What makes a good usability evaluator? This study attempts to define the features and qualifications.

Miia Kososen verkkoyhteisöjä koskevan väitöstutkimuksen lektioluento.

The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, was held in the beginning of December. Nearly all the presentations are available online and they are worthwhile exploring.

This paper presents a macro level model of design with three internally coherent modes of design. These are immediate des ign dealing with users’ immediate situated challenges, traditional product design creating generally appealing solutions, and remote design, which elaborates on preconditions for design such as knowledge, platforms and standards. The need for the model is justified by a discussion addressing a set of conflicting trends called design tensions within the design of complicated human-technology systems. These include technology, innovation, competence, readiness and generality tensions. Finally, the impact of immediate and remote design on design education and design business is discussed. (via Ville)

Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? We can learn a great deal from organizations whose strong and adaptive ownership cultures give them a powerful competitive edge. Here are our top 10 lessons.

See the picture.

Created by Future Exploration Network’s Chief Futurist Richard Watson, also of NowandNext.com, the 2009 trend map moves on from the subway map theme of the last years to show the multi-tentacled hydra that is the year ahead. Core themes include: Uncertainty, Ageing, Global Connectivity, Anxiety, and Power Shift Eastwards.

Back in 2005 the leading user experience companies from France, Germany, Spain, UK and US met in Barcelona with a single common goal in mind: how to provide effective international user experience services to our clients. Having worked together on international projects for many years, we recognised that we were ideally placed to lead international user experience research. Thus, the UXa was born. (And still they don't know how to give titles to web pages.)

Servicedesign.org is a glossary of terms related to Service Design.

"We have reused Peter Kim’s wonderful predictions gathered from social media influencers, we summarized the predictions, used tag clouds to help you focus, added insights gathered from Read Write Web and of course, added our own inputs. So here it is – the first from the influencers and experts collection."

Overshare has increasingly been used to reference those who divulge excessive personal information, online as well as offline.

More than five million people are expected to use the internet to carry on shopping on Christmas Day, the online retail group IMRG says. IMRG estimates more than £100m will be spent online, compared with the £84m spent last year.

This is a wiki for capturing design patterns about service design.

This wiki aims at collecting cases, methods and reflections about Service design. (It has a weird name, tho.)