetup, we know that many people in the industry have adopted UX specific tools for wireframing. At Moment, we are fans of Adobe Illustrator for both wireframing AND visual design. We have tried tools like Axure, Omnigraffle, Balsamiq and Visio over the years, but we always come back to Illustrator.
So why do we use Illustrator?
Among the many reasons we’re loyal to Illustrator, the most important reasons are about how it functions as a tool: it brings an idea to life without leading the design, it encourages digital sketching, and it makes designing for a multi-platform world much simpler and more efficient. Read More »
One thing we’ve been working on (and getting very excited about) for the last couple of months is redesigning our website. While in the process, we realized it’s not easy to sum up our company culture in a paragraph, giving visitors a complete idea of what it’s like working with, working at and visiting our offices. For us, we prefer to show, not tell; we want to show what it’s like to spend a day here at Moment. So photographer and friend-of-Moment Jacob Murphy spent a couple of days with us, capturing the normal goings-on around the office from eating lunch, a meeting or two, drowning in Post-Its, or enjoying our fully stocked kitchen (and beverage fridge, yes, we have a fridge just for beverages). So here’s a little sneak peek:
Gathering for a some lunch.
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It’s been just about a week since we returned from our excellent adventure that was Interaction 12 in Dublin. As the memories of excellent Guinness and conversation fade, the reaction to the content of the conference is sharpening. In discussions with colleagues here at Moment who were there in person and those who were not a couple of presentations stand out for me:
I’ve already written about how much I enjoyed August’s talk and the concept that designers create states of mind, and I found complementary messages in the other two presentations. Andrew challenged his audience to see the people they are designing for beyond what their goals are – illustrating how designing for goals is actually very narrow and specific, while the real world is a much more complicated place. Jeroen reviewed Aristotle’s framework for story telling including explaining how plot, character, and theme is central to narrative and asked his audience to consider how they could be applied to digital experiences. Read More »
We’re back in our Crosby Street office, getting back to work and thinking back to the whirlwind 4 days spent in Dublin at this year’s Interaction12 conference. It was our first year sponsoring the event and it certainly won’t be our last. The Moment crew on the ground in Dublin, including John Devanney, Yixiu Wu, Izac Ross, Leah Shea and Mia Bohleman came back swirling with ideas, inspired by the people they met and the content they consumed. Read More »
Image Credit: Andy Mangold
It all started with Jonah Lehrer’s article in the New Yorker that bluntly stated, “brainstorming is dead.” But is that really the case or do professionals just need to give the idea an update? As described in Lehrer’s article, brainstorming was born in the advertising industry, the brainchild of Alex Osborn, one of the partners of B.B.D.O. Although brainstorming was a hit, numerous studies came out following that offered evidence that it doesn’t work. So why didn’t brainstorming die if there was evidence that it didn’t work? Why do so many creative companies hold fast to it today? Read More »
This is the first essay in a multi-part series by John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflecting on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street.
I was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience. Ethnography, as both a term and a discipline, is often misunderstood so I was happy to have the opportunity to give my perspective on it and on what it can contribute to User Experience Design.
Ethnography was formalized as a research approach in the social sciences, specifically within the discipline of anthropology, where it is commonly employed to describe human societies and cultures. In that setting, ethnography refers to a suite of qualitative research methodologies such as participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, etc. as well as the interpretive output of that research. Read More »
Healthcare has become a hot topic in the tech industry with designers picking up the responsibility for creating the products that will change the way that patients take control of and manage their health. Yesterday, several presentations at Interaction12 presented the possible tools for helping patients to understand their health and manage it. Between Virgil Wong and Akshay Kapur, Kel Smith and Maggie Breslin’s presentations – we saw a range of tools for patients: from the high fidelity (digital) solutions and low fidelity (analog) solutions. Read More »
This morning at Interaction 12 I had the opportunity to sit in on Augusto de los Reyes great talk about modernity in design where he took on the question “What is The New Modern?” As my friends and colleagues will attest, there’s little I enjoy more than a good debate, and I love modern design, so this was right down my alley.
As it turns out, I have very little to argue with what Augusto presented because of two reasons. Read More »
This year we are excited to announce that we are Bronze sponsors of IxDA’s Interaction12 conference in Dublin. After years of attending this amazing conference, we decided that it was time to get more involved (not to mention we were looking for an excuse to travel to Dublin).
Now, a trip to Dublin would not be complete without a sampling of the local beverages like a pint of Guinness or maybe a nice glass of whiskey in an authentic Irish pub; so, we decided to make exploring all that Dublin has to offer a little easier by sponsoring a pub crawl on Thursday night. Dublin is a fantastic city, full of rich culture, stellar food and drink all wrapped in beautiful historic architecture; so, we wanted to encourage conference attendees to experience all the city has to offer.
We’re not just sponsoring an evening of exploration; we’ll also be picking up the tab at The Bank on College Green from 8-10 PM where you’ll be able to spot a Momenteer by our light blue buttons.
So we hope that you stop by, have a pint and little bite to eat and stay for a chat while you make your way around Dublin.
In 2010, Microsoft changed the way we game with the introduction of the Kinect sensor for their Xbox gaming platform. Gamers were excited and intrigued by Kinect’s ability to read body movements in place of traditional controllers, but hackers and hobbyists especially went to town, leveraging Kinect to make everything from interactive shadow puppets to making yourself invisible on screen through ‘optical camoflauge’. After February 1st, hackers will have the opportunity to capitalize on their inventions because Microsoft will release Kinect for Windows, encouraging designers and developers to utilize the sensor outside the world of gaming. But before we all start dreaming of using Kinect to read (and clean out) our e-mails, there are several challenges that have to be met before it reaches mass adoption.
First, there’s the price; its $250 price point is rather high for a non-essential piece of hardware. Unlike the sleek devices of recent years, the Kinect is an awkward robotic uber-camera that may have difficulty gaining admission to some environments. In order to cross these barriers to cost and comfort beyond early adopting gamers and hackers, the Kinect’s value needs to be communicated as an everyday input platform. Microsoft is depending on developers to create the applications that will create this value and draw consumers in. So what are developers working with? And, more importantly, what will they build? Read More »
