Magazine

May 31: Guerrilla Research Methods

April 3, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

Russ Unger literally wrote the book on Guerilla Research Methods. Russ leads this hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods to help you make better data-driven design decisions. Russ will provide you with a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you’ve conducted your research. Seating is limited to 100 people. It will sell out fast! Topics Covered: How to sell guerrilla research into a project from the start How to recruit better participants How to form better research questions Valuable “how-tos” [...]

Filed Under: Workshops Tagged With: #BigD12, research, Russ Unger, Usability, UX, workshop

June 2nd: Movie Premiere at Big Design 2012

April 3, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

Design & Thinking Documentary on June 2, 2012

On Saturday evening from 8-11PM, we are going to transform the Trinity Ball Room into a red carpet event. We are going to show the Texas Premier of a new documentary called Design & Thinking. In this documentary, you will see a series of interviews from some fantastic design thinkers, including Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO), David Kelley (Founder of Stanford Design School), and Richard Grefe (CEO of AIGA). Get your popcorn ready! Preview of Design & Thinking Movie We plan to have a small panel of local leaders and the movie director briefly talk about design thinking. Then, we [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: #BigD12, Design Thinking, movie

June 1st: Casino Night at Big Design 2012

April 1, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

On Friday evening from 8-11PM, we are going to transform the Trinity Ball Room into a Vegas Style Casino. Don’t worry, these games are just for fun. We will be giving away several different prizes donated by our great sponsors. You get the chance to challenge your new friends to various games of chance, including Craps, Roulette, Texas Hold-em, or Black Jack. For the light-hearted, we will have slot machines and a lounge singer. Yes, we said a lounge singer! We thought you would like a fun,interactive way to learn about these games of chance. Plus, you get to win [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: #BigD12, casino, prizes, Vegas

Help Create the Big Design 2012 Sculptures

March 29, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

If you joined us at Big Design 2011, there is no way you could have missed the sculptures called My Favorite Machine. These sculptures were the center-piece of the Big Design trade show. People loved them. They stood by them and posed. Well. our resident Big Design artist, Roger Belveal, is back with his blow torch ready. As our culture speeds headlong in this digital age, the slick aesthetic has reached toxic levels. This overdose of untouchable virtual brings with it a kind of sensory deficit. As much as we love the capabilities that the digital world brings, there is [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: art, Information Age, Monolith, MyPhonehenge, Roger Belveal, Technology

Your 11AM Choices on June 1st…Oh My!!!

March 22, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

When you go to the Big Design Conference 2012, the 11AM hour is your another “power hour” of speakers. Yes, you have to choose to between maintaining your design sanity, beyond gamification, thriving in SASS, and design thinking in World War II. Your speakers include an independent UX consultant, a design rock star, a development geek, and a UX soldier. Yes, we have a former soldier talking about design thinking in World War II. How cool is that! Details are below. Choice #1: Maintaining Your Design Sanity In-house designers, or ”creatives”, regularly work for companies and organizations that are not [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: #BigD12, Axis & Allies, cascading style sheet, CSS, design, Design Thinking, SASS, Usability, UX, World War II

Help Us, Help Dana

March 19, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

Dana Chisnell believes that democracy is a design problem. After the 2000 Presidential election with its “butterfly ballot” in Florida, Dana began to creates a set of best practices to help election officials. Dana discovered that the designer of the butterfly ballot wanted to do the right thing. This designer knew her county had older people, so she wanted to make the type bigger, which would make it easier to read. Making that well-intentioned change to the design of the ballot did make it easier to read. But it made it harder to use. Thousands of people voted in a [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: #BigD12, Dana Chisnell, help, usabiity, UX, voting

[Video & Transcript] The Power of UX Checklists

March 10, 2012 By Dave Curlee Leave a Comment

Elisa Miller discusses the benefits of using checklists during the user experience (UX) design process. Checklists are used by professionals in all fields. Commercial drivers, air line pilots, surgeons… all use checklists to ensure that they are fully prepared for their task, or have covered every point in their work. We should too. Transcript (Sponsored by UTD’s ATEC program, special thanks to Leslie McMillan) How many of you have actually used a checklist? Wow, that’s awesome. Now I’m going to ask you, what did you use your checklist for? Everything, grocery store, to do list, what else? Packing. My mother once went [...]

Filed Under: Videos Tagged With: #BigD11, Big Design Conference, checklist, checklists, design, User experience, UX, videos

Designing for Awareness in Attention Economy [Transcript]

March 9, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan Leave a Comment

At Big Design Conference 2011, Taylor Cowan and Brian Sullivan gave a talk about designing for awareness in the attention economy. Taylor and Brian will be giving an updated version of this talk at SxSW Interactive 2012. Dr. Leslie McMillan of UTD’s ATEC program provided the transcript. You may want to go ahead and review the slideshow, and them bookmark this page for future reference. Enjoy! Design for Awareness View more PowerPoint from Brian Sullivan [Transcript provided by UTD's ATEC program] What is the Attention Economy? Today, you are going to learn about an incredible facet of the human mind, [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: Attention Economy, awareness, Taylor Cowan

Design for Awareness: Spatial Attention

March 9, 2012 By Taylor Cowan Leave a Comment

Time or temporal attention has a sibling; spatial attention. Spatial awareness is being made aware of the location of things; where things are happening, where friends are and are going, and where you are right now. Spatial awareness is an even richer environment for discovering content; for as time is one dimensional (a continuum along x,y axis), location is two or even three dimensional in some cases (x,y,z). Spatial attention is the resource we are competing for as designers. It is the amount of attention our customers are willing to pay towards the location of things. It is limited, but at the [...]

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: #BigD11, attention, awareness, conference, presentation

Five Ways to Improve Your Mental Alertness

March 9, 2012 By Brian Keith Sullivan 2 Comments

Here a five things you can do to stay mentally alert. Yawning cools your brain, which increases your alertness (source) Yoga boosts oxygen to your brain for better concentration (source) Drinking green tea improves your memory & ability to learn (source) Aerobic exercise helps with age-related memory loss (source) Dark chocolate contains phenylethylamine and anandamide which increases awareness. (source) What other ways do you know that help you increase your awareness? Please let us know below.

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: attention, brain, Brian Sullivan, Thought