NEWS / COMMENTARY
Usability Professional’s Conference comes to Portland
CHIFOO is proud to be a part of the Usability Professional Association’s international conference taking place June 8 -12 here in Portland at the Hilton Hotel. Over 600 attendees from around the world are coming to our fair city to share ideas, learn new research, development and implementation techniques and to discuss projects designed to make our world more usable.
Whether people are interacting with consumer electronics, medical equipment, factory floor production lines, websites, retail stores, customer support or the architectural spaces which they inhabit every day, usability and user experience reactivation share in the common goal of making it better. A wealth of speakers will be sharing their wisdom ranging from Jared Spool to CHIFOO veteran speakers Nathan Shedroff and Nancy Frishberg.
The main conference registration includes two and a half days of presentations with sessions at each level of usability expertise from Wednesday - Friday of this week. Whether new to the field or an experienced expert, you’ll find sessions of interest.
Are… READ MORE »
Wednesday, June 3 Program: Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation
Join us at Cubespace PDX at 7 pm this Wednesday, June 3, for the University of Colorado’s Gerhard Fischer’s program, Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation.
READ MORE »Architecture and User Experience (Part 8: A Form of Software Architecture?)
I’ve spent several months making wild claims about the importance and strategic value of User Experience Architecture, especially for businesses seeking opportunities in new ecologies of use. But how do we communicate these architectures? What are the deliverables we provide to our stakeholders, clients and users that describe the parts and pieces of a User Experience Architecture?
In the last article I revealed how our internal stakeholders, often not trained in the art of design, will likely find our design-focused deliverables incomprehensible and unactionable. For User Experience Architecture to fulfill its promise, it must communicate the vision of… READ MORE »
Within the context of pervasive computing, which weaves intelligence into the fabric of our environments, architectural design informs interaction design as much as interaction design transforms architectural design. So suggests Malcolm McCullough in this extraordinarily deep dive into design theory and the impact of digital, interactive technologies on architecture. 
One of the things that makes our field so rich is the multitude of disciplines that must converge to successfully create a new product. Regardless of how we may label our own roles, we are often called upon to work side by side with our fellow designers, engineers, researchers, business managers, and so on. This collaborative spirit is the force that at once drives us to invent new niche titles for ourselves (from user researcher to usability engineer to interaction designer), yet aligns us across our different backgrounds and goals. 
