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[IA Summit 2008] 'Inspiration from The Edge' Presentation
Posted Tuesday April 15, 2008

This past weekend I had the pleasure of presenting at the IA Summit in Miami. The topic of my presentation? Other places to look for UI inspiration, specifically, other digital interfaces, such as the Wii, Tivo, Club Penguin, etc.

The Presentation:

The Description:

Want a fresh perspective on UI design? Look around. Not at other web sites or desktop applications but at other interactive media. Tivo, the iPhone, the Wii software interface, the ‘Sugar’ OS for the XO Laptop… there’s a world of new UI inspiration that is already being proven out in other devices— yet much of what we see in application design is more of the same. Tabbed menus. Drop downs. Form fields. Sure, patterns and conventions are important. But is ‘familiar’ always better? What might be more natural? While years of usability studies assert that consistent UI elements are a critical requirement, we also know that people quickly adapt to new patterns of use, new game interfaces, and new hardware-specific interactions.

To increase our field of vision, we’ll take a macro view of interface design, focusing on alternative UIs— and emphasizing patterns that can be leveraged in a business context. What might World of Warcraft tell us about improving our business intelligence tool? How might Club Penguin, a virtual destination for young children, influence the information architecture of our new CRM tool? How might designing for the iPhone affect our desktop UI designs? These are the types of questions we’ll explore, along with how skills in abstraction and synthesis can open our eyes to see new opportunities all around us.

Overall, I believe the presentation was well received. I had a great time preparing for and presenting this. And yes, this time round, I’ll be adding audio to my SlideShare presentation! :-)

To all who were in attendance at the Summit— thank you! I was blown away by the packed room and by all the compliments that followed. Oh yeah, I now have a complete set of the UX Methods trading cards. Whew!

But wait, there’s more…
A lot of folks asked about where (and how!) I collect all these reference screenshots. No secret really. Given how many people asked this, I’ll write a post listing some of the sites I frequent. However, here’s a much better option: Kevin Cheng has started a grouptweet called @inspiring where we will post interesting designs and ideas (web or otherwise) as we come across them. Spread the word!