A very interesting conversation is going on over on http://www.uxbooth.com. As the need for beautiful things and big ideas evolves into a need for usable things and open platforms, the role of the Creative Director is changing.

Enter the User-eXperience Designer, the man (or woman) “with the plan” for how the experience will work, grow, spread and evolve. Some argue that this is still the CD’s role, and others see the new emphasis requires balanced influence from more than one skill set. They overlap, sure, but just as the copywriter/designer team was shown to work best in the past in the advertising industry, so too this matchup will become the norm, I predict. It works for building architects and designers; car companies; event planners; game designers… but agencies still seem to struggle with it.

If you’ve hired a UXD, it’s not too late to elevate and socialize their importance and impact. If you haven’t got one yet, it’s not too late. Just be ready to create some Exceptional Experiences.

This video by Google illustrates several issues that have been plaguing product and brand managers, UxDs (user-experience designers) and IAs (information architects) and most obviously, the general public. Google asks “What is a browser,” only to find that less than 8% of those polled have an understanding of the term. (It is, by the way, “a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web” – Wikipedia; e.g. Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (The big blue ‘E’))

This is an excerpt of a post… Read the rest of this post on Organic’s Threeminds Blog

I clicked my laptop out of hibernation the other day, and spent an hour or so working on a screen set at 1024×768, mostly reading RSS feeds in Netvibes. (Click the image to enlarge)

I realized after a long while that my workspace was very small, and just wondered when I decided that this was normal, as I’ve slowly built up a ridiculous navigation-to-workspace ratio, amplified when I have a low res setting.

Just thought this was funny. Shaking my head; now back to work.

For years now, usability evangelists have been searching for a Perry Masonic closing remark that would secure a proper judgement from sceptics of the information architecture and user interface design process.

“Why spend time and money on prototyping and usability testing,” the stakeholders ask, “What is the ROI?”

There have been few, if any, strong cases to prove what experience designers have known and espoused since Louis Rosenfeld published his O’Reilly Polar Bear Book/IA Constitution in ‘98.

Now, Jared M. Spool has handed usability experts this elusive case study to tip the scales for any web building jury. He explains here: How Changing a Button Increased a Site’s Annual Revenues by $300 Million.

The main points? Visitors to a major e-com site didn’t want to sign in to buy, they just wanted to get in and out. Spool and his team changed the copy on the registration form (which most users wanted to skip anyway) and cashed in on an additional $300M over the next year.

Information Architecture is good. How good? $300 Million good. Now I hope you’ll get as excited as I do when you get to review wireframes and test multivariate interfaces.