What’s on your desk?

In case you ever wondered what members of the User Experience team here at Lab read, you just need to take a look at our desks..

A selection from the UX book library at Lab49. Photo taken by Amir Dotan.

Lab49 at IA Summit in Denver

Lab49′s Ann McMeekin Carrier ran a workshop about creating an agile UX manifesto at the IA Summit in Denver last week. Check out the slides from her workshop.

UX & The City

Lab49′s Amir Dotan talking about user experience design for the financial services industry at Enterprise Search London‘s February meetup.

UPDATE: View the slides for Amir’s presentation on SlideShare

Lab49 at UX People London

Lab49′s Mark Plant will be talking at UX People in London on the 26^th of November. He will be speaking about “Coping Strategies: UX in an Agile World”. He and Ann McMeekin will then be hosting a workshop in the afternoon.

You can read more about his planned talk and workshop on Mark’s blog.

Could Agile go the same way as Waterfall?

An interesting read…

Beautiful Design for Everyone

Lab49′s very own Ann McMeekin (A.K.A @pixeldiva) was the keynote speaker at the London Web Standards May event last week, talking about inclusive design.

Here’s the review of Ann’s talk, from Robert at Boogdesign.

UX Team Field Trip: Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence

Lab49′s London-based UX team had a little outing last Wednesday to hear Edward Tufte talk at the Royal Geographical Society, about his thoughts on visual thinking and analytical design.

The talk was organised by Intelligence Squared, and you can view the video of highlights from Tufte’s talk on their website (if you pay that is).

My favourite point (as summarised by Intelligence Squared) is: “Data should be used to guide the design, rather than design being based on fashion or what the technology offers. Content-oriented design is necessary, as the point of information display is to assist analytical thinking.”

Some found his talk a little ‘rambling’ and complained that he was just reciting from his notes, however it’s worth noting that he is an academic, not a public speaker, so perhaps we should forgive him for such things! Any guru’s followers can often get weighed down with the minutiae of what they say, rather than focusing on the underlying principles they are attempting to communicate. It’s these key principles (such as the one mentioned above) that made the talk a success for me, as I think much of it reinforces my views on what good UX design should be. He had some very good examples and interesting graphics to illustrate his points (Minard’s the poster of Napoleon’s march on Moscow will end up on our wall!).

We failed, however, to get our copy of Tufte’s “The Visual display of Quantitative Information” signed by the author

5 million work hours, wasted

Apparently the Google Pacman game logo displayed on the site last Friday has cost approximately 5 MILLION work hours! Literally hours of fun.

Proves that plenty of people are still using the google.com website to search, and not just their browser add-ons/built-in search (Or maybe it just shows that the few people who still do, spread the word quickly!)

Did you play it? Did you? I bet you did…

Translate? Nope.

Every now and then you come across an error, prompt or alert message that makes you smile.

Here is a nice ‘translate page’ prompt from Google Chrome:

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash

Steve Jobs has responded to some of the criticism’s from Adobe over their mobile products’ (iPhone, iPad etc.) lack of Flash support.

It’s more than a single line response too! And the claws are out – meow!

UPDATE: Adobe’s response to Steve’s rant is short & to the point. Nice one Kev!